What Bluegrass-Loving Friars Taught Me About A Life Of Faith: Put First Things First

Fox News Op-Ed: What a Rollicking Band of Billboard Charting Bluegrass-Loving Friars Taught Me About a Life of Faith, by by Mike Kerrigan (Hunton Andrews Kurth, Charlotte, NC):

In August, my eyes welled with tears ... as I heard The Hillbilly Thomists perform live in concert for the first time. This sensational bluegrass band, which took its name from Southern Gothic fiction writer Flannery O’Connor’s delightful description of her own creative worldview, is comprised entirely of friars from the Order of Preachers.

For 50 weeks of the year, the clerics humbly live out their priestly vocations as, for instance, university chaplains, a parochial vicar and a bestselling author on theology. For the remaining two blessedly harmonious weeks, they tour. ...

Their folksy music is at once complex and lovely with lyrics rich in poetry and Scripture, but it’s their live performances that are joy incarnate. The Hillbilly Thomists’ love of God, of one other, and of music is unmistakable, an apt metaphor for the real presence that they so reverently adore. Turning Americana into sacred sound, they play with human hearts, light with — to borrow G.K. Chesterton’s definition of gratitude — happiness doubled by wonder. They are, in a very good word, winsome.

But why is this so? It’s too cute to chalk their staggering success up to Providence, which after all is not on stage with the band and keeping them in time when they perform. What about their music exudes this attractive happiness doubled by wonder? I think it is something maddeningly simple, a critical choice they’ve made in their lives, but equally maddeningly rare in the world, since so few people so unreservedly make the same choice.

The choice is to put first things first, and God is first. Talented musicians, all, The Hillbilly Thomists rejected the "music or ministry" dilemma, rightly, as a false choice. Rather, they chose to serve God as Dominican priests, first and always. By so doing, they found each other as brother musicians and became the band they could never have hoped to become had they put music first.

British writer C.S. Lewis explained this phenomenon succinctly. In a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths in 1951, Lewis wrote "put first things first and we get second things thrown in; put second things first and we lose both first and second things." Then, in his masterpiece "Mere Christianity," he made the same point with even more universality: "Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in: aim at earth and you will get neither." ...

The Hillbilly Thomists radiate such triumphant joy when they play. They’ve heeded the counsel of Matthew 6:33: "But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." They bear the fruits promised to those who put first things first. And if they can do it, so can I. 

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