Mortal Lenses

When I was fifteen, a good friend of mine cautioned me against being too “moralistic.” In fact, as best I remember it, his exact words were,

“Don’t get moralistic on me.”

I think I had been scolding him about smoking cigarettes, and maybe there is nothing more insufferable than your best teenage friend going all Miss Morals on you. He eventually gave up smoking but not because I said to. We make statements and judgments of our selves and others all the time, and it’s right that occasionally, and with good reason, that we get called on it. And that we figure this stuff out in our own time and place.

I say all this first to speak for and about myself. I can be pretty judgy and intolerant and even close-minded about what I think is right or wrong. And it’s not even that I find right and wrong to be relative or wholly objective, either. We have to make decisions based on what we see and hear and have learned. These aren’t always satisfying decisions, and they definitely aren’t always forever decisions.

I learned today that someone I thought I knew well once upon a time recently got divorced. I hadn’t kept up with that marriage, but when I heard the news, though I didn’t know about the divorce and wouldn’t have seen it coming necessarily, I wasn’t stunned. I don’t know how or why it came about, but the judge in me believes he does. Because I knew this friend and knew that attention from others was a weakness for them, I imagine an affair, and that might be wrong and way off base and unfair.

And yet, their marriage relationship was actually begun by an affair, since one of them was engaged when they first met.

This led me to thinking about the way we see people in our lives and how different we see them at various stages of our lives.

Last night I was playing my vintage copy of Loretta Lynn’s first LP, Loretta Lynn Sings (Decca DL-4457, 1963). It’s so soothing and a perfect way to wind down, especially after tending to a three-year old grandchild all day. Such a voice she had and I’m glad I appreciate her even more today than I did when I was a kid hearing her on Saturday afternoon country TV shows.

In my film classes, I often show Loretta’s biopic, Coal Miner’s Daughter. I’ve loved the movie, and its stars Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones, ever since I first saw it in 1980. It’s easy, given all the good singing and the longing Loretta feels for her parents, to forget about the scene of Loretta and husband Doo’s wedding night. A night when Doo forces himself on Loretta.

I’m not sure what I thought about this scene when I first saw it. I was in graduate school, a 24 year-old guy. It was uncomfortable, but I never felt as bothered by it as many of my female students do today. They see and know what Doo did as spousal rape. If someone had pointed that out to me in 1980, maybe I would have agreed as I certainly do now. In this time and place, when I think about Loretta’s life, I see so many images, hear so many sounds. But they are surely colored forever by the images and voices of a very young woman saying “No, Doo. Stop.”

Their marriage stayed alive, but I have since wondered about what that night did to it and to their personal relationship.

This morning I was reading about the musician Ricky Skaggs in Geoffrey Himes’ In-Law Country (CMF Press, 2024). I think I knew that Skaggs was a conservative Christian, but I hadn’t thought much about it. I can take or leave his music, though to be fair, I haven’t really given the music or him much of a chance. What I read today, though, about Skaggs and his wife Sharon White, who for a time was also a musician, makes me even less interested:

“My spiritual relationship is the most important thing in my life, and Sharon is the next most important thing. And that’s just the way it is” (332).

Sharon gave up the music life to stay home and raise their kids. She home schools them as well. The kids are, according to Skaggs, Sharon’s “piece of the pie.” Had they both stayed in music, instead of just Ricky, and used a nanny or a governess, then according to Skaggs, there was a greater chance of them being “a tragedy” (332–3).

I donned both my judge robe and one of those old-fashioned white powdered wigs when I read this, and it was all I could do not to call my wife in to read it to her. Had I done so, she might have said “Wow,” and then gone about her morning getting ready for work. That would have been a moment for self-congratulatory back-pats, accomplishing what?

But I keep thinking about Skaggs and what he said.

Skaggs admitted that when he used to preach from the stage of his shows through his music, he might have carried things too far. He actually gave a pretty apt analogy when he said that what he was doing was akin to people coming to a BBQ joint expecting pork or brisket and being served chicken. Not that chicken is bad, but it isn’t pork or brisket. So coming to a show and expecting music but getting preaching…

I would have walked out, and now I’m thinking about becoming vegetarian again.

Before reading this, I had a thought about buying one of his classic records, Highways & Heartaches, but I doubt I will now. I just don’t care. And honestly, the part about deciding to stay home with the kids, ok, we all make choices. The home schooling? Hhhhm. I know that some do it for economic reasons, some for health reasons, but there are other, darker reasons for homeschooling out there.

These are choices that some make, and just because I didn’t and wouldn’t doesn’t make one of us better or worse, right or wrong. So if I believe my wife and I made the right choice in both working while raising children and sending our kids to public schools, I know I can qualify those choices as relative to us. But I also know that as our society goes, I think we made the better, the wisest choice for all in our still functional society.

So judgy.

Now that other part — the one where Skaggs’ spiritual relationship comes first and the relationship with his wife, second. I don’t understand that at all and have absolutely no conception in my life to be able to understand it.

All my life I have heard about the spiritual side of things, particularly from the Christian lens. In my high school years — the early 1970s — I began hearing more talk from certain peers about having a “personal relationship” with Jesus.

I didn’t understand.

I understood the ritual of being “born again,” or rather, I understood the steps in the ritual. One Sunday night at my girlfriend’s church, I saw someone speak in tongues, too.

I didn’t get what was going on. I didn’t feel anything except very much out of place. I understand that for some, this is a powerful testament to their relationship with God and their inner connection to the eternal.

And it’s not like I don’t hear the voice inside me giving me advice or direction or even telling me that I should or shouldn’t buy that Ricky Skaggs’ album. I do. Is this God’s voice, though, and if I reason, argue, or simply ask it a question or two, do I have a personal relationship with that voice?

I suppose I’ve always thought this voice was my conscience, which of course might be a manifestation of God and maybe is also that moralistic piece that my best friend wanted me to keep to myself.

I think and feel and hear my voice, but when it comes to advice, when it comes to finding direction and hope and often a cool dose of reality, the place I go to most often is the seat my wife is occupying. I trust her more than any person I’ve known, and I work hard to maintain my personal relationship with her. That’s hard in and of itself, but if I gave any less time or energy to our work and our love together, I’d be afraid of creating too great a distance between us.

Or to put it more positively, I love spending time with my wife, even if all we’re doing is sitting on our screened porch together, listening to Loretta or to the birds in the woods behind us. It’s difficult maintaining deep connection, intimacy, with another human being. We have flaws, sometimes deep ones; we grow old and lose our vitality, our charm, and even our memories.

Our bodies and minds are not eternal. But this love is real, and it is here and it is very tangible and soothing.

As I write this, I realize that I have enough alone time to ask the voice inside me what it thinks about so many things. Writing is very much such an act for me. This blog, which I’ve been keeping over various pubs for the past eight years, has allowed me the freedom to explore myself and my personal relationship with my wife, my children, my friends, and the music I also love so much.

This is my tongue; my voice. My wife is my deepest loved one. Maybe all of this can be considered spiritual, but that’s a word I have never really understood. Sometimes I do feel things so deeply that I have no words to describe the connection. But I try, and even when I’m writing — because she eventually reads these, too — I know it’s my wife that I’m writing to. The one I most want to understand me, because I believe that if she does and if I’m one with her, everything else in the universe will align and make sense to and for me.

And on those days when I think about God, I think this must be what was planned for me because I am so happy and so fulfilled by her love.