Susannah Cernojevich

Let us now praise holy women. Like millions of others, I found myself surprisingly sad over the death of Dolly Parton. Of course, like those same millions of people, I was a huge fan of this woman with an outsized musical talent. She was a regular voice on the radio from my earliest years; I vividly remember eating Wheaties as a 13-year-old on a school morning and hearing her plaintive cri de coeur, “Jolene,” on the pink Bakelite radio that sat on our kitchen counter. Dolly was a fixture in pop culture through my teenage years with tuneful hits like “I Will Always Love You” and “Here You Come Again” in the 1970s. A few years later, “9 to 5" summed up a whole era of office work when I was working in an office myself. Her voice spoke, or sang, for itself; but growing up, I was only dimly aware of her prodigious writing talent: she was the composer of 3,000 songs, many of them covered by other artists. And I always enjoyed her sunny disposition and, especially, her confidently pushing back against people who would reduce her to a cartoon. But only later in life did I became aware of her tremendous charity and big heart: giving away thousands of books to children in need (and “babies”: I love the idea of giving a baby a book); offering countless acts of charity to residents in Sevier County, Tennessee, her hometown; quietly helping a struggling singer or artist or writer or anyone; and being an early supporter of the LGBTQ community, when that could prove deeply unpopular. The universal mourning may come from that last quality, which you could call charity or compassion, but you could also call holiness. When you read even cursorily about her life, what becomes obvious is a Christian faith that led to a lifetime of kindness and charity, often behind the scenes. This helps to explain the great sadness that greeted her death. And it reminded me of someone else. Think of how often we read about Jesus in the Gospels being pursued by crowds. Early in the Gospel of Mark, we read that Jesus’s “fame” spread throughout Galilee, with crowds waiting at his door in Capernaum. It’s not just the healing that people wanted; it was the innate desire to be near holiness: to be near compassion, near acceptance, basically, near love. Holiness calls to us, because it’s a quality of the divine and is one way that God draws us closer. We saw in Dolly Parton something more than talent, something more than wit and something more than even charity; we saw holiness. Thank you, Dolly, for teaching me about the Christian life. And may you rest in peace with the God you loved and served so well.