Country (as in Rural)

photo by wayne mclaughlin

May 9, 2011. This morning I read a poem by Barbara Ras entitled, “A Wife Explains Why She Likes Country.” The first sentence reads: Because those cows in the bottomland are black and white, colors anyone can understand…

‘Country people’ see things in black-and-white. They are simple people, without Masters degrees or Doctoral degrees. If you know me very well, you’ll know that I crusade against oversimplification and throw my weight to the support of an appreciation of ambiguity. But I also have a deep appreciation for ‘country people.’

Now, I know I’m stereotyping by using that phrase. But I’m following the theme of Barbara Ras’ poem, which presents ‘country’ as a simple, decisive, uneducated milieu. I spent many years of my pastoral ministry in small towns surrounded by agricultural fields. My congregations have had people who milked cows and slaughtered hogs and grew corn, beans, tobacco and other crops. I probably disagreed with most of them on political questions, and their theology was usually much more conservative than mine. But I grew to love these people for their authenticity, their down-home-ness, their know-how, their friendliness, their faith, and their humanity.

It’s easy for those of us who have higher education and a more sophisticated take on life to have a subtle feeling of superiority toward country folk. Elitism is a common disease of the well-educated. Country people have so much to teach us. Out in the country you find genuineness and a lack of presumptuousness, as well a nitty-gritty understanding of life. In her poem Ras the wife likes the country because only country has a gun with a full choke / and a slide guitar / that melts playing it cool into sweaty surrender in one note, / because in country you can smoke forever and it’ll never kill you…

What really matters in our human relationships is being human. When my real humanity encounters your real humanity, then we have begun to know each other. In Genesis the Hebrew writer uses puns to tell us that humans were created from humus so that we would live in humility. The wife in the poem ends by saying, because my people / come from dirt.

The dirty little secret is that all humans are alike, and the more we let down our guard and relate to one another on a truly human level, the more our commonality will bring us together. St. John wrote in his gospel that “the eternal Word became human/humus and lived among.”

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