Transcript for October 11, 2009 by Ian Lawton

Bluegrass is a musical genre that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Take for example some of the great song titles:

Barefoot boy with boots on
I kissed her on the left cheek, I kissed her on the right, but I left her behind for you.
I Met My Baby in the Porta-Jon Line.
If I Can’t Live Without Her, Then How Come I Ain’t Dead?

Bluegrass music shares a lot in common with progressive spirituality. It is a blending of many world traditions. It is about everyday life, and it involves a lot of improvising.

Blending of World Traditions. Many of the cultures that have found their way to America brought their music with them. Bluegrass is a combination of ballads from Ireland played with fiddles, and folk music from West Africa played on the banjo. It blends these different traditions into its own honest expression. It’s much the same with progressive spirituality. As the world gets smaller, there is more and more inspiration to be gained from all of the world wisdom traditions.

Everyday life. Early bluegrass reflected life on the land, a new land. It was honest music, with recurring themes like loneliness and sorrow. Love, home and family life are common topics for bluegrass songs. Similarly in progressive spirituality, there is less emphasis on speculating about things that we can’t possibly know for sure and more emphasis on living your daily life with integrity.

Improvising. One of the nicest features of bluegrass is improvisation. As someone said, “Play the melody correctly the first time around .. then you can cut it to pieces”. There is no blueprint for how to live a spiritual life, so it involves a lot of improvisation.

This last point is maybe the most profound illustration for life that Bluegrass music offers. One instrument will improvise the melody while the rest of the band support, then they will switch it up. That sounds a little like family or community doesn’t it? One person shares their story or opinions while the rest of the group holds the space for them. Then another takes a turn to improvise with their ideas and thoughts.

At its best, community is a forgiving place where you don’t have to get everything right. You don’t have to be perfect. You are given space to think out loud, make mistakes and do the best you can. Do you remember the movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou? The Soggy Bottom Boys was the name of the bluegrass group of three escaped convicts looking for buried treasure. They run into an old time religious revival by the river with hundreds of people dressed all in white are being baptized. One of the Soggy Bottom Boys runs in to be baptized then runs out saying “I’ve been saved. The preacher says my sins have all been washed away. Even the piggly wiggly I stole.” They say to him, “I thought you said you didn’t do that.” “I lied” he said. “The preacher says even my lies have been washed away.”

Later on they steal an apple pie out of someone’s kitchen window. They think twice and go back to leave a dollar in its place. That’s progress! Spirituality is measured by progress not perfection.

Being a spiritual person is not about having all the answers, or being perfect. It is about progress. Being spiritual is like being a soggy bottom boy or girl; mixing it up in the real world, sharing your feelings along the way and supporting each other as we improvise at being human together.

Homer Simpson once said this prayer for his family, “I give thanks for the occasional moments of peace and love our family’s experienced…well, not today. You saw what happened. O, Lord, be honest! Are we the most pathetic family in the world or what?”

Maybe that is the way you feel some of the time. Seek progress, not perfection. Bluegrass is an honest expression of being human in good times and bad.

Bluegrass and Harvest Fest

Traditionally, bluegrass is played at harvest festivals. Bluegrass and harvest share a common essence; improvising with what you get. Harvest is used to celebrate the seasons of nature, the seasons of human experience and our dependence on the earth. The harvest is different each year and you have to be creative with what you get. Our industrial food system makes it easy to forget this fact. We just assume that most of what we want is available most of the time. We truck in whatever we want from wherever we want to get it in the world and the cost doesn’t vary greatly.

It wasn’t always like this. After the Second World War, when Bluegrass was taking off as a musical genre, people were much more mindful of the harvest. There was always an element of uncertainty in each harvest. A bumper crop would mean a fall of feasting. A lean harvest would mean a winter fast, a diet of cabbage soup and for some it would mean starvation. Food could never be taken for granted. So you really celebrated what you received, and you adapted to the conditions of the time. Now we barely need to give it a moment’s thought. So how can we be truly thankful for the harvest?

It’s worth pausing to reflect on our current harvest. The unique feature of this current harvest has been a lot of moisture and not enough heat. It was a gentle spring, followed by a wet and cool summer and then followed by a moist fall. So now we have an abundance of tree fruits and a scarcity of heat loving crops like tomatoes and melons.

Give thanks for the harvest, and be mindful of its seasonal challenges. Get creative and improvise with what the harvest offers.

One of the challenges for us in our industrial food chain is that we forget who we are dependent on. It’s so easy to lack gratitude in a system like this. Why should we be grateful for our food, when it all seems so easy?

But is it easy? Who was else was involved in our food chain? Who else paid the price for our consumption?

The harvest festival in Southern India is called the Pongal. It is a three day rice Harvest Festival. Families take this time to thank all those who have contributed to a successful harvest — including the gods, the sun and the cattle. That’s getting closer to the type of harvest festival we would do well to celebrate. Our lives are dependent on each other and on the earth whether we acknowledge it or not.

The journey of the simple banana from Ecuador leaves a trail of ecological disaster behind it; a reminder of our lack of gratitude, a massive carbon footprint that stamps the word “mindless” on the sky. If we really understood the cycle; where our food came from, and its seasonal sojourn, we would never eat a thing without enormous gratitude for the web of nature/ human collaboration that brought it to us; the earth that prepared it, and the future life of the planet that depends on our choices. The cycle of dependence is like a bluegrass band, with each being celebrated for their part in the whole.

The Buddhist Monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, offers this beautiful grace before a meal that captures interdependence.


”My plate, now empty, will soon be filled with precious food. In this food, I see the presence of the entire universe supporting my existence. Many beings are struggling for food today. I pray that they
all may have enough to eat.”

Bluegrass, Harvest and God

So where does a belief in God fit in to this view of interdependence? What is God’s role in the harvest? What role does God have in the changes and seasons of your life?

You can go for an extreme and say that there is no need for God. As Bart Simpson prayed before one meal- “Dear God, we paid for this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing,”

Or you can go to the other extreme, and find God in all the elements of nature. Ancient harvest festivals included the worship of various gods. In Egypt the harvest festival was dedicated to Min, the god of vegetation and fertility. When Egyptian farmers harvested their corn, they wept and pretended to be grief-stricken. This was to deceive the spirits which they believed lived in the corn. They feared that the spirits would be angry that they had cut down the corn.

Reverence for the food we harvest and consume is important. But fear? Do we need to fear the harvest as if it is full of spirits that control our fate?

Maybe there is a middle perspective, where God is one name to use for the bricolage of seamless and mysterious connections that you experience so clearly at harvest time. We are all related. All things are related and interdependent. God is a name for the whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Fear is not necessary, but it takes some purging from our minds that have been so conditioned.

The Hopi people have a fascinating harvest festival that includes their children. When they are young, the children experience a ritual during the corn harvest. Kachinas, masked holy men, parade into the tribe’s circle, bless the corn and bring gifts to the children. Between the age of 7 and 10, the children are taken to an alternate harvest festival. During this occasion, something surprising happens. Instead of dancing, the Kachinas stand directly in front of the children and remove their masks. These men, whom the children had always thought were gods, are revealed in fact to be their uncles and neighbors. It’s a coming of age ritual, where otherworldly magic gives way to the ordinary miracle of shared humanity.

Harvest is a great time to celebrate the miracles that are all around you. They are so often revealed to you in the people around you as they improvise the best they can with their life circumstances.

Let me end with a beautiful story from the Zen tradition.

Behind a temple there was a field where there were many squashes growing on a vine. One day a fight broke out among them, and the squashes split up into two groups and made a big racket shouting at one another.

The Zen master heard the uproar and, going out to see what was going on, found the squashes bickering. In his booming voice the he scolded them. “What are you doing out there fighting? Everyone sit in meditation.” While the squashes were sitting their anger subsided and they settled down.

Then the teacher quietly said, “Now everyone put your hand on top of your head.” When the squashes felt the top of their heads, they found something attached. It turned out to be a vine that connected them all together. “This is really strange. Here we’ve been arguing when actually we’re all tied together and living just one life. What a mistake!” After that, the squashes all got along with each other nicely.

Give thanks for community and interdependence, the God between, the God who goes by many names; Life, Harvest, Improvised Bluegrass, Evolution, Gaia, Interrelatedness, Ground of Being or whatever other name has meaning for you. 

You experience the God between when you carve pumpkins and when you drink cider. You come closer to the God between when you accompany a band on fiddle and when you encourage another to be all that they can be.

This harvest festival, my great hope is that you might come nearer to God, not in fear but in reverence for the wondrous connections that are greater than all and yet present in each. It’s bigger than you; but at the same time it is utterly dependent on you and the choices you make for a more peaceful world.

Your life is an abundant harvest of colorful and luscious fruit called doing your best. Within you are countless seeds of potential, waiting for your permission to burst forth in self expression and blossom into radiant fullness. Go wild today. Be seen. Be bold. Be heard. Be real. Let it all out. Cultivate your unique talents and let your love loose in the world.

For Further Reflection (Questions that can be used privately or in groups) –

1. In what areas of your life can you celebrate progress?
2. What spiritual truths does music such as Bluegrass teach you?
3. What spiritual truths do the seasons and harvest time teach you?
4. How do you understand God in relation to the interrelated web of life?