Saint Dolly
I have a Dolly Parton coffee mug that I bought from Dollywood a few years ago. It’s one of my favorite mugs, the one I often grab in the morning.
We strolled through the gift shop and I checked to see if my name, Tanner, was on any of the mugs. Usually, it’s not and I end up saving money. I don’t have one of those names that gets to be on mugs. I am not a Blake or Chris or Kyle.
I looked high and low, all the while amazed that Dolly Parton has her own theme park. A real, entire theme park. It has everything from shows to roller coasters to unforgettable cinnamon bread.
I spent most of that day looking for Dolly.
Because you hear stories about how Dolly would sometimes show up at Dollywood.
You just never knew when or where or how.
But I never saw her.
“Dolly seemed to understand something Christians, myself included, have a remarkable ability to complicate: grace.”
I did, however, find a mug in the gift shop with my name right there between a steam engine and Dolly Parton’s smiling face.
That was the fastest $20 I ever spent.
Something inside of me sank when I heard Dolly Parton had passed away.
We live in a time when it’s easy for us to grieve someone we’ve never met. Dolly was in many ways part of our family. Her books are in our house. Her music is in our ears. Her photo hangs in our bathroom. (Long story, but it’s a Dolly Parton themed bathroom.) And her photo is on the mug I am currently drinking from.
It is strange to feel as though you've lost someone you never knew, someone who never knew you, but somehow, did.
This is what happens when you lose a saint.
Saint Dolly is what we call her in Nashville.
In middle school confirmation class, I learned saints were not spiritual superheroes. A saint was someone who trusted in Jesus, someone forgiven and made holy by the grace of God.
At least that’s what I remember. Middle school confirmation was a long time ago.
There are some saints, like Dolly, who change the way you see God and the way you walk with him. Saints teach us something deep and beautiful about the love of God and how to love the world around us. And when you see that kind of love in a person, it makes you remember just how kind and loving and inviting God truly is.
Since Dolly’s death, we’ve heard story after story about the ways she loved people. Dolly gave away books to children by the millions. She helped families after wildfires tore through her beloved East Tennessee. She gave money and always seemed to understand that having a lot meant you had the privilege of giving a lot away.
She talked about her faith in God without making it feel like a weapon.
She loved people whom Christians have shied away from.
Dolly seemed to understand something Christians, myself included, have a remarkable ability to complicate: grace.
“She didn’t sand down the edges or trade the big hair for beige or confuse holiness with dullness.”
Grace is freedom. It reminds us again and again that there is nothing left to earn.
You don’t love your neighbor so God will love you. You love your neighbor because God already does.
Life becomes a gift, this strange and fleeting moment in which we get to love and be loved. In Christ, love comes to us as a gift, and then it starts spilling out toward the people around us. Grace turns us outward and sometimes it even leads us to build a theme park.
Dolly seemed to live her life in response to God’s grace, spending her days giving people things they didn’t have to earn. Sometimes it was a song or a book or a roller coaster. Sometimes it was the feeling that there was room for you, too.
But what I admired most was that she did all of this in her own Dolly way.
She never seemed to believe that loving Jesus and following Jesus required becoming less of the person God created her to be, but rather that the love of Christ freed her to live as the person God had made her to be, among the people God had given her to love.
She didn't sand down the edges or trade the big hair for beige or confuse holiness with dullness.
She was funny and glamorous and excessive and generous and strange and completely herself.
Dolly was Dolly.
And Dolly lived like she was loved, because she knew of a love that had no end.
How freeing.
No, I never saw Dolly Parton, but I did see what she did with her life.
She spent it loving, making room for other people.
And maybe that’s why losing someone you never met can still feel like losing someone you knew.
Because every once in a while, someone lives in such a way that their life helps you see your own a little more clearly.
Saint Dolly did that for me.
She reminded me that maybe following Jesus really is as simple, and as difficult, as loving the person in front of you and doing something about it.
Not to make God love you or to prove that you are good or to be remembered as a saint.
But because in Christ, you already have what you need.
You are free and you are loved.
And now you are free to love your neighbor.
And maybe build a theme park if you’d like.