‘Fit me for the builder’s use’ — a lectio divina meditation on an alt-country song by Tyler Childers

I hope that people take, it doesn’t matter, race, creed, religion, and all of that, the most important part is to protect your heart, cultivate that, and make that something useful for the world. — Tyler Childers, Whiskey Riff (2022).

Let’s try something new here. For several years I’ve been trying my hand at lectio divina, a prayerful meditation technique that involves focusing on a passage of scripture. And I’ve learned recently of something called visio divina, a related visual technique. But I’ve never tried to put them together, and I’ve certainly never tried it on a country music video.

The song is titled “Way of the Triune God.” Doesn’t sound much like a country music title, does it? And it’s by Tyler Childers and the Food Stamps, whose music is just as hard to pigeonhole. It’s a mix of alt-country, Americana, bluegrass, Grateful Dead-style rock and Southern gospel.

“We’re our own thing,” Childers once told an interviewer, “it’s a new time, and I don’t know what it’s called, but I’m calling it country.”

So, country it is. (Although I think I still prefer alt-country.) Whatever you call it, “Way of the Triune God” speaks to me. What better way to find out what it’s saying?

Lectio: An old practice (with a new wrinkle)

According to Wikipedia, which I consider my summa theologica, lectio divina (divine reading) goes back to St. Benedict and the third-century church father Origen of Alexandria. It has four steps: read (lectio); meditate (meditatio); pray (oratio); and contemplate (contemplatio). I like to use a how-to guide by James Martin, editor of the Jesuit magazine America. It’s no longer available online, but in 2019 I saved an excerpt (link HERE), and I still use it to jog my memory:

• Reading: What does the text say? First, you read the text. At the most basic level, you ask: What is going on in this Bible passage? Sometimes a Bible commentary is helpful to enable you to better understand the context. […]
• Meditation: What is God saying to me through the text? At this point, you ask whether there is something that God might want to reveal to you through this passage. Often, it might connect with something in your life. […]
• Prayer: What do I want to say to God about the text? […]
• Action: What do I want to do, based on my prayer? Finally, you act. Prayer should move us to action, even if it simply makes us want to be more compassionate and faithful.

And in the last few months, I discovered visio divina (divine, or holy, seeing). As the Dominican Sisters of Springfield explain it on their website, it’s like lectio. But the steps, naturally, are more visual:

• Gaze on the image and open yourself to what it offers you. What do you notice about the image? Color? Texture? Light? The look of a person’s face? Look with loving gaze and let the image speak to you.
• Contemplate on what you notice, in the text, in the image, or on what is rising in your own heart.

To this, the Sisters add: “Pray […] and welcome a word from God.” And, finally: “Move from this moment of holy seeing into the rest of your day, aware of the gift it has been for you.”

Taking my hounds to heaven?

“Way of the Triune God” was released in September 2022 on a three-disc studio album titled Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? (The title song is a gentle riff on hunting dogs, angels and the streets of gold.) Ann Powers, music critic for National Public Radio, says it’s one of several projects that enlist Childers’ music in social justice causes like racial tolerance and LGBTQ rights. Hounds, Powers says, “confronted religious intolerance while holding on to the joy of worship.” Somehow, I’d say, he manages to do both.

Childers, for his part, says the gospel vibes — including a cover of Hank Williams Sr.’s “Old Country Church” — are part of his eastern Kentucky heritage. “Now, throughout the album, you know there’s a lot of talk about the way the ‘Triune God,’ like the Holy Trinity, being a very Christian thing, an idea and talk about Jesus, and that’s just you know, from my raising,” he said in an interview session carried on the Whiskey Riff website.

I think it’s part of my heritage, too. I hope I’m not claiming too much, because I grew up in the foothills on the very edge of Appalachia, in a “TVA town” where my father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority’s forestry division and most of the families I knew had their roots elsewhere. Flatlanders. My real exposure to Appalachian music, and culture, came later at an urban ministry just off the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville.

In any event, I was drawn in by the gospel harmonies in “Way of the Triune God.” Nate Cortas, SJ (another Jesuit!) says Childers “explor[es] the limits of country and gospel as genres,” adding:

There is plenty on the album well within those traditions, including […] an unaccompanied quartet introduction to “Way of the Triune God.” The importance of the music’s roots is even more evident in the song’s lyric video. Composed of footage of Eastern Kentucky church services taken from the archives of Appalshop, the power and diversity of the Appalachian Christian tradition is on full display. [Links in the original]

More to the point, perhaps, Cortas says Childers can sing an iconic Hank Williams song about an old country church “not because he believes he is good enough to (although he certainly is), but because he believes what the song says.”

Which leads us to the first part of lectio: What does the song say? I’ll use Fr. Martin’s rubrics:

Read (and watch): Google has the lyrics. Link HERE, or do a keyword search with the song’s title and “lyrics.” In the studio album, Childers sings as the video shows a white-steepled country church and a two-lane mountain highway. Wow, I’m thinking, this is making me homesick. He launches right into the message:

I don’t need the pills you take
Just to feel the spirit movin’
Brother, I ain’t slept in days
All without the drugs you’re usin’

This I can relate to! Childers and I had different drugs of choice — I wasn’t into the Nashville music scene and I didn’t have his kind of access — but we’re both in recovery now. We share that commonality, we both belong to that community. Backed by the Food Stamps, he goes on to a chorus, “Old time screamin’ and a-shoutin’ (go up) / Go up, tell it on the mountain,” in close gospel harmony with a hint of old-time country Baptist lined-out hymnody or call-and-response.

Now I want to be very clear here. The Old Regular Baptist hymns, as they are known, are not my tradition. I grew up in a liturgical church where the music ran more to Ralph Vaughan Williams and chanting the Magnificat. But in later years I learned to love the old Baptist and Methodist tunes from singing the Sacred Harp and the Cokesbury hymnal. I even sang with a Black gospel choir once at a week-long music festival in Maryland! What’s more, when I’m singing an 18th-century metrical psalm by the likes of Isaac Watts I believe the words, even though the theology is too orthodox Calvinist for me.

And so it goes throughout the video.

The pictures, curated by the Appalshop regional cultural center in Whitesburg, Ky., show worshippers at a variety of churches, Black and white; coal miners and a string of gondolas curving through a mountain pass; a wide variety of Appalachian life. Childers goes on to sing: “Fit me for the builder’s use / Use me for the great commission.”

Again, all of this I can relate to.

The echoes of the King James Bible remind me of home, and the Great Commission, the call to spread the gospel to all nations, is remindful of the charism I try to live by now as a Dominican associate. (One difference: I try to do it by example, preaching from the pulpit of our daily lives as the saying has it, rather than handing out tracts like the old-time sidewalk preachers did back home in Knoxville.) “Fit me for the builder’s use?” A reference to the stone the builders rejected? Who? Me? I’ll have to think about that.

Again, I’m OK with the Calvinism as long as Childers is singing things like this:

I don’t need the laws of man
To tell me what I ought to do
He reached down and touched my hand
And gave me quite a talkin’ to

It’s only when the music stops, I begin to wonder what’s going on here. Why am I relating to this? (We’ll get to that in a minute.) In the meantime, the pictures and snatches of video from Appalshop keep flashing while Childers and the Food Stamps sing, and I’m reminded again of what I left behind when I left southern Appalachia.

As Childers and his backup band play on, I see familiar scenes of a creekside baptizing and country churches; another coal train, a strip pit, a deep mine tipple, a picket line on an urban sidewalk; men and women doing farm work, farm animals, a lot of mules; what looks like a “sanctified” Holiness congregation moved by the spirit and the music; a potter, artists and musicians including a young folk singer-songwriter John McCutcheon. I knew John 40 years ago when he was a recent graduate of St. John’s University in Minnesota and served as the music director of an off-campus community arts center I was involved with in Knoxville.

Most of the rest of it was more of a visual backdrop to my life at the time, which centered on grad school and navigating the process of getting a 501c3 for the arts center. But seeing the Appalshop pictures, they look like home to me. When he was interviewed for Whiskey Riff, Childers said he incorporated Buddhist, Muslim and other religious traditions in his imagery because he didn’t want to be exclusively evangelical or Christian “I think it helps people know what this album isn’t intended to be” he said. “It’s much more so, coming from a place of harmony and welcoming, and this idea that we are all in this thing together.” Maybe it’s all like home. Maybe that’s what Childers is saying.

Meditation: “What,” asks Fr. Martin, “is God saying to me through the text?” Good question. To go a little easier on the Calvinists and the Baptists? Well, yes. We are all in this thing together. And I think Nate Cortas, the Jesuit from Kentucky, is onto something when he says Childers’ music — and his message — are nothng if not authentic. “The Kingdom of God is real and expansive, but it is also simple and out-of-the-way,” he says. “There is no broad road leading to it and there is no cheap grace.”

And that pretty well sums it up for me. Be true to who you are. After all, we’re all in this together. And while you’re at it, let other folks be true to who they are. The Kingdom of God is expansive, and it’s within us.

There’s something else Cortas says that fits here, too. It’s about the music:

The third and final iteration of each of the songs dispense with lyrics and colorfully mix elements of blues electro swing, trap, bluegrass, and Southern gospel, at least. The final effect is not ironic pastiche but, as Childers describes it himself, a true joyful noise.

Be true to who you are, then, and make a joyful noise.

As I say that, I recall one of the chants I learned in my Episcopal church choir back in Tennessee. It was Psalm 100, the Jubilate Deo ( ) In the 1928 prayer book we used at the time, it went like this: “O BE joyful in the LORD, all ye lands: * serve the LORD with gladness, and come before his presence with a song.” (The asterisk meant you sang to a new tone in the middle of the verse.) And I recall something I wrote 20 years ago, when I was teaching at an Ursuline liberal arts college. “In East Tennessee I learned to love bluegrass gospel, Bach cantatas, Anglican chant and shoutin’-glory spirituals from shape-note songbooks.”

Actually, most of the songbooks were in “round notes,” or standard notation; I did more shape-note singing later, after I moved north and discovered the Sacred Harp. But the rest fits. I’ve always been a spiritual mutt.

I’ve learned now to use words like “ecumenical” instead, but, hey, I like mutts.

Prayer: Fr. Martin asks: “What do I want to say to God about the text?” Prayer, as I’m coming to understand it, is a two-way street, a converesation, and the Dominican sisters put it like this: “Pray into what you see and read, and welcome a word from God.” Well, I don’t expect to dream of herald angels blowing trumpets, but there is something else I’d like to ask about. What’s this business about the stone the builders rejected? Hey, God, give me a talkin’ to.

Cortas may have the keys to the kingdom here. He’s another Southern expat, studying at Fordham when he blogged this piece to The Jesuit Post. and “pitching in at local parishes wherever help is needed.” when he posted to :

He sings, as he has on earlier albums, about our sinful attachments, be they dependence on whiskey, pills, or covetousness for lovers long gone. But there’s more at stake—Childers wants us to confront our religious bigotry, our racism and xenophobia, our failures to love one another well. As he did on 2020’s Long Violent History [a meditation on the death of Breonna Taylor], he offers white folks (and more particularly white Christians) an invitation to contemplation and compassion.

So maybe it has something to do with using your talents no matter what the circumstances. If nothing else, it’s worth thinking about.

Action: “Finally,” says Fr. Martin, “you act.” That strikes me as a typically Jesuit way of looking at it. They’re nothing if not practical, and I like that. But other traditions stress contemplation. (Even Martin says that sometimes it’s enough — for now — to want to act, or to be more compassionate and faithful.) The Dominican Sisters, in their outline of visio divina, “Move from this moment of holy seeing into the rest of your day, aware of the gift it has been for you.”

Links and Citations

Nate Cortas, SJ. “On His New Album Tyler Childers Brings Us Back to My Home Kentucky Church,” Jesuit Post, Oct. 10, 2022 https://thejesuitpost.org/2022/10/on-his-new-album-tyler-childers-brings-us-back-to-my-home-kentucky-church/.

Brady Cox. “Tyler Childers Discusses Purpose Behind Upcoming Album ‘Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven?’: ‘Coming From A Place Of Harmony & Welcoming’,” Whiskey Riff, Sept. 23, 2022 https://www.whiskeyriff.com/2022/09/23/tyler-childers-discusses-purpose-behind-upcoming-album-can-i-take-my-hounds-to-heaven-coming-from-a-place-of-harmony-welcoming/

Dominican Sisters of Springfield, Illinois. “Visio Divina: Seeing as Prayer” https://springfieldop.org/visiodivina/

James Martin, SJ. “Read, Think, Pray, Act: ‘Lectio Divina’ in Four Easy Steps,” Word Among Us (2007), copied https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2019/07/24/lectio-divina/.

Ann Powers, “Tyler Childers is back, and taking chances,” National Public Radio, July 27, 2023 https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190148625/tyler-childers-in-your-love-interview.

“Pray, Ponder, Preach and Practice the Word of God,” Racine Dominicans, Racine, Wisconsin https://www.racinedominicans.org/prayer-and-preaching/reflections.cfm.

“Tyler Childers On His Music: ‘I’m Calling It Country’,” Saving Country Music, Jan. 28, 2020 https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/tyler-childers-on-his-music-im-calling-it-country/ [citing Raina Douris and John Myers, “Tyler Childers Is Passionate About The Country Music Tradition,” NPR World Cafe, Jan. 27, 2020 https://www.npr.org/sections/world-cafe/2020/01/27/800009602/tyler-childers-is-passionate-about-the-country-music-tradition].

Wikipedia: Alternative country, Appalshop, Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?, Tyler Childers, Great Commission, Holiness movement, Lectio Divina, Lining out, John McCutcheon, Psalm 118, Breonna Taylor and Isaac Watts. Also a paper I wrote at Springfield College in the year 2000, “Faith, Hope and Poetry: Science and (Pre-)Postmodern Ways of Knowing in the Writing of Kathleen Norris” https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/faith-hope-poetry/. In spite of the cutsey-poo parentheses in the title, I kind of like it.

[Uplinked March 2, 2024]