Stephen Foster, Job, the Canaanite woman—what do they have in common, and what can we learn from them? Pastor and storyteller Alex Joyner takes us deep into the lives of these three people, exploring anger, audacity, hope, and joy. Through it all, he poses the question: Why do we suffer? Hard Times Come Again No More is a six-week study that affirms the goodness of God, the reality of evil, and the wonder and tragedy of living in hard times.Alex Joyner is the author of Restless Hearts: Where Do I Go Now, God? and writes for the popular FaithLink adult studies and the online magazine Catapult. A published poet and photographer, he has served as campus minister at the University of Virginia and is now pastor of Franktown United Methodist Church on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Hard Times Come Again No More
Suffering and HopeBy Alex JoynerAbingdon Press
Copyright © 2010 The United Methodist Publishing House
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4267-0370-6Chapter One
Spirit (or Learning from Hard Times)
And my lament Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away. —Gerard Manley Hopkins
In the dark years of the American Civil War, the most popular composer of the day was living in poverty and relative obscurity in New York City. By 1862 he was alone in spare quarters, separated from his wife, who had left with their daughter to try and make it on her own as a telegraph operator in New Jersey. Years removed from his latest hit song, he began to drink heavily and to fall into despair.
Even though his songs continued to sell well and were part of the general culture, Stephen Foster did not see much revenue from them. Poor deals with publishers meant that he received royalties far below what he should have gotten, and to make ends meet he sold off future rights to his songs. Had he been living in the contemporary era, he would have made millions from his music. As it was, he was reduced to begging help from his brother, Morrison, to pay for laundry bills.
The words of songs such as "O Susannah," "Camptown Races," "My Old Kentucky Home," "Nelly Bly," and the wistful "Old Folks at Home" tripped easily from the lips of those he passed in the streets. The words spoke to a generation that hoped that somewhere in this constantly moving American society, with all its change and upheaval, was a place to call home. One song in particular seemed to take on special meaning as the war dragged on and soldiers left to fight, some never returning home. Written almost a decade before the war, Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More" found new life among soldier and civilian alike.
The song features a "pale, drooping maiden" weighed down by the evils that had come her way and that lingered "around my cabin door." With gentle defiance, the singer commands, "Hard Times, come again no more." By the fourth verse the command becomes a universal cry for every suffering person, wafting over the waves, heard upon the shore, and uttered at the side of the grave. The Civil War left many graves beside which mourners could sing about hard times.
While his songs and his name were well-known, Foster himself was not. He spent his days playing music in dingy bars. He was still writing songs, mostly in collaboration with George Cooper, another struggling musician. Cooper handled most of the lyrics, but both words and music fell far below the quality of Foster's early work. Some were simply drinking songs delighting in the momentary amnesia that drunkenness can bring:
Darkling sorrows take their flight In the wine's rich ruby light, And the hours are winged with pleasures While the bowl goes round.
There was even an ode to moustaches. Foster's mental state began to deteriorate to the point that he had trouble remembering the words to all his songs save one: "Hard Times."
So it might seem unusual that in the midst of this period of wandering through a struggle with alcohol, Foster turned up one night at a temperance reception in the Bowery. John Mahon, an Irish journalist living in the city, befriended Foster and invited him to come to the gathering. During the night the group began to sing, and Mahon asked Foster to take a turn. Mahon tells the story as this broken man sang out the words to the one song he clung to:
[H]e threw such pathos into his voice, especially when he came to the word: "There's a poor little maiden who weeps her life away," that there wasn't a dry eye in the room. Every voice was hushed. All crowded round him; and as he came to the chorus: "'Tis the song, 'tis the sigh of the weary / Hard times! hard times come again no more; / Many days you have lingered around my cabin-door — / Oh, hard times come again no more" there arose such a burst of melody from the untutored (musically, I mean) male and female voices present as I never heard before or since.
It was only after the singer sat down that the host finally introduced him as Stephen C. Foster, "the author and composer not only of that, but of some of the finest songs ever written." The gathering erupted in cheers with handkerchiefs waving in what Mahon referred to as a "perfect ovation." It was one of the few moments of public recognition for Foster and for the power of that song.
It may seem strange to begin a book about suffering and hope with such a bittersweet tale. Perhaps it's even stranger because Stephen Foster was no paragon of virtue or pious model of noble suffering. He was just one more fellow wanderer who found his way into hard times through the usual combination of personal failings, social ills, sins of omission and commission, and what we sometimes call bad luck. For Foster there would be no happy ending. Before the war ended or his circumstances changed, he died following a fall in his small room.
What Foster left, however, was a song—testimony to an enduring spirit within humanity that refuses to let hard times have the last word over our lives. In its stark images and haunting melody, "Hard Times Come Again No More" lets us feel the reality of suffering in this world, the poignancy of loss, and the longing for a new day, and then it emits a cry that pushes back against the darkness. It is no anthem of faith. It is a window on the wounded soul. And because we all know that wound to some degree, the song has the capacity to move us, like that Bowery audience, to tears and to sing its chorus at full throat. From those gathered in a Civil War–era reception to modern recordings by the likes of Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris, "Hard Times" endures as a heart cry.
The Value of Hard Times
Hard times used to be good for us. At least, that's how our popular culture often presented them. In the nineteenth century, Stephen Foster invited the comfortably placed audience that purchased his music to "pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears" because it was an edifying exercise. There was a certain nobility in struggle. Literature gives us many examples. Would we have seen Oliver Twist's character without the bleakness of the orphanage? Would Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird have stood so tall in the courtroom if he hadn't been a Depression-era widower with two small children? How could we know Celie from The Color Purple except through her empowering journey through racism and sexism?
When twenty-first-century Bruce Wayne (aka Batman) experiences hard times, it doesn't look the same. Wayne, one of the spate of superheroes flooding our movie screens these days, doesn't have to struggle with economic deprivation. He broods over what to do with his powers from the comfort of a mansion while advised by his wise butler. It is not what he lacks that defines him but what he is going to do with his abundance.
Maybe it's time to listen to "Hard Times" again. When the stock market tanked in the fall of 2008, it seemed to usher in a new post-abundance era. Lingering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed us the limits of military might to bring anything resembling peace. The ongoing horrors of genocidal conflicts in central Africa reveal the persistence of sexual violence and other acts of inhumanity. When we look into our own hearts, we know the dark shadows and the old wounds. We don't have to look far for hard times.
It is a peculiar term: hard times. It has a particular connection to economic struggles, and Stephen Foster wrote his song in 1854 during an economic downturn. But the term and the song were evocative enough that they lived on in very different kinds of hard times.
We think we would like to live in a world without hard times, but the truth is that pain can give us important information. Gabby Gingras is a young Minnesota child who doesn't feel pain. When she gets a shot at the doctor, she doesn't wince. When it's cold outside, she doesn't feel it. These may not seem like problems, but without the sensation of pain Gabby also faces life-threatening situations. When she is injured, she may not know it. When she began cutting teeth, she would mash down on her gums until she bled. As a result she had to have all her teeth pulled. She began to scratch her eyes without knowing that she was doing damage. Her left eye has been removed because of the injury.
Trish Gingras, Gabby's mother, says their family has learned that pain is an essential tutor: "Pain teaches. Pain protects. Pain can save you from a lot of bad things in life." Without pain, Trish's daughter has to spend her life under constant supervision, wearing goggles and other protective gear.
So what do we learn from the hard times of life? What will we learn by spending time in their company? Let's start by going to the ash heap.
The View from the Ash Heap
The biblical treatment of hard times gets its most extensive expression in the book of Job. It is an ancient story (actually, in its present form it may be two or more stories pulled together), and it steadfastly refuses to let easy answers to suffering suffice. There is a happy ending, but it is not particularly satisfying, and questions hover around the characters—including the character of God.
The opening scene threatens to turn Job into a mere pawn in some heavenly game. God makes a wager with the Satan, who is not the red devil with pointed tail that we sometimes imagine when we use that term, but rather the appointed investigator for the courts of heaven. The Satan wanders to and fro through the land seeking out the true hearts of humanity. In Job he finds a man he really wants to test.
God likes Job. God holds him up as a model of faithfulness and integrity. The Satan is unimpressed. He wonders what would happen if Job were not so blessed with children, cattle, and riches. So God strikes up a bargain and allows the Satan to wreak havoc on Job. Job's children die, his cattle and property are struck down, and his wealth is wiped out in an instant. In a second round of calamities, Job's very body is afflicted, and he breaks out in sores from his head to his feet. He goes to sit among the ashes of his former life and scrapes his lesions with the shard of a broken pot.
Job's wife comes to him and offers cold comfort: "Are you still hanging on to your integrity? Why don't you just curse God and die?"
To which Job replies, "Don't be foolish. Should we accept the good things from God and not accept the evil?"
The Bible says Job didn't sin during any of this, but that last question really sticks. When God sends us evil, how should we react? Does God send us evil? This line of inquiry dominates the rest of the book of Job. Job's friends come to be with him in his desolation, and for about a week they get it right. They simply sit there with him in silence. But then they start talking, and what they discuss is the question that haunted Stephen Foster and minds great and small from time immemorial: Why do hard times come, and how should we respond?
A Fate Worse than Fate
If the Job story ended there, that question might have a very disturbing answer: hard times come because there is something working actively against us. It is worse than fate or chance.
If bad things happen just because the universe is made in such a way that bad things are an inevitable part of life, that is scary but understandable. The world runs according to some grand physical laws that ensure that the system as a whole survives, but along the way individuals sometimes suffer loss and ruin, and all of us eventually suffer death. You can't complain about the moral injustice of a world created like this. You can't cry out against the death of an infant or the flooding of a nor'easter because those are just part of the grand scheme of things. If we did not believe in a God who cares for and is intimately involved in the universe, we would not have any reason to ask why hard times come. Hard times come because they are the way of the world.
Fate, too, is a little easier to swallow. Fate says that what occurs is in some sense foreordained. Hard times happen because they were determined beforehand, and the proper response to them is to accept your fate grimly and perhaps with some dignity. But fate places God far in the background; in fact, fate is itself a kind of god—an uncaring, unconcerned force that we can condemn with loud, righteous anger, but to what effect? No one ever said that fate cared about us.
Christians, however, do say that God cares about us, and so the question of suffering is one with which people who believe in a loving God must seriously struggle. We have no grounds to question the injustice of suffering if there is no such God, because without that God there is no moral agent at the center of the universe. If we did not believe, when we cry to the heavens, to whom would we call out?
Some may chide believers for their naïveté in holding on to a world where God still lives, but what would we be left with if we did not hold on, except a disenchanted world that offers no ultimate reconciliation, no comfort, and no redemption for the sufferer? Believers must struggle with a universe where suffering matters and where hard times point to the deepest questions of life and death.
The book of Job offers a chilling introduction to that struggle. It suggests that the world is not just a neutral sphere in which good and bad things happen and there is some kind of cosmic equilibrium to the whole thing. In Job's world there are agents afoot, wandering the earth here and yon, walking to and fro, seeking to do us ill. We could end up as the Satan's playthings.
God has intentions for us, just as God had intentions for Job. The story tells us that God seeks human beings who will be perfectly upright, fearing God and turning away from evil. But even those who live God-fearing, evil-despising lives are not immune from the forces that work against God's intentions. We will be battered, but the question is whether we can see, in the shadows and deaths of this life, the world God is bringing to birth.
Fingernail Faith
I admit that I am a fingernail Christian. There are times when I feel that I am holding on to my faith by my fingernails. I am ever grateful that my relationship with God is not determined by how well I am able to hold onto my theology on a given day, because there are many days when it is shaken. We could pick up the newspaper on any day and find something that would shake us to our core. In early 2010 it was an earthquake that devastated Haiti. In 2006 it was a story in Pennsylvania. In October of that year, Charles Carl Roberts, plagued by who-knows-what demons, went into an Amish schoolhouse, sent out the adults and the boys, and then shot the ten girls. It was an unspeakable act. It is the kind of thing that makes you reach for your children and pull them close.
It is also the kind of thing that, had it happened in another community with other people, might have played out very much like other American tragedies. There would have been televised funeral services with speakers from across the country. There would have been chain-link fences covered in ribbons, and teddy bears, and reporters trying to wrench every bit of anguish they could from the traumatized survivors.
That sort of spectacle was on the sidelines in this case, though, because the Amish are a different sort of community. Deeply religious, they have their own ways. The world watched from a distance as they began the burials. Thirty-four horse-drawn buggies made their way through the farmland for the first of the funerals. The funerals were held in homes, according to Amish tradition.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hard Times Come Again No Moreby Alex Joyner Copyright © 2010 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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