Poplar Tent Memories: album release

I have updated and re-released an album I put together with some friends ten years ago, POPLAR TENT MEMORIES. The name of the album comes from the road where I lived after I was born, Poplar Tent Road, in Concord, NC.  There was no Interstate 85 roaring through, moonshiners lived down the road and my grandpa and grandma were two houses away. I attended Poplar Grove Baptist Church before I could walk. My Grandpa Price led the music, and I have memories of the singing from pre-age five.

Poplar Tent Memories is sixteen songs from the 2011 album and some I have added in recent years. It features several friends, including Michaela Bundon (Take a listen to her on “Tell Me the Story of Jesus”!), Nancy McLemore, Melanie Rodgers and Beth McGinnis among others.

I still have my grandfather’s old Broadman hymnal, a shaped note edition from 1940. The church musicians of Baptist life gave us a rich heritage of hymn singing. My grandfather led music in revivals, every Sunday in church, and sang in a quartet that included my mother. So I grew up, as so many Baptists then did, with an affordable upright piano in the house and a piano bench full of gospel music.

Regrettably, I resisted and won on giving up on the piano, but the guitar found me at nine or ten, and the hymns continued to be a great source of personal devotion for me in all the years that followed. I love hymns because they taught me the basics of my faith.  “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” and dozens of others were my first instruction in the faith.  We sang every time we came together, over and over we recited and sang them until we knew them by heart.

I miss that part of life. I wonder if part of why we’re so messed up now is that we don’t sing together like we used to. I know people sing in arenas to the latest pop microhit, but that’s not the same. Moreover, it’s how we learned the faith. Sermons, other than the really scary ones at revivals, I remember almost nothing. But hymns, I have emblazoned all over my brain. They bubble up all the time.

When I sing, somehow the crazy part of my brain shuts off for a bit and I touch a deep place again, where Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, Beethoven and Lowell Mason speak to  me. The hymns give voice to longings, pain, sorrow and hope, and above all, to Jesus, who is always better than most of Christianity. When I keep looking at that beautiful life, I don’t feel as lost.

I once opened for rocker and contemporary Christian singer Ashley Cleveland at the old Moonlight on the Mountain music venue. Like so many in the music world, addiction overtook her life for a while. It was part of her journey back to her childhood faith. During that harrowing time, she said, it was the old hymns that came back to her and carried her through.

I hope you enjoy these hymns, whether you are a church person or not. There is something universal and accessible to anyone in them.

Faith and Vaccines

This week I remembered a conversation I had with a woman many years ago. I had gone to teach a series on the family at a friend’s church in another state. She came up to me after the presentation and asked to talk with me. Of course, I said.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked.

“Well, I feel like such a failure in my faith. I suffer from depression. It was affecting my marriage, my children, and most of all, my faith in God.”

“Why did you feel it made you a failure?” I inquired.

“I’ve tried everything. I prayed and prayed for God to take it away, but it didn’t leave. Finally I went to a psychiatrist and he put me on medication.”

“Did it help?”

“Oh, I started feeling better soon.”

“Are you still on it?”

“Yes.”

“So why is that a problem, spiritually?”

“Well, it makes me feel like a failure, like I don’t have enough faith to overcome this on my own.”

“Ah, I see. Well, let’s consider this another way. First, when the book of James encourages those who are sick to call for the elders to pray over them and anoint them with oil, anointing might be considered ancient medical treatment. In other words, pray and see the doctor. Then, let’s consider Jesus’ healing example. His healings were instantaneous. Nevertheless, I would never consider it to contradict the natural order, not if God created that order. Sometimes I tell people that doctors now do routinely and every day what Jesus did instantaneously and miraculously to their way of thinking.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“And then, think of this. The Apostle Paul had the same problem with something he called ‘his thorn in the flesh.” Was it depression? Vision issues? Epilepsy? Scholars don’t really know. And he prayed and prayed but God only said, ‘My grace is sufficient for you.’ He believed, but he was left with trust. Not every question ends with an instant answer. He had to keep holding onto his faith. But the failure to solve it did not mean he had no faith in God. He was humbled by it.”

“Now, let me leave you with one more thought about this. Who created this world?”

“God, of course”

“And who is Lord over that world?”

“God.”

“So who is responsible in this creation for the beauty of a creation where the body can heal itself through knowledge, insight, medicine and care? You see my point. Medicine, including anti-depressants, are not a substitute for faith. They are a gift of God. Think of taking your pill as a daily reminder, a humbling one, of the grace of God. Grace is the truth that we cannot save ourselves, heal ourselves, solve every problem or make it alone. Grace acts before we do. So think about your medicine as a daily act of faith, not a failure of faith. Your faith is not the problem. It’s a theology, a belief, that isn’t large enough for the truth. Open it up, and see God’s hand of care. You like your psychiatrist?”

“Oh, he’s wonderful. Talking to him helps me so much.”

“Then I would suggest you rejoice. God has answered your prayers. Take your medicine and thank God for it. If we could conjure up a miracle every time we needed one, we’d have replaced God I think. God has given us thinkers and researchers and people who give money and authorize systems of healing, all kinds of wonderful gifts. Or as folk theology sometimes puts it, we are His hands and feet in the world. This applies to science and medicine as much as anything else.”

And to paraphrase the gospels, “she went on her way rejoicing.”  

I think if I know someone who is struggling with whether to take the vaccine or not, especially as an issue of faith, I’d have the same kind of conversation. I wouldn’t ridicule them for believing inadequately in magical religion any more than I would make fun of my granddaughters for believing childish ideas of God and the universe. What is the point of that? Besides, after all these years and education I’m still haunted by a magical idea or two myself.

I would try to help them think about their faith in a more mature way. I would try to understand which of the many anxieties was at the root of their fear. I would gently listen and offer some antidotes to bad religion with the real thing. And I would never stop caring for them.

I hope that’s what I would do. They are struggling with all the bad actors and shallow theology out there confusing the issue. The truth is this: this is God’s world as people of faith understand it. We are not simply waiting for the End, whatever that will be. Life is God’s gift, and medicine is one of God’s many blessings sent to us all in the lives of those who live it as a calling. Listen, learn. Pray about it if you need to, but be sure you pray in openness to the idea that what might need healing is not just the problem but a faith that needs to grow up some more.

That’s what I might do. How about you?

After Easter…

Sometime I will have to gather my thoughts about this breathtaking revolution that has been forced on us in the larger context.  Mine is one local congregation of people with whom I’ve been for twenty-seven years come July. Things always change, but this one has been especially momentous. Others have had enough to say, but I’ve observed a few little beams of light in the dark. Consider these:

  1. Churches forced to innovate everything we do. How appropriate that Holy Week would be the big test. And the people are still there. Turns out that little rhyme we did with our hands as a kid had something to it.  “Here’s the church, here’s the steeple,” (fingers interlocked and hands folded, index fingers joined in a spire. “OpenHeres the Church the door,” and you’d unfold your hands and wiggle your fingers, “and there’s the people.”
  2. I see a lot of cooperation, humility and mercy down here on the ground level.
  3. Leaders rise up in the worst of times.  Anybody can lead in good times. Only in the crises can you tell the difference.
  4. Imagine that Christianity in a short while has had to watch the burning down of the Cathedral of Notre Dame and Vatican Square empty except for a blind man singing “Amazing Grace” on Easter Sunday after the Pope stood there alone. But people sang “Amazing Grace” all over the world Sunday.
  5. People sewing, volunteering, sacrificing and praying harder than usual. Constant cheering and appreciation for our medical workers. I often pray when I go to a hospital (I miss that right now), “Lord, we know that you’ve given us wisdom and medical knowledge so that these doctors, nurses and workers do every day and routinely what Jesus did miraculously.” Healthcare is a daily miracle. We just appreciate it more right now.
  6. Being away from people we love makes us yearn for their presence and anticipate the first time we can see one another. You can feel it all the way into prayer.
  7. The earth has been given a sabbath of human activity. Sea turtles in India are flourishing during our quarantine, and people can see the Himalayas from a hundred miles away for the first time in years. We ought to remember what we’ve learned.

Continue reading After Easter…

Everything Happens for a Reason? Review

Review of Bowler, Kate. Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I Have Loved. Random House Publishing Group.

By Gary Furr

Kate Bowler begins her book in the doctor’s office.  “I had lost almost thirty pounds by the time I was referred to a gastrointestinal surgeon at Duke University Hospital.” And then, the thud of reality.”

ONE MOMENT I WAS a regular person with regular problems. And the next, I was someone with cancer. Before my mind could apprehend it, it was there—swelling to take up every space my imagination could touch. A new and unwanted reality. There was a before, and now there was an after. Time slowed to a pulse. Am I breathing? I wondered. Do I want to? Every day I prayed the same prayer: God, save me. Save me. Save me.

There are plenty of books about the problem of suffering, but every now and then one Bowler_Kate_AIF2019comes along that makes us feel it. All humans eventually suffer in life somewhere along the way—but it is undeserved, unfair and untimely suffering that is the most crushing variety. Enter Kate Bowler, a professor at Duke Divinity School and church history. Bowler’s first book came from her dissertation, a study of the Prosperity Gospel, entitled Blessed: A History Of The American Prosperity Gospel. She befriended and studied the world of name it and claim it Christianity, embodied in the megachurch worlds of Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen.

This book, though, is a personal one, a wilderness wandering through the most difficult and intractable questions all religious people face: why suffering, why now, why me? She gets my vote for the most interesting title of the year and she does not disappoint. Kate is a wickedly funny writer but also gut-wrenchingly honest about her journey through Continue reading Everything Happens for a Reason? Review

Rachel Held Evans’ Questions

Rachel-held-evansThe passing of Rachel Held Evans unleashed a surprising wave of grief to some.  But to readers in the Christian world, and young women in particular, she was a voice of welcoming honesty.  In an October 2012 article in Christianity Today called, “50 Women You Should Know,” Katelyn  Beaty said of Rachel Held Evans that her blog, which began in 2007, spoke out on many traditional evangelical issues in a fresh and fearless way.  Evans, she quoted, wrote that young Christians “aren’t looking for a faith that provides all the answers.  We’re looking for one in which we are free to ask the questions.”

It was intense questioning that led her to start writing in the first place.  In 2012 alone, 1.2 million visitors went to her site to hear what she had to say.  She was speaking for many others, giving voice to many who were needing one. To a church (in the largest sense) that is always, at least institutionally, last to respond to change, she pushed to make it look at its truth and heart and reassess what it was Jesus meant us to do. Continue reading Rachel Held Evans’ Questions