What a rollicking band of Billboard charting bluegrass-loving friars taught me about a life of faith
My eyes welled with tears this summer as I heard The Hillbilly Thomists perform live for the first time. For 50 weeks of the year, these men humbly live out their priestly vocations.
Anytime I hear the hauntingly beautiful song,"Mr. Tanner," by Harry Chapin, I struggle to keep a dry eye. In it, Martin Tanner is a launderer and baritone with an otherworldly voice. His passion for singing dies when critics cruelly pan his professional debut, crushing his spirit.
In August, my eyes welled with tears of another kind - joyful ones – as I heard The Hillbilly Thomists perform live in concert for the first time. This sensational bluegrass band, which took its name from Southern Gothic fiction writer Flannery O’Connor’s delightful description of her own creative worldview, is comprised entirely of friars from the Order of Preachers.
For 50 weeks of the year, the clerics humbly live out their priestly vocations as, for instance, university chaplains, a parochial vicar and a bestselling author on theology. For the remaining two blessedly harmonious weeks, they tour. They are in many ways similar to fictional Mr. Tanner.
WHAT A GRATEFUL DEAD SONG AND A DOG NAMED AFTER ONE OF THEIR SONGS TAUGHT ME ABOUT LIVING MY FAITH
Like the dry-cleaner, music is a side-gig for these lyrical yet obedient Dominicans. They found each other on the path to priesthood because, also like Mr. Tanner, each "sang from his heart and he sang from his soul, he did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole." They sang, and sing, because deep in their bones and as brother-in-tunes Cat Stevens mirthfully put it, they can’t keep it in. On their life’s journey of faith, bluegrass simply is the soundtrack.
The Hillbilly Thomists are different from Mr. Tanner in one very important respect. From the beginning, critics have praised their music. In the self-effacing telling of Father Simon Teller, O.P., Chaplain and Director of Campus Ministry at Providence College, they put out their first album in 2017 to evangelize, yes, but also pay for their health insurance.
Imagine the band’s surprise when that eponymous album’s maiden voyage sailed to #3 on Billboard’s Bluegrass Albums chart. When Billboard telephoned Father Teller with the news and asked for the group’s picture, he dryly said to his bandmates, "we’d better get a camera." It happened again this summer, when their fourth album, "Marigold", debuted at #2.
Their folksy music is at once complex and lovely with lyrics rich in poetry and Scripture, but it’s their live performances that are joy incarnate. The Hillbilly Thomists’ love of God, of one other, and of music is unmistakable, an apt metaphor for the real presence that they so reverently adore. Turning Americana into sacred sound, they play with human hearts, light with – to borrow G.K. Chesterton’s definition of gratitude -- happiness doubled by wonder. They are, in a very good word, winsome.
But why is this so? It’s too cute to chalk their staggering success up to Providence, which after all is not on stage with the band and keeping them in time when they perform. What about their music exudes this attractive happiness doubled by wonder? I think it is something maddeningly simple, a critical choice they’ve made in their lives, but equally maddeningly rare in the world, since so few people so unreservedly make the same choice.
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The choice is to put first things first, and God is first. Talented musicians, all, The Hillbilly Thomists rejected the "music or ministry" dilemma, rightly, as a false choice. Rather, they chose to serve God as Dominican priests, first and always. By so doing, they found each other as brother musicians and became the band they could never have hoped to become had they put music first.
British writer C.S. Lewis explained this phenomenon succinctly. In a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths in 1951, Lewis wrote "put first things first and we get second things thrown in; put second things first and we lose both first and second things." Then, in his masterpiece "Mere Christianity," he made the same point with even more universality: "Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in: aim at earth and you will get neither."
It’s easy to say but hard to practice. I struggle with it daily. Even in the good moments, like prayer, too often it’s an exercise in cleverly demanding my will be done rather than humbly accepting thy will be done. That is the very definition of putting second things first, of aiming for earth. It took a rollicking band of bluegrass-loving friars to remind me, melodically but methodically, of the folly of my ways and the wisdom of theirs.
That, I think, is why The Hillbilly Thomists radiate such triumphant joy when they play. They’ve heeded the counsel of Matthew 6:33: "But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." They bear the fruits promised to those who put first things first. And if they can do it, so can I.
I close where I began, with thoughts of poor Mr. Tanner, the crestfallen singer of Harry Chapin’s imagining. It’s special when life imitates art, sublime when life imitates good art, and transcendent when life improves upon good art.
To listen to The Hillbilly Thomists is to see the path that might have been for broken Mr. Tanner. Their glorious music makes not only the priestly bandmembers themselves, but everyone who hears it, whole. Like the holy rock & rollers, all we have to do is put first things first.
