Well, hello, old friend.  Yes, I thought that I was done with you — I thought you, this lens through which to view my life, were a song whose coda had been sung, and that I was okay with that finale.  Every musician knows that time will come, just as every athlete does — the moment when it is time, for whatever reason, to move on to something else, to let other dreams frame your days.

I thought I was living into that moment — until a recent Wednesday night in the North Carolina woods.

That night, and the day before, I had the honor of sitting at the feet of Dr. Catherine Meeks as part of the Haden Institute’s Summer Dream Seminar at the Kanuga Conference Center.  I expected to be challenged.  I expected to be stretched.  But I did not expect  to find the answer to a question that has been, for two years now, only a feeling.

However, that is what happened.  I finally understood the ask of the unformed nagging in my soul, and I got an answer, all at the same time. Thank you, Dr. Meeks, because you gave me back a connection to my voice, or, more specifically, gave me a compelling reason to use that voice again.

Singing, particularly performing as a singer, is a lot of work, for those who don’t know. It is not glamorous, it is not magical.  It requires a discipline of mind and body and spirit that is unrelenting. For a while, the effort is worth the perceived reward, or at least it was for me.  My reward, for many years, was a glimpse of the kind of wholeness that is possible as an incarnated being,  moments when I knew that my mind, body, and spirit were working together in the very best way they could.  You might say, and I often do, that it was learning to sing and performing that opened the doors to my life’s continuing pilgrimage, that journey to a closer relationship with the great All-That-Is.

A time came, however, when even though there were plenty of such moments in my life, they were not enough.  I no longer experienced that sense of fleeting completion.  Singing became work, and it became work without a purpose. It became an expectation of others, not an action that rose from that deeper place within.  And other work, other acts of creation and communication took up the call to wholeness in my life.

The ability to sing and touch people’s lives is not a God-given gift.  For those of us who consider ourselves to be carriers of a deep and abiding faith, that ability is more responsibility than gift.  And, even though the need to step away from that world was clear, even deafening sometimes, there was an equally strong need.  If not in the world of performance, then, what do I do with this ability to communicate?  What do I do with this voice? How do I use it?  Do I use it?  What does it mean to use it, not just to me, myself, but to others?  Most of all, why, why doesn’t it just go away?

I could barely articulate those questions before my time with Dr. Meeks, and, when I could, I had no answers to them, only tears.  And, for me, without answers, there was no reason to continue using a skill that took so much out of me.  Yes, I had my old answers, the ones that drove me further down the path of song the first time I was ready to hang it all up, but my old answers no longer worked. From my current view, those answers were tinged with ego and self-need, and I had to let them go–I could literally feel the complete disconnect between body and spirit when I did not. I stopped singing, except in church as a congregant, or on the rarest of occasions when I could be convinced to do so for a special event, or in the privacy of the recording studio.

And so, on a Wednesday night in western North Carolina, after watching scenes from the documentary Unchained Memories:  Readings from the Slave Narratives (2003) and hearing the soulful singing of Paul Robeson’s  “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” and “Deep River,” I heard these words from Dr. Meeks:  sing these songs, but know their source.  Know the desolation and the fear, and still, sing these songs.  Let the music, as Bernice Reagan says, make space.  Let the music make space for our shared humanity.  Let the music make space for hope. And my addition:  and then live into that space.  Walk into that space.  Invite your human sister, your human brother, into that space. Hold that space, that space in which anything is possible.  And listen, in your soul, to what their song has to say to you — about their human experience, and about yours.

These words cleared away the brush and opened up a space inside of me.  You see, this is the language of my new life.  As a spiritual director, our primary call is to open up that holy space space, to hold it at its edges, and to stand as witness to that space as the Spirit does her work.  Could it be that music is just another way to answer that same call?

As I sat there on that sticky evening, my mind and my heart raced at the thoughts that were flowing like water. Water, that’s right –beautiful, but forceful water.  And as the evening drew to a close, Dr. Meeks asked that we end in a song…just a chorus or two of “Wade in the Water,”  which the group had sung at opening worship that morning (um…which I had skipped in favor of a walk in the woods).  Honestly, over the years I have lost patience with that self-effacing moment when every one politely eschews the honor of starting the song in favor of another in the room (when of course, they really want to be asked to start it), and so, in my desire to get back to my room and think and write, I broke my own rule and just started singing.  Yes, I broke my rule of silence about singing in public, and the water flowed.

Given the events of the week, then, I was not surprised, then, when the recessional song for the last night’s closing worship was — can you guess it — “How Can I Keep From Singing.”  Correct; God is such a joker.  Not only did we sing it, but we sang it and sang it and sang it, as 200 people filed out of the beautiful chapel here at Kanuga and threw wisps of paper carrying the collective hopes and dreams of the group into a somewhat raging bonfire on a too hot night.  And that song, too, had such a different meaning that night.

Indeed, how can we keep from singing, when people who faced and still face degradation, desolation, and terror could find hope in their lamentation.  How can we keep from singing, when people who literally were motherless children, who literally crossed deep rivers and struggled to reach a city called Heaven, how can we not sing loudly in solidarity. And how can we not tell their story, because, as Dr. Meeks reminded me, it is my story, too, even if not my pain. If, as Jung believed, if as Emerson believed, if, as I believe, we are all part of one great imago Dei, one divine human consciousness, one Great Oversoul,  if as Jesus taught we are one Body, every act of oppression damages us all.  If Rachel Yehuda‘s research is correct, we all have much to confess and much to heal, as the living repositories of all the inhumanity that has come before us, done by and to our shared ancestors.

We talk so often about reconciliation and forgiveness.  Dr. Meeks called us all to the place we must go to first, before either of those great gifts are possible — and that is the place of listening, and understanding, for both self and those we call “other”.  She called us, not to appropriation, but to respect.  And so, I will sing, because in that moment of music, every cell of my being is listening to the message encapsulated in the words and the music of that song. In that moment of music, I can make and hold a space where we are all just one humanity, and where the Holy Spirit can do her work.  In that moment of music, I can hear and hopefully make space for others to hear, what Howard Thurman called “the genuine in me,”

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

 –Howard Thurman, Commencement Address,Spelman
College, 1980

Sing these songs, but know from where they have come — not just the history, but the human context.  Sing these songs, so that I can “go down in me and come up in you.”  Sing these songs, not to appropriate or explain or dismiss, but to feel.

I haven’t written the words yet, but, from this day forward, I will  begin any performance of this music, this music that grew out of that human degradation we call slavery, with an acknowledgement of the source of that music, and a prayer of gratitude that somewhere, some person had enough hope to reach for God from that dark place because, in so doing, they reached a little closer to the Spirit for all of us. I am humbled by their faith, and I have only begun to learn the lessons they have to teach me.  It seems that not all my days in music are behind me, after all.

And let all God’s people (and I do mean all), say Amen.