Shaped By the Statlers: An Advent Reflection
My parents are amazing. I can’t explain in a post of reasonable length how much I value the way their lived example has positively impacted and shaped me. So much of who I am today is a direct result of who they are. From them, I learned how to love my spouse, to love my kids, to love God and His church. I learned to work hard, to value humility, honesty, simplicity.
And I also learned to love the Statler Brothers.
Don’t know the Statler Brothers? Oh, let me share the joy. The Statler Brothers are a four-man country/gospel quartet whose height of popularity in the later ’70s and early ’80s. I think at some point they had a variety show on CMT, but I’m pretty sure that came after their main recording days were behind them. The fact that I feel an affinity with the Statler Brothers is a reasonably unlikely thing considering their genre is not one that has ever been one of my favorites. I love THE GOSPEL, but as regards music, gospel ain’t my normal jam.
So here’s how my parents, primarily my dad, deviously labored over several years to make a place in my heart for the Statlers. When I was young, every year as Christmas approached, my mom and dad would load the family up in our van and take us to a neighboring town to look at the Christmas lights. We would drive around for a few hours, checking out each neighborhood where we knew it was likely we’d find decorated homes. Some years we hit the jackpot, and some years it seems we’d see fewer displays. Still, regardless, we could always count on one thing: the Statler Brothers’ album Christmas Card would be our soundtrack the entire time–and since it’s not an especially long album, we went through it numerous times each time we went out.
As we got older, my sister and I began to poke fun at the more cheesy elements of the album–my favorite to jest at was always where the bass singer inserts talking lines as if he’s one of the characters described in the song. I think we did it more to get a rise out of my dad, the Statler superfan, but he never took offense–he always just played into it, and those exchanges continue to this day.
Now, many years removed from the days when my parents would load us up and cart us around listening to “Christmas to Me,” “I’ll Never Spend a Christmas,” or my personal fave, “Something They Can’t Buy,” the funny thing is that my siblings and I can’t seem to quit the habit. It’s like a Pavlovian response in that when we get on the backside of Thanksgiving, and the radio stations start wearing out Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” we, by contrast, start binge-listening to the Statlers. There’s no getting around it. Without us even knowing it, my dad taught us that listening to that album at Christmas is just what we do. Fish swim, the sun rises, death and taxes are certainties, and the Love family listens to the Statler Brothers in December.
Well played, Ed Love. Well played.
Spiritual Formation in the Way of Jesus
It’s a funny and true story, but it’s also pretty interesting to think that my dad set me up for long-term fondness of one of his preferred albums, much in the same way Jesus set his closest disciples up to be the means by which he would establish his church. He invited them not to a training session or to a seminar by which he would intellectually ready them to be his emissaries into the world; instead, he invited them into a shared life where they were given the opportunity to walk in the rhythms in which he, Jesus himself, walked.
How did they learn what it means to have a calling but not a home? They left their homes and traveled with the one who said of himself, “Foxes have dens, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” How did they learn to pray? They learned by observing and by asking. How did they learn God’s heart for the outcast, the wicked, and the poor? They sat at tables with the one who said to the religious elite, “It’s not the healthy that need a doctor; it’s the sick.” How did they learn to be fishers of men? By letting Jesus take them “fishing.”
By immersing my siblings and me in a rhythm we could embrace over time, my parents managed to shape in us a love for the Statlers. By immersing his disciples in a rhythm they could embrace over time, Jesus reshaped his disciples’ hearts, their priorities, their understanding of God and his purposes in the world—and by doing this, he prepared them for long-haul faith that gave birth to Christ’s church, which endures today.
Perhaps, this advent, it is worth asking ourselves what rhythms of formation we have given ourselves over to. Our loves, our thoughts, our aims, our priorities, our habits–they are not static. No, they are consciously or unconsciously shaped. The patterns and routines in which we engage are the forms that give shape and contour to our lives, forming us along the way into the person we are becoming; perhaps the type we’d want to be, often the type we wouldn’t. Give yourself to a pattern of consuming the words of angry, paranoid, anxious media voices, and you ought not be shocked when you find yourself an angry, paranoid, anxious person (though others will likely see it in you before you do). Give yourself to patterns of working interminably and never resting, and you and ought not be shocked when you find yourself burnt out. Give yourself to patterns of taking the edge off of negative emotions with excess alcohol or other diversionary numbing agents, and don’t be shocked when you find yourself enslaved to addiction.
But give yourself to intentional patterns of charity, and you may find yourself a more generous person. Give yourself to a pattern of serving in worship, and you may find yourself given to greater love for (and perhaps fewer gripes about) your church. Give yourself to a pattern of gathering with people you don’t know, perhaps even those you do know and maybe wish you didn’t, and you may find yourself a more hospitable person. Give yourself to a pattern of taking time and silently meditating on scripture, not just reading it like a high school textbook, and you may find yourself able to ponder and appreciate the Biblical narrative more deeply. Give yourself to time-tested liturgies of prayer that have sustained God’s people and served them well in worship for centuries, and you may find yourself less likely to not pray on a day when you just aren’t feeling it and don’t know what you’d even say to God if you were.
Such formation, though, is rarely, if ever, accomplished in a one-off moment. It took many Christmas van rides for the Statlers to get their four-part harmony hooks into the core of my heart. It requires that we commit ourselves to rhythms over time that, given ample opportunity, can shape us into the people we want to be, the people we were created to be. And to be clear, this is not simply about habit creation or character improvement—the goal of being shaped and formed properly is that we might be people open and obedient to the one who created us. That we might live lives formed in the pattern of the one in whose birth, death, resurrection, and promised return we find our ultimate and eternal hope.
Andy Love is a husband, father, and friend. He is a former secondary-level instructor of literature and composition, and currently an assistant administrator at a primary school in southwest Missouri. He writes at I Say Stuff where this article has was originally published. It has been republished here with permission.