"Sunday morning's I'm too tired to go to church"

I have a lot to say about Jason Isbell and the song he played last night

I grew up Southern Baptist in Kentucky and for a lot of folks, that’s all you need to know about my religious upbringing. I could say I grew up white and Southern Baptist in Kentucky, but if you know much about what it means to be Southern Baptist, the white part mostly goes without saying.

When I was a kid we went to Sunday school every morning, followed by church, which was so much more boring than you’d expect a Southern Baptist sermon to be. There was no fire and no brimstone, because we were about as far north as you could go without leaving the South. Still, it feels like Sunday mornings we spent at least three hours at church, my mother passing us mints out of her purse on the uncomfortable church pew to quiet our growling stomachs and tide us over until we got home for Sunday dinner.

On Wednesday’s, we went to Wednesday night supper and then GA’s (Girls in Action—I don’t know that the boys did, but the Southern Baptists are all about gender segregation) and then, I think choir in there somewhere, too. That was another two or three hours at church, adding up to almost six hours at church per week. Which is all to say that I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence in church, which you might think was all trauma. But church was also how I knew I was held and loved in a community,¹ which is still one of the best gifts I’ve ever been given, flawed as it may have been.

Some of my fondest memories are of standing outside the church in the crisp fall air with my friends, waiting for my dad to pick me up. As a kid in church, there was singing and handbells (which are fucking awesome) and flirting with boys and maybe, if my memory serves me right, there were briefly puppets? Church was great, except for the part where they told me my grandfather who wasn’t baptized was going to hell, but that’s a whole other story.

The point is, church was at the center of my family’s life when I was growing up because church was community. Church was our people. It was my grandmother, who was part of all the senior activities. It was my parents hanging out with the friends they’d known since high school in their Sunday school class gossiping and drinking coffee for an hour or so. It was children’s church, when you were still young enough to escape the sermon and to hang out in this room full of toys and this awesome wooden thing that went from steps to rocking boat if you flipped it over (god, I loved that thing so much). It was Miss Isabelle Cropper, my secret granpal who lived in the big house in Burlington and wrote me notes on flower stationary. It was my friends, who I’d gone to kindergarten with in the church basement and would graduate high school with one day. Church was, in a lot of ways, sort of the world.

Not gonna lie, I still kind of want one of these things in my house now

So when, at the Democratic Convention last night, Jason Isbell chose to sing, “Something More Than Free,” alone in his blue tuxedo and a little amp on that big, empty stage (Jason Isbell never sings alone on the stage, let alone in a tuxedo) and he got to the line, “Sunday mornings I’m too tired to go to church,” I get what he’s talking about. I understand the deep depths of what that line means. It might not sound like he’s saying much, but he’s saying a lot. He’s sort of saying everything.

Church, for a lot of folks in this country, is what makes any of this bullshit life worth it. I mean, let’s be honest, capitalism sucks. It sucks the life out of us. For so many of us, our backs are numb and our hands are freezing, in whatever metaphorical sense you want to take that. Your body literally hurts or your soul hurts or your spirit hurts. We are tired, all of us. Too tired to pick the fucking clothes up off the floor most nights.

In that world, church is an oasis for a lot of folks. Maybe that’s because of Jesus, but I think he’s honestly sort of superfluous to requirements. Church is refuge because it’s where your people are. I don’t go to church anymore, but there’s a part of me that still misses it. I’ve made a community of people in the town where I live around a different institutions and activities, but if I could know that I’d get to spend six hours a week with those people inside a building together and that there’d be singing and maybe puppets, too? Hell, yeah, I’d sign up for that in a heartbeat.

I don’t want to get all Marxist on you (oh, who are we kidding, I totally want to get all Marxist), but part of the way capitalism works is by making us too tired for the real pleasures of life. When we’re too tired to go to church—too tired to hang out with our friends or take a walk around our neighborhood or just, you know, be with people—what are we left with to comfort ourselves? Buying stuff. And stuff. And then buying more stuff. It’s the driving force of capitalism, our crushing urge to buy things we don’t need. Capitalism needs us to be too tired to go to church.

To say we’re too tired to go to church is to say we have been defeated. Demoralized. We have had our humanity stolen from us. We have given it away.

Maybe, like the narrator of the song speculates, there’s some reward waiting for us after this lifetime of toil. Maybe grinding our bodies down to nothing is what we’re put on earth to do. But maybe not. Maybe there is something more than free, a phrase I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.

I mean, in the United States, we go on and on about being free. It’s our cultural obsession. We want to be free from so much shit. We want to be free from having to ever think about the fucked-up legacy of our country’s history. We want to be free to make as much money as we want. We want to be free to carry guns and free to use the planet as both the fuel for our endless greed and the dumping ground for all our toys when we’ve grown tired of them. Free hasn’t added up to much for us so far. What would something more look like?

I don’t know. I don’t think the narrator in the song knows. Maybe Jason Isbell knows. He’s a very smart dude.

The inspiration for “Something More than Free,” came from Isbell’s dad, who said to him on the phone one day, “I’m too tired to go to church.” The song has its beginnings in a real moment, as all great art does.

I just love this man so much, I can’t even

We are, so many of us, too tired to go to church. We are beat down and it is so hard amid the constant noise of our culture to figure out what it is our bodies and souls and spirits need. But what if we weren’t too tired? What if community was at the center of our lives? What if we made it easy to find that belonging I had in church, wherever it might come from? What if we treated that as necessary? What if we started there, instead of with some idea of what it means to be free? What if we began working toward that something more? I don’t know what might happen, but maybe it’s time to find out.

I stopped myself there, friends, but I could go on and on about Jason Isbell and his songs, which have saved my life on so many occasions. I could tell you how in an interview once he said that he never wanted to be so famous that he couldn’t just go to the Target and how fucking wise that is. How I’ve held that wisdom close to me so often. I could tell you how my husband believes the line, “She didn’t want a better attitude,” might have been written just for me. I could tell you how many times I cried during the Trump presidency listening to “Hope the High Road.” I mean, fuck, there can’t be more of them than us, can there? I could tell you about so many great lines like, “In a room/ by myself/ Looks like I’m here with the guy who I judge worse than anyone else.” I could talk about how part of what makes Jason Isbell great is that he never forgets where he’s from, like last night when he called out the Alabama delegates.

But I won’t. I hope lots of folks go find out for themselves.

1. I was held and loved because I was white and middle class and (as far as anyone knew at the time) straight and I know not everyone has access to this feeling of being held and loved because of who they are and this is part of what sucks about so many churches.