Dolly Parton's Conversations with God

I had the thrill of meeting Dolly Parton at an annual United Way conference a number of years ago.

Dolly founded a wonderful non-profit called Imagination Library, which gives away children’s books for free to families who would otherwise not be able to afford them. She felt that by partnering with United Way, we could vastly increase Imagination Library’s reach and scope.

Dolly gave an incredible performance at that conference, and the crowd was truly in awe of her. Also, she held a series of meetings with United Way executives.

She asked many market research questions, and at the time I was Vice President of Research for United Way. I've got to tell you that, not only was Dolly a great singer/songwriter, but she was also a brilliant entrepreneur! Her questions were spot on, and she could size up things very quickly.

But not only that, you could sense very quickly that she was the real deal. She had a heart of gold. After going over the numbers, she started telling us that her family was so poor that her daddy had to pay the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal.

Dolly was one of 12 children. She told us about the one room cabin — with a dirt floor — that she grew up in. But then she looked at us and said, “But even back then we dreamed big and prayed big.”

I never got a chance to ask her about her spiritual roots. However, through reading and interviews I learned that she was the granddaughter of a Pentecostal preacher.

Nevertheless, her really big spiritual awakening was not in a formal church during a Sunday service. Instead, it happened in this empty and abandoned chapel that still had a poorly tuned piano in it. This empty church was where some of the locals went to drink, etc.

While in this dump of a former church, Dolly felt a deep spiritual hunger. She called out to the spirit of the universe. She felt that Spirit, in those grimy surroundings, responded to her. “I just felt like I, for the first time in my life, had truly found God,” she told an interviewer.

From this experience, Dolly believed that she was in a lifelong conversation with the Divine. In fact, she said that she believed that many of her songs and best decisions came out of direct conversations with God.

The New York Times reports that their obituary on Dolly Parton has been the most widely read obituary that they have ever published. Yes, the fact that The New York Times is now online as well as in print, does increase the number of readers. But I do think that so many people have read this New York Times obituary is a clear indication of how many hearts Dolly has touched!

While I am an avid reader and subscriber of The New York Times, I have felt that the newspaper does a poor job of covering religion and spirituality. However, this is dramatically changing, and for the better. In 2025 The New York Times started an online newsletter, entitled "Believing". I think this newsletter —which is available to even non-subscribers of the Times — is doing an excellent job of covering spirituality and religion under the editorship of Lauren Jackson.

Lauren has been very interested in people who believe that they are in direct communication with the Divine. Following the passing of Dolly — and given Dolly’s beliefs — Lauren had a conversation with Professor T.M. Luhrmann who is a leading anthropologist at Stanford University.

One of Luhrmann’s areas of expertise concerns people who believe that they have heard directly from God. Her studies include modern witches, charismatic Christians, shamans, etc.

Let me share my two key takeaways from Dr. Luhrmann’s observations:

First, she believes that all of us have had some experiences of this nature. “Everybody has mild versions of those events, like intuition or inspiration, or maybe a powerful dream. The more intense version is that the experience feels like it’s not me; it’s also not inside me, I heard it,” she adds.

The second key takeaway for me is that Dr. Luhrmann believes that there are both healthy and unhealthy forms of this phenomenon. Dolly’s verson, of course, was tremendously positive — and not just for her, but for all of us.

This second takeaway reminds me of a story that Ram Dass told during the last workshop I ever attended of his. He said that he went to visit a person who was in a mental clinic because this person believed that he was God (and he also exhibited some very strong antisocial behaviors).

When Ram Dass was about to leave, the man turned to him and said, “ I don’t get it. I say that I’m God and I get locked up in a mental ward. You say that you’re God, and you are the star of stage, screen, television, book publishing, and the Internet.”

Ram Dass responded to the man as follows: “Well friend, that is easy to explain. You say that only you are God. While I say we are all God, and we all have a divine spark inside of us.”

Probably 25 years ago, I would have looked at all of this “conversations with God stuff” as being a bunch of sheer woo woo. But now I strongly believe in a Spirit that deeply and passionately wants to communicate with us — and this communication can take so many different forms if we will just give it half a chance.

This stuff is not just for spiritual greats like Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Gandhi, Henry David Theroux, Myrtle Fillmore… or Dolly Parton! It is something that I believe we can all experience. As John Denver sang, “It is in every one of us to be wise.”

A book that really helped me in this process is one entitled: The Power of Two Way Prayer. It is written by Father Bill W who is an Episcopalian minister in Austin, Texas.

He says that he has given up questioning whether or not this stuff is coming from God or a higher and better part of his psyche. All he knows for sure is that wherever it’s coming from, it is some of the best advice he has ever gotten.

Also, before anybody says that this stuff is not Unity, let me tell you a true story. There were times when Myrtle Fillmore, the cofounder of Unity, put two chairs facing each other. In one of the chairs, Myrtle put a picture of Jesus. Then she sat down in the other chair and proceeded to have a talk with Jesus.

Was Myrtle really talking with Jesus or was she communicating with some higher part of her psyche? Or was it both? I’ll leave it to you to decide. But all I know is that from these conversations came some of the best advice I have ever heard.

There was a time when I did not take so-called “channeled literature” really seriously. But then one day it dawned on me, almost all of the great spiritual paths came out of such channeled conversations. Then I said to myself, “Do you really believe that God in the past was a chatty Cathy, and now in the modern era God has developed a permanent case of laryngitis?”

So many of us were deeply touched by Dolly Parton, and she did so much good in this world. I believe that her “conversations” with that “beyond which is within” played a key role in making her potential a reality.

Many blessings,

Rev. Rick