I had not been there since the year my great aunt, Mary K, died at the advanced age of 95. Flying in from bustling, cosmopolitan Boston to Nashville in the fall of 2010, I drove the last leg on country highways into quiet, homogenous Lynchburg to attend her funeral at the Main Street Church of Christ. I arrived in the tiny town and felt I’d landed on another planet. I was then a doctoral student studying theology, and I found the service to be theologically torturous as well as emotionally fraught. I wanted to escape immediately after the service concluded but remained because congregation members kindly invited our very large extended family to a meal in the church parish hall. All of the recipes were based on Aunt Mary K’s own cooking, which had provided the family our annual Thanksgiving feast since my mother was a child.
Aunt Mary K never had children and had outlived all four of her siblings, including her twin brother, Ted, who died young of MS, and her older sister, Nancy, who was my grandmother. We -- her multi-generational phalanx of nieces and nephews -- were her people, her blood, some of us still in the faith tradition she kept, and others switchers to less theologically rigid communities. The generous hands of her church friends, her local family of faith, gave us the sustenance she had always provided us. Someone had also brought in boxes of old family photographs for us to sift through over the meal. After a while, it felt like Aunt Mary K was there amongst us, telling wild stories about her childhood in nearby Smith County.
In early October of this year, I returned to Lynchburg when my partner in life, Charles, rode in a cycling event to raise money for MS research. He pedaled 50 miles on two wheels with 400 other cyclists, and I drove the narrow, winding Tennessee backroads on four wheels with our husky, Freya. On that gorgeous early fall day, I arrived in a town changed tremendously from my last visit 13 years ago. Despite being nestled in a dry Moore County where alcohol was not supposed to be sold, Lynchburg has been home to the historic Jack Daniels Distillery since at least 1866. My aunt and her churchgoing friends were teetotalers, but my great uncle, Seaborn, kept a bottle of Jack hidden on the rafters of his chicken coop, where he invited my father to join him sometimes after the Thanksgiving dinner. The dessert course of the meal always included Aunt Mary K’s homemade boiled custard and a small gravy bowl full of “flavoring,” which was never named but which children were forbidden from adding to their cups of custard. In other words, even in a county, a religion, a home where alcohol was disdained, whiskey was ever-present.
Jack Daniels is now much more than an historic Southern distillery tucked into the hilly countryside on the site of a cold creek at Cave Spring Hollow. It is a full-blown, international industry. The grounds of the distillery, where the cyclists were welcomed after their 50- or 80-mile rides, are lush and well-kept with all sorts of amenities and a steady stream of tourists from around the world. When I arrived, I toured the town, seeking the street near the square where Aunt Mary K had lived, but I could not locate her house. I walked, as we used to after those hearty Thanksgiving meals, around the town square, which is now lined with restaurants and giftshops, a Harley-Davidson dealership, a cigar shop, a parklet with a gazebo, and even whiskey-tasting stores (the laws of the dry county having been eased to accommodate commerce). Instead of a lonely, semi-abandoned square, the place was humming with tourists, and a number of languages floated on the fall breeze.
Wreathed in autumn beauty, Lynchburg showed evidence of tensions. On the one hand, the folksy, dog-friendly distillery grounds were notably a-political, welcoming anyone who might want to buy the whiskey or at least pay for a tour. On the other hand, windows in some shops on the square showed evidence of a hard-right lean, featuring t-shirts emblazoned with themes like “WANTED: TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT, 2024,” featuring a caricature of the grinning man himself behind bars. The overall message seemed to be: Black money, gay money, and foreign money are just as good as straight, white, American money, but let’s not go any further than that with this relationship. Let’s not get into religion or politics or conversations about “lifestyle” choices or try to live near each other. I was reminded, slightly, of my discomfort with the preaching at Aunt Mary K’s funeral, the messages about sin and salvation that become so entangled with political ideologies and carry a hint of violence in the sharing.
But there I was the next morning, sitting, unchurched, on a sunny Sunday, in a little country inn off the main drag, enjoying myself despite the frictions just beneath the surface of this small town in one of the most conservative states in the union. I thought about the lovely people who made the post-funeral luncheon for Aunt Mary K’s brood, people whose religious and political and social views are in no way aligned with mine, and of how, out of love for my aunt, they made a beautiful meal for a family they hardly knew and might not have liked much if they did know. Many of us, at least in my wing of the family, were offended by their particular brand of doctrine and practice. My grandmother, Nancy, had been raised, like my aunt, in that faith, but she married a Methodist who refused to join or raise his children in her church. Over the years of her marriage, Nancy got used to the Methodists. After my grandfather died, she tried to return to the faith community of her childhood, but she found that she could not go home again. All those years of singing in the church choir, leading fundraisers, and praying with my grandfather’s people had re-formed her, changed her. Living in Wilson County with a Methodist for more than 40 years, Nancy could not be what she had been. She had become someone very different. My side of the family retained that shift.
One time, I asked Aunt Mary K how she had stayed in the Church of Christ all those years. She was a fairly open-minded person for someone of her era, and a rather independent, working woman who communicated her views quite matter-of-factly, and often humorously, to anyone who would ask. Yet, she remained in her childhood faith, which had begun retrenching with the Moral Majority of the 1980s. My sisters and I were staying with her before the Thanksgiving meal one year, helping with the cooking before the rest of the family arrived in Lynchburg to eat and watch football all afternoon. While slowly stirring the boiled custard over low heat, we were talking about politics and religion and whatever the societal upheaval of the day was, and I asked about her views in light of her own religion. She told me, “Well, I don’t agree with everything they say, but when I look at what they do, I can see they are good people. So I stayed because of how they care for each other and this community. Actions speak louder than words.”
Driving back from Lynchburg as the cyclists made their way home later that Sunday afternoon, I pondered my aunt’s decision to remain fixed in a community. Aunt Mary K was wise, in her way, so I do believe she knew something that is worth considering, even if the situation, from my perspective, is more complicated than that. She felt that, no matter what comes out of people’s mouths, it’s good to pay attention to their movements in the world. How do they treat people? Is he kind? Is she generous? No matter how a person votes or what their stated theology may be or what church they attend, what does that look like in daily relationships with others, including people they know and love and people they do not? In fancy, PhD-land, we call these questions the difference between a person’s propositional theology (or doctrine) and their operational theology (or practice). Most of the time, I think of it simply as the relationship between our words and actions, and it has long been a focus of my own work, the question beneath all of my questions.
These days, with a world so polarized as the one we are living in, I am wondering whether I should stop listening to the trumped-up bluster quite so much and watch the behavior instead, maybe even listen for the subtler things being said when the cameras are not rolling. This is not to say that public actions and words are unrelated to each other -- we often speak into being what we want to see in practice, we drive something into everyday life by saying it is so. But, if I listened a little more to my aunt’s voice, perhaps I would slow down and watch and listen, to find more in common with folks who, for now, appear as far away as another planet. While I can still hear tinges of violence around the edges of some of their talk and have sometimes seen those dangerous impulses bloom into action, I notice that most people are not so terrible when you interact with them out of a sense of kindness, generosity, caring. If I come to others from this place, like my aunt did, I might not feel like an alien in this, my home state.
When I think about in this way, when I consider Aunt Mary K’s focus on the qualities of others’ actions, I see at an even deeper level. It occurs to me that, perhaps, what made her able to remain with people she did not agree with has more to do with who she was and how she saw the world, how she lived, and what she thought, than with who they were and what they said or did.
Shan Overton’s writing focuses on spirituality, the arts, nature, theological imagination, and creating a new world together.