Some mornings have a soundtrack, whether or not you want it.

Right now, my morning walk falls in what I call the sunrise sweet spot. I step off in the dark, but, with any luck, at sometime during the walk, I see the passage from dark to light in the skies. And years of music, both church music and the secular classical world, mean that stored somewhere in that grey matter between my ears are a whole lot of tunes to feed my personal soundtrack.

Today was one of those We Shall Behold Him kind of moments. Those moments happen often as I live into the arrival of the fall season and as we experience the changes to the light brought by atmospheric residue from the western wild fires so far away. That’s right; I can thank the weather for the beautiful colors, but I can’t really blame the weather for the ear worm.

I loved singing that song back in my church choir days at the previous manifestation of Unity of Washington, when we sang music of all kinds, often without a lot of attention to the theology or the ways in which the theology was used by others. We sang songs by Dottie Rambo and The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir as often as we sang show tunes or music by Brahms or Vaughn-Williams. Our director, Michael Patterson (of blessed memory), believed that you had to sing all the music to reach all of the people at least some of the time. I still agree with that philosophy of programming, actually, but at the time it led me to some, shall we say, “risky” program choices? There was the time that a friend and I did a light song and dance number (as the musical offering during the service), complete with top hat and cane, to Maltby and Shire’s “One Step,” a song from the revue Starting Here, Starting Now (and there might have been a kick line and soft shoe in that performance, but we don’t have to talk about that).

You had to be there. It was moment in time. And from that one story you know why I have a little trouble fitting into the musical ethos of my current denomination.

But, back to this morning’s sky show and the text of We Shall Behold Him. In an attempt to satisfy that pesky ear worm, I went back and listened to the song in its original performance incarnation as offered by Sandi Patti. I have to say that I was shocked, for a lot of reasons, but most of all because, in all my years of singing this song, I had not realized its relationship to the whole “left behind” movement of 90’s evangelicalism. This new understanding came with more than a little discomfort about my sunrise soundtrack.

And yet, songs, like people, are often many different things to many different listeners. And I know that then, as now, that theology was not what drew those of us who sang it in that time and place. I’m pretty sure that I was not the only singer who edited out words like “glory” and “those who remain” in favor of “face-to-face” and “shall be changed in a moment,” since in that choir, we were ahead of the cultural curve with our skepticism about organized religion.

And so here I sit with so many dilemmas. It is our human nature to filter, to pick and choose what we see and hear, based on our teaching, our background, our world view and experience, and possibly, what we need to learn or can learn. We construct filters for our experiences just as much as does any search algorithm in our current, digital world. And yet, sometimes it does us (and the world) a lot of good if we pause and pick at those filters, and do the best we can to understand ourselves and whatever else we can understand.

Sometimes, it is all we can do. And most likely, when I see this kind of a sunrise, I will still hear the opening strains of We Shall Behold Him, with its words:

The sky shall unfold
Preparing His entrance
The stars shall applaud Him
With thunders of praise

I will hear these words and that great, sing-able, ascending line of music, and I won’t feel quite the discomfort. And I will feel the discomfort, too. And in the place where that discomfort sits lies the power to change.

Oh, and I may need to find that top hat again.