On Tuesday, in Nashville, Dolly Parton finished her climb. She was eighty years old, and the world has felt smaller every hour since.
I want to tell you why her passing belongs in this letter, on the last week of our #BeingUU summer. For nine Sundays we have walked the values of our faith, one at a time. Dolly Parton never sat in our sanctuary. And she spent seventy years living our whole series.
Start where we started, with worth. She was born one of twelve children in a one-bedroom cabin in the Tennessee mountains, a little girl the world had already filed under poor. Her mother sewed her a coat from a box of rags, stitching love into every patch, and schoolchildren laughed at it. Dolly wore it like royalty, wrote a song about it, and spent the rest of her life proving what that coat taught her: worth arrives with the person. Money never touches it.
She lived the free search too. Nobody handed Dolly Parton a self and made her swallow it. She built one, rhinestone by rhinestone, hymn by hymn, on her own terms, and she refused every voice that tried to tell her who she could or could not be. The industry wanted her smaller. The gatekeepers wanted her quieter. The sophisticated wanted her plainer. She outlasted them all, and her advice to the rest of us fit in ten words: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”
And she loved the margins, out loud, when it cost something. Her table had room for the choir loft and the honky-tonk, for the church lady and the drag queen, for every fan the respectable world sneered at, and she never once made anyone earn the seat. When parts of her own audience grumbled about who she welcomed, she kept welcoming. That is acceptance with a spine. That is the table of love, made longer.
Here is what moves me most, though, and it is the lesson of our final weeks together: her love kept receipts. She did more than sing about lifting people. Her Imagination Library, begun in honor of a father who never learned to read, has mailed hundreds of millions of free books to children around the world, one book, every month, arriving in mailboxes like a river that never runs dry. When wildfires took the homes of her mountain neighbors, she put monthly checks in their hands. When the world needed a vaccine, her quiet million helped fund the research. Love, in her hands, was never a feeling. It was a delivery schedule. It was accountability wearing sequins.
So yes, I will say the word. For me, Dolly Parton is a modern saint of our collective humanity. Ours is a faith without official halos, and that is exactly why we can recognize the real ones: a saint is a person whose love became so practical, so durable, and so wide that strangers were fed by it for generations. She reached the highest mountains a human being can climb, wealth, fame, adoration, every summit that usually ends a story, and she looked around from the top and chose to keep climbing, with her actions, her words, her talents, and her unshakable faith in what all of us are capable of becoming. That is what a continual search for awakening looks like when it never retires.
She wrote the most famous farewell song in American music, and this week the whole world is singing it back to her. But the truest way we will always love her is plainer than any song. We will keep her alive in how we live, in service to one another, and to everyone on the margins of our society, where her heart always went first.
So here is my charge to us, and I mean it as spiritual practice, four letters for the refrigerator door and the hard moments. WWDD. “What Would Dolly Do.” When the stranger arrives, when the scoffers laugh at somebody’s coat, when love needs to show up with its sleeves rolled up and its receipts in hand, ask it. And then, friends, do it.
This Sunday, at our Water Communion, her music will walk beside our waters, and her family invites any gifts in her memory to the Imagination Library, where her river keeps flowing.
Rest well, Dolly. We will take it from here.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero