Singing Along the Journey
Thoughts about faith and wholeness set to the soundtrack of life

The things our heart remembers most…

Last night in our Maundy Thursday service at Calvary Baptist Church, we sang a lot of music, but most poignant for me was the singing of Mozart's Ave Verum.  You see, Maundy Thursday is, well, my anniversary.  And it was Mozart's Ave Verum that we sang in 2006, the first night I attended a service at Calvary as a substitute singer.  And, it was on another Maundy Thursday that I made my decision to join, a decision that has changed so many things in my life. Maundy Thursday has always loomed large in my life of faith and church; as a child, my parents would always take me to the…
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Let the remembrance begin…

If you don't know me personally, or have only met me in the last year or so, you may not know that well, I am passionate about the Passion.  I am among those who believe that we as the modern church do not pay enough attention to the worshipfulness of Holy Week; too many people think that you have to be a church nerd to gather with your community to worship on Maundy Thursday, or to gather together to symbolically stand with the women at the foot of the Cross on Good Friday.  And so, five years ago, I decided to put my actions where my heart and soul stood, and,…
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Star-shaped pegs, round holes, and obsessions…

The Lenten season is never a particularly easy one for me...I tend to take the set-apart nature of this time very seriously, and conduct my own very intense version of the 12-step "ruthless moral inventory" to the very maximum.  Throw in a little of the type of soul-searching and relationship review that precedes the commemoration of Yom Kippur, and add a dash of my own personal intensity, and well, you can imagine what these weeks are like inside my spirit and my head.  I have always loved the Lenten season, despite its difficulties -- but not this year. Without burdening those of you who kindly read what I write with…
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There may be a future in music after all…

I had a rather tumultuous week, the details of which I will keep to myself for now, but I realized that, as someone who had spent much of the last year fixated, trying to put the star-shaped peg into the round hole, well, perhaps my eyes and my ears and my spirit have not been quite open enough, and I may have missed a few things.  Everything that I was going through made me think a lot about an exercise that we did at the John Bell seminar, where we had to fill in circles on a picture of a human head, each circle representing a different part of our…
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Tradition anchors us, but change is our birthright…

Let me repeat that statement one more time:  tradition anchors us, but change is our birthright. This sentence danced through my brain recently while I was doing my daily trudge on the elliptical trainer (you know, the 40 minute walk that goes no where fast?).   It is the summary that occurs to me after a lengthy discussion I was having with a friend, in response to his exclamation following my excitement about a Lenten study group at my church at the Stations of the Cross: "I don't know why Protestants are always trying to be so Catholic!"  I know a lot of people raised as Catholic, but now practicing Protestant. I…
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Authority, credentials, and the road less travelled…

Well, the Lenten season is, for me, off to a whizz-bang start.  Two Ash Wednesday services, five days of my personal spiritual discipline, a conversation with my spiritual director and one with my pastor (and let's not forget the total change in my relationship to all the water on the planet) and yes, my view of the world and my place in it is totally up-ended. I have a new, weird kind of clarity, and I realize that, when faced with that famous fork in the road, I have been looking right when I should have been looking left-- although not totally.  It has been more like I've been looking right,…
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Public vs. private, again…

As the basis of my personal Lenten practice, I am using a book called Lent with Evelyn Underhill, edited by G. P. Mellick Belshaw.   For those of you who don't know who Evelyn Underhill is, she was prolific writer on the topics of mysticism, spiritual thought and practice, and worship; and a practicing spiritual director of the early 20th century.  Her early major work,  Mysticism (1911) remains the basic text on the topic; but her writings are numerous.  The Lenten devotional has been created from the whole corpus of her work. I can remember reading her book Mysticism during my undergraduate work in Medieval studies:  I too, shared her interest…
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Ash Wednesday

Today is, just in case you don't know, Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.  Yes, I know that I am a Baptist, but I am a Baptist through  the filter of years of life worshiping in a variety of churches and studying faith from every angle.  And, well Ash Wednesday means something to me. And so, I've chosen today to let invite you into a little project I'm working on....it's birth has been hard and I'm sure that its infancy will not be without trauma, but just in case you are interested you can follow the link here.  Spend a minute, and let me know what you think. And…
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Thinking about Ash Wednesday…

I don't really have anything profound or revelatory to say today...but I'm thinking a lot about Ash Wednesday and Lent.  While looking through some files this morning, I found this poem which I had all but forgotten and it seemed to me to be particularly meaningful in this week as we enter this time of reflection and preparation.  I hope it is meaning for you as well. None other lamb Christina Rosetti, The Faces of the Deep (1892) None other Lamb, none other Name, None other hope in Heav'n or earth or sea, None other hiding place from guilt and shame, None beside Thee! My faith burns low, my hope burns low;…
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Living in baptism

I am a very, very fortunate person.  Through some twist of fate, it seems that a trip to the beach has, for the last few years, fallen on the week of my birthday.  So this year, again, I had the chance to celebrate the anniversary of my arrival on this little planet from a beach in Mexico. But this year was not by any imagination business as usual on our few days in the sun. This year, instead of sitting comfortably on my beach palapa bed  in the shade and watching the fun in the waves, I decided make a change.  I actually got in the water. Well, it wasn't really a decision -- not like deciding which book to…
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