Strange Things Happening Every Day
Message Given at Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, Portland ME, June 24, 2012
© 2012 Dawn Boyer. All Rights Reserved.
On April 30, 1945, two things happened:
Adolf Hitler killed himself, and
A woman named Sister Rosetta Tharpe did something no one else ever had: she topped the secular R&B charts with her gospel song “Strange Things Happening Every Day.”
Most of us know about one; most of us don’t know about the other. Many would say the two carry much different weights on the spectrum of history and importance. But they show us how evil and good, the profane and the sacred, exist side by side. They show us how seismic shifts occur, whether through a dramatic act like the suicide of a murderous tyrant, or the seemingly insignificant act of a simple song breaking through prejudicial barriers.
We look around today and shake our heads, and we quake and we worry about terrorism, the violence in Sudan or too many other places to list, the violence right here, the lost jobs and homes, the disease that strikes those who don’t deserve it, the rapid change that makes so many of us so fearful that we turn against one another and rip a divide so big it looks as if might not ever be overcome. Yet think for a moment of how afraid people were in 1945, when millions of Jews were slain, when our very souls and existence were called into question and so many countries fell, one by one, and the Great Depression still had millions in its grip. Things looked terrifyingly bleak back then.
But Hitler killed himself because his heinous jig was up. He went down, literally, in a blaze of shame. And a rockin’ gospel song took off like wildfire and gave people--of different faiths, of no faith--hope. Might made right. Good overcame evil. Strange things happened on that day.
We know who Hitler was. But who was this Rosetta Tharpe? Well, she was born in either 1915 or 1921 (she was dodgy about her age) in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. She is considered to be one of the top ten influential musicians in the 20th century, right up there with Louis Armstrong. She was a child prodigy at four years old. They called her “the singing and guitar-playing miracle” (Boyer, 154). As a child, she traveled the tent revival circuit with her mandolin-playing mama, who wanted to be a preacher but couldn’t because she was a woman. So, mother and daughter played religious music instead. Rosetta’s father wasn’t on the scene long, and in the late 1920s, she and her mother moved to Chicago.
As she grew, Rosetta was known as a “sweetly saved” young woman (Boyer, 155). Yet she couldn’t deny the influence of jazz and blues, which she heard on every street corner in Chicago. At the homes of friends, she played and sang both, but in public, she performed only gospel.
The licks Rosetta played as an adult were so sophisticated and difficult that most guitar players today still can’t touch her. And this was during a time when women just didn’t play guitar, folks. On top of that, she played an ELECTRIC guitar. Tharpe did the windmill thing decades before Chuck Berry or Pete Townsend tried it. They got their stuff from HER. Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Isaac Hayes, and Aretha Franklin all said she had a heavy influence on their music. The woman had some serious chops.
Here’s what Jerry Lee Lewis said about her: “I said, ‘Say man, there’s a woman who can sing some rock and roll.’ I mean, she’s singing religious music, but she is singing rock and roll. She’s ... shakin’ man ... She jumps it. She’s hitting that guitar, playing that guitar, and she is singing. I said, ‘Whoooo. Sister Rosetta Tharpe.’”
So why is she so obscure that even though she died in 1973, she didn’t even have a marked grave until 2009, when some people “rediscovered” her and held a benefit to raise money for the headstone?
Well, for one thing, her spirit was so big that it broke through walls and refused to be categorized. We all have our different sides, and in addition to loving the blues, Rosetta was flamboyant, dressing more like a nightclub torch singer than a religious inspiration. Those were big no-no’s in her world back then. Did she let that stop her? No. Her high-octane energy couldn’t be harnessed. So she combined the two styles into something so powerful that she filled football and baseball stadiums when she performed, something previously unheard of for a gospel singer.
“There’s something in the gospel blues that’s so deep the world can’t stand it,” Rosetta said. The black Pentecostals surely couldn’t. They were scandalized that she played guitar when a proper church instrument was piano, and horrified that she dared to cross into the secular pop world with her music. Many turned their backs on her. What does that say about religion? How does that fit with “love thy neighbor as thyself” or “judge not lest ye be judged”? What does it say that the same strange thing goes on today.
In the 1930s, Rosetta moved to Harlem and got married to William Thorpe (who later changed his name to Tharpe). He seemed to understand her independent and free spirit at first, but then resorted to criticizing her for not wearing a hat (a holy horror in the black church back then), and began to try to exert control in other ways. The marriage did not last.
In New York, and hugely popular, she performed at the Cotton Club and Carnegie Hall with the likes of Cab Calloway and Benny Goodman, which only added to the consternation of her religious audience.
Yet her secular audience continued to grow. Soon, she was heard on many a juke box, turntable, and even victrola (how many remember those?) throughout the nation. Her sound was boogie woogie laced with blues. She had learned that upbeat tempos were the ones that appealed, and her rapid guitar playing outshone even the best male players. In fact, she was so popular that she got married, for the third time, in 1952, before a baseball stadium full of 25,000 people in Washington, D.C., and then played a concert in her wedding dress. She even charged admission to the wedding. Scandalous! But that’s the kind of free-spirited woman she was.
Rosetta wrote “Strange Things Happening Every Day” because she was tired of being looked down upon for her musical choices. It was a not-so-subtle jab at the hypocrites in the church who talked one way and acted another.
Sound familiar?
The song took off. Rosetta straddled the secular—some would say profane--and the sacred, because, let’s face, it, that’s how we all live. Only she was the first one in gospel who openly dared to do it. She combined the two styles into one, and that style became known as rock and roll. In fact, “Strange Things Happening Everyday” is considered by most musicologists to be the first rock and roll song ever recorded. The profane influenced the sacred, or the sacred influenced the profane. Who knows which was which, and really, does it matter? The important thing is that her song reached all those people precisely because it straddled both worlds.
It also raises an important question. What on earth are we doing here?
I mean that both ways:
What are we doing here? As in, why do we exist?
and
What are we DOING here? As in, what actions do we take every day? What are we doing, to or with one another, to ourselves, to our community, to our planet?
We can’t answer the first part of the question very easily. In some ways, it will forever be a mystery, and that’s OK. It’s enlightening, sometimes troubling to practice to the best of our abilities a way of life that will us feeling pretty good about the way we spent our time here before we have to part. The Bible, the Koran, the Talmud--insert holy document of any religion here—they never get old, because their sole purpose is to try to map out why we’re here and how we might live in as enlightened and moral a way as possible. Yet even today, we continue to struggle with the same questions and answers as those who wrote those documents some 2000 years or more before us.
That’s interesting, when you consider how much more scientific “knowledge” we’ve acquired since then.
The second part of the question, what are we DOING here, that can be answered …. If we’re willing to take a look. What we do and say in the minutes of our days, the choices we make, the paths we choose, yes, those add up to our having a big impact on our world, much as we may think otherwise. Rosetta chose to go with what she loved, even though it meant being rebuked and scorned for it. And she, one woman, had a huge impact on music in this country.
So, what are you doing here?
Chances are, right this minute, you’ve come looking for some kind of answer, or relief, or connection or validation to give you strength, make you feel inspired or even just OK about entering the coming week. Or maybe you’re here to fulfill an obligation that you’ve made to someone. Whatever the reason, with so much uncertainty and ugliness going on in the world, we need continual and constant reminders that fighting the good fight, nurturing our spiritual side, doing the right thing, is the way to go. And we need to be reminded that we have the power to make a difference. The bombardment of all the crap going on in this world, in our country, makes it all too easy to think we and our actions just don’t matter.
But they do. They really do.
The atrocious acts we inflict on others are strange things. But so are miracles, large and small. What strange thing can you, will you make happen? What miracle can you help bring about? How will you do it? Do you think of this every day? Chances are, you don’t. Why? Because, if you’re like most of us, you get swept up in the day-to-day craziness. The busy-ness.
It’s clever, the way we’ve been indoctrinated to think we have to be busy every second, plugged into our iPhones or Androids or Blackberries or laptops, constantly looking at them, constantly connected, yet disconnected. When was the last time you sat down and actually had a meaningful, face-to-face conversation, oh, say, for 30 minutes or more, without once checking your device?
We are not meant to go, go, go. We are part of the natural cycle of the world. That means, as Ecclesiastes tells us, there is a time to go, and a time to stop. Slow down, reflect. Not just once in a while. Not just during vacation. Because when you slow down, you have time to see and to “get” the strange things. Every day.
Rosetta told us that even if you can never fully understand God's will (like, why do good people get cancer?), it can still be experienced and accepted through the mystery of miracles and salvation.
Faith keeps us from deteriorating into a mess of base desire and the worst of our human nature—greed, self-righteousness, pride, sloth, all the stuff that seems to be overtaking our society lately and harms the overall good--but so does reason. We need both. When we damn one in order for the other to exist, we—and our society--are in deep trouble, on our way toward the “harmonious death” that William Durant speaks of. Rosetta suffered the prejudice and shunning of her religious community because she dared to embrace a different way of understanding and worship through music. Yet she kept going.
Eventually, newer, younger people followed her blazing trail and surpassed her. She toured Europe for a while, where they still appreciated her. She came back to the U.S. and was about to record a new album, but a blood clot in her brain led to a stroke, and diabetes led to one leg being amputated. Her last concert was performed from a wheelchair, and then, in 1973, she suffered a final stroke that ended her life. She was either 58 or 52.
Her husband refused to put up money for a headstone to mark her grave. I’m sure glad one got put up eventually. On it is an epitaph written by her good friend Roxie Moore: "She would sing until you cried and then she would sing until you danced for joy. She helped to keep the church alive and the saints rejoicing."
I think we need to pay attention to what Rosetta had to say. And to sing, loudly, in her honor, in whatever way touches us and others, because you know what? Rosetta was right about the gospel blues reaching down deep. We now have proof of how it literally changes our minds. Music releases the brain chemical dopamine, which makes us feel pretty darned good. Robert Zatorre, professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Montreal Neurological Institute, says, “Music is strongly associated with the brain's reward system. It's the part of the brain that tells us if things are valuable, or important or relevant to survival.” Dr. Charles Limb, associate professor of head and neck surgery at Johns Hopkins University, says that music “allows you to think in a way that you used to not think, and it also trains a lot of other cognitive facilities that have nothing to do with music." In other words, we learn to think differently, and in so doing, become better people.
Studies also show that when people move together to a beat, they're more likely to cooperate with each other in nonmusical tasks than if they're not in synch. If Rosetta had anything, she had a beat.
And people sure moved with her.
When music reaches down deep and stirs the soul and makes you want to be better, it’s good. And gospel music, well it, reaches down so deep that you almost can’t stand it because it matters that much. Ain’t no one in a place to judge it. So let’s sing our way out of our troubles, and hew right to the line. Cause there are strange things happening, every darned day.
Sources:
Boyer, Horace Clarence. The Golden Age of Gospel. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 153-158.
Carpenter, Bil. Uncloudy Days: The Gospel Music Encyclopedia. (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2005), 405-407.
Landau, Elizabeth. “Music: It's in your head, changing your brain.” CNN Health, May 28, 2012. (http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/26/health/mental-health/music-brain-science/index.html)
Rose, Joel. “Etched in Stone at Last.” NPR Music, March 20, 2009. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102167126)
Thaut, Michael, Ph.D., and McIntosh, Gerald, M.D. “How Music Helps to Heal the Injured Brain: Therapeutic Use Crescendos Thanks to Advances in Brain Science.” The Dana Foundation: Cerebrum, March 24, 2010. (http://www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=26122)
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Monday, August 08, 2011
How Brief Despair
Message Given at Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, Portland, Maine, on August 7, 2011
© 2011 Dawn Boyer. All Rights Reserved.
A few years back, I listened to a UCC preacher give a sermon about her first ministry. She was installed, fresh out of divinity school, in a poor neighborhood in Harlem in the late 1980s. She was 20-something. From New England. And white, in every way.
One day, she officiated at her first funeral. As she began to speak, she heard a sound. It started low, and she wondered at first if it might be a furnace kicking in from the bowels of the building. But then it began to build. It dawned on her that she was hearing a human voice. A moaning voice, a low and hurting gravelly voice, getting louder in its intensity and pain, until it became a wail. One by one, other moaning voices joined in. She stood, frozen, not knowing what to do.
I’ll come back to that in a bit. But for now, let’s switch scenes. Picture a generically pleasant, blandly pretentious hotel lobby in western NH. All shades of beige, pretty granite counters, nice polished ceramic tile on the floors. Me sitting in that lobby with my mother late at night this past December, four days after Christmas. Exhausted. Afraid. Completely depleted.
We’d spent most of the day at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, waiting to hear news about my husband’s surgery to remove a brain tumor. The neurosurgeon was quiet but upbeat when he finally met with me. The surgery itself was a success. My husband, Brett, would recover nicely. But the surgeon’s last five words: “be prepared for a malignancy,” repeated themselves over and over in my mind, and left me with a cold knot of dread in my gut. In the hotel lobby, where I tried to eat a sandwich before going to my room for the night, my mother said, “I wish I could take your pain away. But I know this is your journey.”
She was wiser than I knew at that moment. I’ve been reading a wonderful book by Jonathan Haidt called The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. There is a chapter in it called “The Uses of Adversity.” I recommend it for anyone who encounters despair. That would, I think it’s safe to say, mean pretty much all of us.
It begins with a scenario. If you had a pair of glasses that could read your child’s future and a pencil to rewrite it, would you choose to wipe out all the bad things so your child has an easy, content life with no struggle? Probably, if you’re like most. But be very careful of wishing for that, for without struggle and adversity, we tend to become complacent and weak. It is only through tough stuff that we grow, become stronger, enrich our character, and move toward wisdom. A sucky truth? Perhaps. But it’s true nonetheless, and no matter how we may wish it different, that’s the way it is.
When my mother spoke her words, I wanted to moan and wail like that woman in Harlem. I didn’t want this journey. I had, I felt, been on enough journeys. I didn’t know for sure what we would encounter, but I had a hunch. And I didn’t like it.
I stumbled my way through Brett’s hospital stay and then his recovery at home, mostly on a numb kind of adrenaline speckled with a few moments of calm and clarity and a ferocious appetite for gaining whatever knowledge about his disease that I could. I took care of him the best I knew how.
The prognosis wasn’t what we wanted to hear. Grade III Anaplastic Astrocytoma. Definitely malignant, though slow growing. Median survival rate: 3 years with treatment. Not the worst kind of brain tumor, but not the best, either.
Somehow, through blind faith and a stubborn insistence on finding grace and hope, and sometimes in spite of myself, I was able to gain the strength I needed to be there for Brett, who, I know, was even more scared than I. Only he can tell his story; I will try to tell mine. I watched him progress from being unable to talk or move his right arm and leg after surgery to gaining back his speech and mobility after a few weeks. Although his speech and fine motor skills still aren’t where he’d like them to be, and he has recently had a setback due to a seizure, it has been a wondrous thing to watch his brain literally rewire itself to bring him back to what is known in the field as “the new normal.”
It has also been hard as hell sometimes, both to watch the frustration and despair he goes through during the ups and downs of his treatment and recovery, and to go through my own. There are no words to describe your life when it is hijacked by cancer.
So I try to gain solace and some kind of footing any way I can. I have that choice. I choose to lean on my incredibly wonderful network of friends and family for support; I choose to wake up each day thinking about what adventures may await and what I can give of myself to help others; I choose to take care of my health by eating well, exercising, and meditating; I choose to get sustenance from my three passions: writing, singing, and painting; I choose to deepen my spiritual practice; I choose to read and listen to books like The Happiness Hypothesis to help further my understanding of life and the human condition.
Some days are of course better than others. Some days, as I recently put on my Facebook status, “you gotta cry. A lot. I’m just sayin.” And once the crying is done, the cleansing can begin. You have to let the cleansing happen, and the cleansing can’t happen without the crying.
Most religions have in common the wisdom of seeing the value in suffering, so there must be something to it. Christians believe Jesus suffered and died on the cross to redeem our sins. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans (5:3-4) said, “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” One of the first truths of Buddhism is that all of life is suffering and suffering is caused by attachments to worldly goods. Suffering is something that can be transcended, but not avoided. The Dalai Lama said, “The person who has had more experience of hardships can stand more firmly in the face of problems than the person who has never experienced suffering. From this angle, then, some suffering can be a good lesson for life.” Hinduism espouses that individuals’ suffering should be placed in the broader context of a cosmic cycle of birth, life, destruction, and rebirth. Islam, which means “submission,” teaches Muslims that enduring pain or loss is a way of submitting to God—it is a way to strengthen one’s faith, as pain often leads to repentance and good deeds. Jews believe that deep suffering must be good even if mysterious, and that God suffers along with the sufferer. Much importance is placed on working to help those in need because repairing the world will help alleviate undeserved suffering.
When adversity strikes, we all have a question to answer. We can go in kicking and screaming, stubborn and recalcitrant, mad as hell, despondent, whatever—most of us don’t want to have to answer.
But nonetheless, the question remains.
Are you going to rise to the occasion, or sink into despair?
According to The Happiness Hypothesis, there are 3 benefits to rising. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to see them all.
1. Adversity reveals your hidden abilities, and seeing these abilities changes how you see yourself. You realize you have more strength than you gave yourself credit for. You gain confidence to face new challenges—the world isn’t as scary anymore. It’s almost as if you get a vaccine against future stress, which ain’t so bad. You recover more quickly each time adversity rises, because you know you can cope. In my own case, I was amazed at the strength I found that I didn’t know I had. You should see me go on a rampage when I have to fight to get Brett the health care he needs. This week, I asked for help—something that used to be excruciating for me to do--and found a way to rent an artist’s studio so I could have a space to paint and write. A year ago, I didn’t allow myself to think that possible. Now, it’s just something I have to do. Cancer has struck our lives and we still manage to laugh and be happy. Am I going to sweat the small stuff or let fear stop me from living fully? I don’t think so.
2. Adversity strengthens relationships and opens people’s hearts to one another. It also acts as a great filter, separating fair-weather friends from true. You become more loving and less consumed with pettiness. I have been dumbfounded by gratitude for the even deeper love I feel for Brett since all this happened. It is fierce yet yielding. It is a thing to behold. I have been touched and astounded by how some friends are steadfastly there whenever I need them, sometimes before I realize I do. I have also been hurt by a couple who have turned away. But I don’t let it consume me. I understand that they have their own issues and reasons for not being able to cope. I am able to acknowledge my hurt, release it, and be compassionate toward them. It’s much easier to forgive and let go now. And frankly, I don’t have the time or energy to deal with petty things these days, which is a relief. I’m also able to be vulnerable and honest in a way I found difficult before December. It’s almost as if I’ve reached another plane, where I’m able to watch with loving detachment and feel peace. There’s a wonderful freedom in that.
3. Adversity changes our priorities and the way we look at life. We tend to more fully, in the great singer/songwriter Warren Zevon’s words, “enjoy every sandwich.” We’ve all heard stories—both in fairy tales and in real life--of those who’ve had conversions based on a traumatic experience. A classic example is that of John Newton, British captain of a slave ship. When his ship was almost lost during a savage, raging storm, he dropped to his knees and vowed he would give up the slave trade and devote his life to God. He wrote the words to “Amazing Grace” that night, and used the melody he heard the slaves singing from below. That was his last voyage to transport slaves, and he eventually became a minister. He also left a great legacy with that song. Think of how many lives it has touched.
Brett and I both find ourselves saying to others that his cancer diagnosis was a gift in many ways. I don’t care how trite it sounds; it’s true. It has been both a wake-up call and a turning point. It forces us not to fall into complacency; it makes us appreciate what each and every day brings. I now pursue my passions, well, with passion. I no longer think, “someday this, someday that.” I think, “I’d better do it now before it’s too late.” So I do. I think even more about how I can use my gifts and the compassion I’ve gained from our trials to help others; that is what drives me now. We don’t take life for granted anymore. I’m not as afraid to take chances anymore, either. If I fail, so what? I get to grow. That I now know in a way I didn’t before.
Is it possible that despair can actually lead to happiness? Well, yes. Actually, it might be the ONLY way to reach happiness, the true kind anyway. We get knocked off our feet. The blinders come off. We’re forced to stand up, look around, and say, in Dorothy Parker’s words, “What fresh hell is this?” We have a chance to clean ourselves up and figure out how to get out of there. We realize we can make some changes we wouldn’t have if our lives weren’t turned upside down.
And then we have to take the step. There’s a window of time—a few weeks or months after a trauma--in which you need to start walking if you want the change to stick. You can’t just make a resolution that you’ll live a different life. You have to live it. Things like making more money or getting a promotion don’t mean as much anymore. But loving and helping others, building relationships, enjoying the beauty nature brings—those are the things that grab us and hold our attention. Suddenly, we realize that maybe we want our life to be a good story, one that inspires others.
But we can’t have a good life story without tension, conflict, and vicissitude, a fancy word for life’s ups and downs. It’s not interesting otherwise. And the reason we listen to or read stories is because we want to find out: How’d she make it through? How’d he survive it all? We all crave those answers. We all need to believe. And there’s nothing like trauma to make you realize you might have a story that’s not much worth telling if you don’t start making some changes. Trauma is your chance to rebuild the parts of your life story that you never could have torn down voluntarily.
Which way do you want to go?
Is your story a boring one of striving to get material things and being so consumed with your goals and yourself that you do little loving or thinking, then realize on your death bed your life didn’t amount to much?
Is it one that contains what’s known as a “contamination sequence,” where good things go bad, the world is bad, you’re bad, and you end up with a negative tape playing over and over, leading you into a depressed life that depresses others in it?
Or is it one of transformation and inspiration? Like the Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed or Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., do you come through suffering to some sort of enlightenment that you can share with others, either through words or example, or both? How do you want others to think of you? How do you want to think of yourself?
If you like the idea of the last story, there’s no way around it: you’re going to have to go through the tough stuff. Else, no one will believe anything you have to say.
In my life story, the pain and the fear and the horrible ripples of cancer’s wake are still there. I would never deny them. But rather than allow them to destroy, I am the alchemist: I can transform cancer’s ugliness into a thing of beauty. I have that God-given power, and so do you. No matter how awful or ugly something is, there is the possibility of seeing its other side. The beauty of our DNA is that we are hard-wired to adapt. We ALWAYS have a choice. Always. I choose a well lived and well loved life. A rich, grace-filled, stumbling, fumbling, loving, bumpy, beautiful life.
Now, back to that young UCC minister and the moaning in her church. She was wise enough to just let the moaning be, and eventually, it subsided. Later, while walking in the funeral procession next to the woman who started it all, the minister asked what in the world was going on. The woman told her that without the moaning, the despair would swallow her whole. It was a cultural thing that reached back to slavery--the moaning and wailing allowed her and others to release and make it through.
Next time you feel the stealthy, seductive tugging of despair, try moaning. Or wailing. Or writing. Or singing a gospel song. Or whatever else works for you to make sense of it, because making sense of it is what will help you through. Ask yourself one crucial question, and do your best to answer it: What good can I make from this? And then get on with creating the story you want left behind.
Sources:
Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
Leventry, Ellen. “Why Bad Things Happen: How Different Religions View the Reasons for Undeserved Human Suffering.” http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2005/01/Why-Bad-Things-Happen.aspx
© 2011 Dawn Boyer. All Rights Reserved.
A few years back, I listened to a UCC preacher give a sermon about her first ministry. She was installed, fresh out of divinity school, in a poor neighborhood in Harlem in the late 1980s. She was 20-something. From New England. And white, in every way.
One day, she officiated at her first funeral. As she began to speak, she heard a sound. It started low, and she wondered at first if it might be a furnace kicking in from the bowels of the building. But then it began to build. It dawned on her that she was hearing a human voice. A moaning voice, a low and hurting gravelly voice, getting louder in its intensity and pain, until it became a wail. One by one, other moaning voices joined in. She stood, frozen, not knowing what to do.
I’ll come back to that in a bit. But for now, let’s switch scenes. Picture a generically pleasant, blandly pretentious hotel lobby in western NH. All shades of beige, pretty granite counters, nice polished ceramic tile on the floors. Me sitting in that lobby with my mother late at night this past December, four days after Christmas. Exhausted. Afraid. Completely depleted.
We’d spent most of the day at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, waiting to hear news about my husband’s surgery to remove a brain tumor. The neurosurgeon was quiet but upbeat when he finally met with me. The surgery itself was a success. My husband, Brett, would recover nicely. But the surgeon’s last five words: “be prepared for a malignancy,” repeated themselves over and over in my mind, and left me with a cold knot of dread in my gut. In the hotel lobby, where I tried to eat a sandwich before going to my room for the night, my mother said, “I wish I could take your pain away. But I know this is your journey.”
She was wiser than I knew at that moment. I’ve been reading a wonderful book by Jonathan Haidt called The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. There is a chapter in it called “The Uses of Adversity.” I recommend it for anyone who encounters despair. That would, I think it’s safe to say, mean pretty much all of us.
It begins with a scenario. If you had a pair of glasses that could read your child’s future and a pencil to rewrite it, would you choose to wipe out all the bad things so your child has an easy, content life with no struggle? Probably, if you’re like most. But be very careful of wishing for that, for without struggle and adversity, we tend to become complacent and weak. It is only through tough stuff that we grow, become stronger, enrich our character, and move toward wisdom. A sucky truth? Perhaps. But it’s true nonetheless, and no matter how we may wish it different, that’s the way it is.
When my mother spoke her words, I wanted to moan and wail like that woman in Harlem. I didn’t want this journey. I had, I felt, been on enough journeys. I didn’t know for sure what we would encounter, but I had a hunch. And I didn’t like it.
I stumbled my way through Brett’s hospital stay and then his recovery at home, mostly on a numb kind of adrenaline speckled with a few moments of calm and clarity and a ferocious appetite for gaining whatever knowledge about his disease that I could. I took care of him the best I knew how.
The prognosis wasn’t what we wanted to hear. Grade III Anaplastic Astrocytoma. Definitely malignant, though slow growing. Median survival rate: 3 years with treatment. Not the worst kind of brain tumor, but not the best, either.
Somehow, through blind faith and a stubborn insistence on finding grace and hope, and sometimes in spite of myself, I was able to gain the strength I needed to be there for Brett, who, I know, was even more scared than I. Only he can tell his story; I will try to tell mine. I watched him progress from being unable to talk or move his right arm and leg after surgery to gaining back his speech and mobility after a few weeks. Although his speech and fine motor skills still aren’t where he’d like them to be, and he has recently had a setback due to a seizure, it has been a wondrous thing to watch his brain literally rewire itself to bring him back to what is known in the field as “the new normal.”
It has also been hard as hell sometimes, both to watch the frustration and despair he goes through during the ups and downs of his treatment and recovery, and to go through my own. There are no words to describe your life when it is hijacked by cancer.
So I try to gain solace and some kind of footing any way I can. I have that choice. I choose to lean on my incredibly wonderful network of friends and family for support; I choose to wake up each day thinking about what adventures may await and what I can give of myself to help others; I choose to take care of my health by eating well, exercising, and meditating; I choose to get sustenance from my three passions: writing, singing, and painting; I choose to deepen my spiritual practice; I choose to read and listen to books like The Happiness Hypothesis to help further my understanding of life and the human condition.
Some days are of course better than others. Some days, as I recently put on my Facebook status, “you gotta cry. A lot. I’m just sayin.” And once the crying is done, the cleansing can begin. You have to let the cleansing happen, and the cleansing can’t happen without the crying.
Most religions have in common the wisdom of seeing the value in suffering, so there must be something to it. Christians believe Jesus suffered and died on the cross to redeem our sins. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans (5:3-4) said, “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” One of the first truths of Buddhism is that all of life is suffering and suffering is caused by attachments to worldly goods. Suffering is something that can be transcended, but not avoided. The Dalai Lama said, “The person who has had more experience of hardships can stand more firmly in the face of problems than the person who has never experienced suffering. From this angle, then, some suffering can be a good lesson for life.” Hinduism espouses that individuals’ suffering should be placed in the broader context of a cosmic cycle of birth, life, destruction, and rebirth. Islam, which means “submission,” teaches Muslims that enduring pain or loss is a way of submitting to God—it is a way to strengthen one’s faith, as pain often leads to repentance and good deeds. Jews believe that deep suffering must be good even if mysterious, and that God suffers along with the sufferer. Much importance is placed on working to help those in need because repairing the world will help alleviate undeserved suffering.
When adversity strikes, we all have a question to answer. We can go in kicking and screaming, stubborn and recalcitrant, mad as hell, despondent, whatever—most of us don’t want to have to answer.
But nonetheless, the question remains.
Are you going to rise to the occasion, or sink into despair?
According to The Happiness Hypothesis, there are 3 benefits to rising. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to see them all.
1. Adversity reveals your hidden abilities, and seeing these abilities changes how you see yourself. You realize you have more strength than you gave yourself credit for. You gain confidence to face new challenges—the world isn’t as scary anymore. It’s almost as if you get a vaccine against future stress, which ain’t so bad. You recover more quickly each time adversity rises, because you know you can cope. In my own case, I was amazed at the strength I found that I didn’t know I had. You should see me go on a rampage when I have to fight to get Brett the health care he needs. This week, I asked for help—something that used to be excruciating for me to do--and found a way to rent an artist’s studio so I could have a space to paint and write. A year ago, I didn’t allow myself to think that possible. Now, it’s just something I have to do. Cancer has struck our lives and we still manage to laugh and be happy. Am I going to sweat the small stuff or let fear stop me from living fully? I don’t think so.
2. Adversity strengthens relationships and opens people’s hearts to one another. It also acts as a great filter, separating fair-weather friends from true. You become more loving and less consumed with pettiness. I have been dumbfounded by gratitude for the even deeper love I feel for Brett since all this happened. It is fierce yet yielding. It is a thing to behold. I have been touched and astounded by how some friends are steadfastly there whenever I need them, sometimes before I realize I do. I have also been hurt by a couple who have turned away. But I don’t let it consume me. I understand that they have their own issues and reasons for not being able to cope. I am able to acknowledge my hurt, release it, and be compassionate toward them. It’s much easier to forgive and let go now. And frankly, I don’t have the time or energy to deal with petty things these days, which is a relief. I’m also able to be vulnerable and honest in a way I found difficult before December. It’s almost as if I’ve reached another plane, where I’m able to watch with loving detachment and feel peace. There’s a wonderful freedom in that.
3. Adversity changes our priorities and the way we look at life. We tend to more fully, in the great singer/songwriter Warren Zevon’s words, “enjoy every sandwich.” We’ve all heard stories—both in fairy tales and in real life--of those who’ve had conversions based on a traumatic experience. A classic example is that of John Newton, British captain of a slave ship. When his ship was almost lost during a savage, raging storm, he dropped to his knees and vowed he would give up the slave trade and devote his life to God. He wrote the words to “Amazing Grace” that night, and used the melody he heard the slaves singing from below. That was his last voyage to transport slaves, and he eventually became a minister. He also left a great legacy with that song. Think of how many lives it has touched.
Brett and I both find ourselves saying to others that his cancer diagnosis was a gift in many ways. I don’t care how trite it sounds; it’s true. It has been both a wake-up call and a turning point. It forces us not to fall into complacency; it makes us appreciate what each and every day brings. I now pursue my passions, well, with passion. I no longer think, “someday this, someday that.” I think, “I’d better do it now before it’s too late.” So I do. I think even more about how I can use my gifts and the compassion I’ve gained from our trials to help others; that is what drives me now. We don’t take life for granted anymore. I’m not as afraid to take chances anymore, either. If I fail, so what? I get to grow. That I now know in a way I didn’t before.
Is it possible that despair can actually lead to happiness? Well, yes. Actually, it might be the ONLY way to reach happiness, the true kind anyway. We get knocked off our feet. The blinders come off. We’re forced to stand up, look around, and say, in Dorothy Parker’s words, “What fresh hell is this?” We have a chance to clean ourselves up and figure out how to get out of there. We realize we can make some changes we wouldn’t have if our lives weren’t turned upside down.
And then we have to take the step. There’s a window of time—a few weeks or months after a trauma--in which you need to start walking if you want the change to stick. You can’t just make a resolution that you’ll live a different life. You have to live it. Things like making more money or getting a promotion don’t mean as much anymore. But loving and helping others, building relationships, enjoying the beauty nature brings—those are the things that grab us and hold our attention. Suddenly, we realize that maybe we want our life to be a good story, one that inspires others.
But we can’t have a good life story without tension, conflict, and vicissitude, a fancy word for life’s ups and downs. It’s not interesting otherwise. And the reason we listen to or read stories is because we want to find out: How’d she make it through? How’d he survive it all? We all crave those answers. We all need to believe. And there’s nothing like trauma to make you realize you might have a story that’s not much worth telling if you don’t start making some changes. Trauma is your chance to rebuild the parts of your life story that you never could have torn down voluntarily.
Which way do you want to go?
Is your story a boring one of striving to get material things and being so consumed with your goals and yourself that you do little loving or thinking, then realize on your death bed your life didn’t amount to much?
Is it one that contains what’s known as a “contamination sequence,” where good things go bad, the world is bad, you’re bad, and you end up with a negative tape playing over and over, leading you into a depressed life that depresses others in it?
Or is it one of transformation and inspiration? Like the Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed or Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., do you come through suffering to some sort of enlightenment that you can share with others, either through words or example, or both? How do you want others to think of you? How do you want to think of yourself?
If you like the idea of the last story, there’s no way around it: you’re going to have to go through the tough stuff. Else, no one will believe anything you have to say.
In my life story, the pain and the fear and the horrible ripples of cancer’s wake are still there. I would never deny them. But rather than allow them to destroy, I am the alchemist: I can transform cancer’s ugliness into a thing of beauty. I have that God-given power, and so do you. No matter how awful or ugly something is, there is the possibility of seeing its other side. The beauty of our DNA is that we are hard-wired to adapt. We ALWAYS have a choice. Always. I choose a well lived and well loved life. A rich, grace-filled, stumbling, fumbling, loving, bumpy, beautiful life.
Now, back to that young UCC minister and the moaning in her church. She was wise enough to just let the moaning be, and eventually, it subsided. Later, while walking in the funeral procession next to the woman who started it all, the minister asked what in the world was going on. The woman told her that without the moaning, the despair would swallow her whole. It was a cultural thing that reached back to slavery--the moaning and wailing allowed her and others to release and make it through.
Next time you feel the stealthy, seductive tugging of despair, try moaning. Or wailing. Or writing. Or singing a gospel song. Or whatever else works for you to make sense of it, because making sense of it is what will help you through. Ask yourself one crucial question, and do your best to answer it: What good can I make from this? And then get on with creating the story you want left behind.
Sources:
Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
Leventry, Ellen. “Why Bad Things Happen: How Different Religions View the Reasons for Undeserved Human Suffering.” http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2005/01/Why-Bad-Things-Happen.aspx
Monday, August 09, 2010
Hope Is in the Chorus (Or, Is Gospel Music Just for Christians?)
Hope Is in the Chorus (Or, Is Gospel Music Just for Christians?)
Text from a Sermon Delivered at Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, Portland, Maine, on August 8, 2010
© Dawn Boyer. All Rights Reserved.
During my 6 years as founder and leader of the Gospel Music Project, I have found that many people tend to assume I’m Christian, most likely the evangelical kind. When they read my writings on the web site or blog, or find out somehow that I embrace many different religious philosophies, they ask: “But how can you sing gospel music if you’re not a Christian?”
I’ve thought of a lot of different ways to answer that question, because it’s an important one. But perhaps the best answer is another question: “How can anyone who’s not a slave sing it?” That’s where gospel music comes from after all—slavery.
Like any good ex-Catholic, I’m going to make a confession. When I joined my first gospel choir, I wouldn’t sing the word “Jesus.” I’d simply replace it with “God.” Why? Well, here’s where my confession might get a little uncomfortable for some, so please listen and stick with me for a bit. My hope is that we’ll come out on the other side together in deeper understanding.
I’ll be honest. I have nothing against Christianity, and I know that practicing the rituals and ways of the different Christian denominations gives great comfort and solace to millions of people. A lot of good is done in this world by Christians. I’m not here to bash Christianity. I think the principles it’s founded on are beautiful and rich and true … and hard as hell to live out sometimes. And I do my utmost every day to abide by most of what Jesus said … because the truth of what he spoke while here on this earth, like all great truths, is profound. It’s just that personally speaking, I cannot reconcile that God would choose one man to be God. If needing to believe Jesus is the Messiah is a prerequisite to being Christian, I cannot subscribe. I wanted to get that out so you’d know where I stand. I do, however, believe deeply in how Christ taught us to behave with one another. I love how he talked in parables. It makes us think. It makes what he said as fresh today as it was almost 2000 years ago. Give me a good metaphor, and I’ll run with it every time. There’s a richness in metaphor that expresses deep truth more than any fact could. Life from death? Redemption from suffering? A belief in something bigger than ourselves? You bet. That I can get on board with.
Let me back up a bit to my childhood. My mother is a quiet, devout Yankee Irish Catholic, and each of her 5 daughters was baptized Catholic and brought up in that tradition. I’m no stranger to Christianity. My father was a storytelling, life-of-the-party Southern Baptist from North Carolina who loved music and sang old country and white gospel songs with us. Our family dynamics collided and divided and exploded with those two very different ways of being and believing. Life was never dull in our house.
Add one more element to that mix: Rachel, the African American woman who came on certain days to clean our house while we lived in the south. I was only 5 when she entered our lives, but even at that age, I knew something was very wrong with how she was treated differently from us. It had nothing to do with socioeconomics: we weren’t affluent; my father was a Tech Sargeant in the Air Force. This had to do with skin color and skin color only, and I knew it. The “N” word was used frequently on my father’s side of the family back then. I was guilty of using it as a child myself, before I learned what it meant and the hate and harm it inflicted. Yet I loved Rachel and her dignity and the light she held in her heart. I’d hear her sing, and the world became a flood of hope, and pure joy, and some startling kind of amazing grace. I began to sing her songs because they stirred something deep and good inside me. How could anyone look down on such beauty, especially when it was just because of skin color? Something didn’t make sense.
During the late 1800s, a group of people, black and white, all educated, felt a similar way and decided to transcribe the slave spirituals they heard on plantations so the songs wouldn’t be lost. Two of them—Col. Thomas W. Higginson (a friend of Harriet Tubman’s) and Henry George Spaulding—were Unitarian ministers. Transfixed and transformed by what they heard, not unlike the way I was as a child when I heard Rachel sing almost 100 years later, they compiled the music into a book entitled Slave Songs of the United States. It is to this day one of the most invaluable resources we have. Without it, we, all of us, black and white, may never have heard “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” or “Down in the Valley to Pray,” or “Rock My Soul,” or countless other songs that have become a part of who we are in this culture.
Not too long ago, I got an email from an AME Zion preacher friend. The subject line read, “Things That Really, Really, Really Make You Go Hmmm.” In the email was a link to a newspaper article about a Nigerian couple who gave birth to a white baby girl, along with his brief comment: “I got nothing on this one … your thoughts?”
Now, before you jump to any conclusions or make any assumptions, I want to let you know that mother was faithful to her husband. There was no white ancestry on either side that either knew of. In fact, interracial relationships in Nigeria are almost nonexistent. Yet this baby has blue eyes and a huge shock of blonde hair. We’re not talking albino. That baby is normal, healthy … and white! All the scientific experts said mixed-race ancestry would be necessary on both sides for the baby to be born the way it was, and even then, the blonde hair is an anomaly, because it should have been brown or black, but not blonde, and certainly not straight.
One scientist said he could come to no conclusion but gene mutation.
Think about that one for a minute.
Maybe all of us who are white are the result of a gene mutation. It kind of changes things, doesn’t it? Maybe, after all, we do all come from the same place in Africa. Maybe all those divides we set up for ourselves—skin color, how much money we make, where we live, what kind of religion we subscribe to—maybe that’s all just a bunch of hooey we come up with to distract ourselves into thinking we’re something we’re not. Maybe God is sending a message through that Nigerian couple, who love that little girl no matter what color she is. Maybe he’s telling us to wake up and start getting along. Because, as Christianity, and Buddhism, and Islam, and Judaism, and all of the major spiritual practices or religions in the world preach, love really does conquer all. And therefore, hope always prevails.
OK, let’s get back to that gospel choir I sang in, the one where I wouldn’t say the word “Jesus.” As much as I loved all those songs I heard as a child, which Rachel and my father had both instilled deeply in me in their different ways, as an adult, I came to gospel music armed to the hilt with my defense-stuffed baggage.
Christians weren’t cool. Too much had been done in the name of Christianity that, in my opinion, was evil. The Crusades, the Inquisition, clinic bombings, bilking people out of millions of dollars, well, those were a few of the things I had a problem with. Now, Eastern religions, those were cool. I immersed myself in Buddhism. I began to learn more about different religions and the truth that’s at the heart of them all. My husband to this day calls me a Buddhatarian. But something interesting happened when I joined that gospel choir. I “got it,” not just intellectually, but here, in my heart. With no judgment attached, with nothing but the music, pure and heartfelt and triumphant, the songs began to change me. I began to realize that gospel music is universal in its message.
And I saw what happened to other people who came to hear the songs. They were brought together in one spirit no matter how different their backgrounds, and it was a sight to behold. I saw that my baggage was much too small to encompass the big, bold and broad truth of gospel music, which is, above all else, a celebration of traveling on the rough gravel road of life, where no one escapes unscarred, and yet, through steadfast hope, we can all make it through to the other side. Gospel music is about the best part of being human, which, interestingly, is the part where we let ourselves feel God, however you define that. It’s about that fearsome trouble that can grab hold of any one of us at any time, but it’s also about the triumphant light each and every one of us holds in our soul … and it waits patiently for its chance to help us rise above if we only let it. Because of gospel music, I let my baggage go, and I said good riddance.
I began to realize something else, too. Being a Christian and being Christ-like are not necessarily one and the same.
The slaves in our country came from a place that knew nothing of Christianity. And the hypocrisy of their enslavers who tried to convert them to a religion that espouses freedom, peace, love of thy neighbor as thyself, was not lost on them. Yet when they heard the stories of Moses and his people, of Jesus and that stone being rolled away, they made the connection between their plight and the plight of those in the Biblical stories. They found hope and grabbed on. They sang about it. They shared it with others. They took whatever they related to in those stories and made them their own, based on their own fragmented understanding of the Scriptures. That’s why you so often hear gospel songs with both Old and New Testament stories mixed up. (O Mary don’t you weep, Martha don’t you mourn, Pharoah’s army, drowned in the red sea.) In the beginning, those songs had little to do with Christianity as a religion and everything to do with the underlying principles of freedom and justice and a better place to get to.
To illustrate how the slaves freely mixed religious metaphor with their own earthly life circumstances, Laura Towne, a teacher who lived with slaves on South Carolina’s Sea Islands, wrote about how one former slave tried in broken English to describe his grief after Lincoln’s death. ‘“Lincoln died for we,” he said. ‘Christ died for we, and me believe him de same mans.’” (Darden, 109)
As Robert Darden states in his very good book People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music, “African Americans resisted, to an extraordinary degree, the very human tendency to exact a well-deserved revenge on their former masters” (111). If that isn’t Christ-like, I don’t know what is.
Perhaps the right question isn’t, “Is gospel music just for Christians?” After all, one could easily argue that gospel music is so deeply embedded in our culture--blues, rock and roll, R&B, soul, pop and pretty much every form of popular American music comes from it, after all--and its themes are so universal, that it extends far beyond any one religion. Gospel is universal the same way all religions have universal principles at their core.
Perhaps the right question is, “Is gospel music for anyone who needs it?” That’s much more inclusive, Christ-like, and, in my opinion, much more relevant to the songs the slaves sang.
The beauty and power of gospel music lie in expressing and feeling the real suffering and pain of life, while also being able to transcend that suffering and turn it into something glorious. You’ll often hear the gritty realities in the verse. But in the chorus springs the spiritual, the hope, ever eternal, ever defiant, ever triumphant. “I ain’t gonna study war no more.” “I’m tired, my soul needs restin’, but I can’t stop now where the saints have trod.” “I know I’ve been changed and the angels in heaven done signed my name.”
Unmarried and pregnant at age 17, I went on welfare instead of going to college. I inherited the alcoholic gene of my Irish ancestors and did a downhill slide like nobody’s business. But, determined to be a success story instead of another statistic, and with some kind of divine grace to help me, I pulled myself up and worked my way through school, through recovery, and into a better life. I know what it’s like to suffer and to come out on the other side.
This is why I relate to gospel music, and why I can indeed sing it, Christian or not.
My story is of course nothing like what the slaves had to endure. But still, when one suffers, it’s real, and it’s hard. Who among us has not suffered? Who among us has not at one time or another clung to hope, no matter how tiny and fragile its thread, no matter how much "darkness", like Helen Keller said so beautifully in the reading today, "lay on the face of all things"? And who among us has not at some point in our lives needed to believe in transcendence, and then, because of that belief, were able to live it? That is what gospel music is about. It is about being human yet losing yourself to something greater. You don’t need to be Christian to celebrate that. But you do need, I think, to be connected to something bigger to “get it.”
Oh, and by the way, even though I’m not a Christian, I do sing “Jesus” now. Gospel music helped me get over myself on that one. I can transcend religious and all kinds of other boundaries and get to the heart of the matter when I sing gospel. So can you. And that is a beautiful gift indeed.
Sources:
Allen, William Francis, Ware, Charles Pickard & Garrison, Lucy McKim, eds. Slave Songs of the United States. New York, A. Simpson & Co., 1867.
Darden, Robert. People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2004.
Wheeler, Virginia. "Black Parents ... White Baby." London: The Sun, 20 July 2010.
Text from a Sermon Delivered at Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, Portland, Maine, on August 8, 2010
© Dawn Boyer. All Rights Reserved.
During my 6 years as founder and leader of the Gospel Music Project, I have found that many people tend to assume I’m Christian, most likely the evangelical kind. When they read my writings on the web site or blog, or find out somehow that I embrace many different religious philosophies, they ask: “But how can you sing gospel music if you’re not a Christian?”
I’ve thought of a lot of different ways to answer that question, because it’s an important one. But perhaps the best answer is another question: “How can anyone who’s not a slave sing it?” That’s where gospel music comes from after all—slavery.
Like any good ex-Catholic, I’m going to make a confession. When I joined my first gospel choir, I wouldn’t sing the word “Jesus.” I’d simply replace it with “God.” Why? Well, here’s where my confession might get a little uncomfortable for some, so please listen and stick with me for a bit. My hope is that we’ll come out on the other side together in deeper understanding.
I’ll be honest. I have nothing against Christianity, and I know that practicing the rituals and ways of the different Christian denominations gives great comfort and solace to millions of people. A lot of good is done in this world by Christians. I’m not here to bash Christianity. I think the principles it’s founded on are beautiful and rich and true … and hard as hell to live out sometimes. And I do my utmost every day to abide by most of what Jesus said … because the truth of what he spoke while here on this earth, like all great truths, is profound. It’s just that personally speaking, I cannot reconcile that God would choose one man to be God. If needing to believe Jesus is the Messiah is a prerequisite to being Christian, I cannot subscribe. I wanted to get that out so you’d know where I stand. I do, however, believe deeply in how Christ taught us to behave with one another. I love how he talked in parables. It makes us think. It makes what he said as fresh today as it was almost 2000 years ago. Give me a good metaphor, and I’ll run with it every time. There’s a richness in metaphor that expresses deep truth more than any fact could. Life from death? Redemption from suffering? A belief in something bigger than ourselves? You bet. That I can get on board with.
Let me back up a bit to my childhood. My mother is a quiet, devout Yankee Irish Catholic, and each of her 5 daughters was baptized Catholic and brought up in that tradition. I’m no stranger to Christianity. My father was a storytelling, life-of-the-party Southern Baptist from North Carolina who loved music and sang old country and white gospel songs with us. Our family dynamics collided and divided and exploded with those two very different ways of being and believing. Life was never dull in our house.
Add one more element to that mix: Rachel, the African American woman who came on certain days to clean our house while we lived in the south. I was only 5 when she entered our lives, but even at that age, I knew something was very wrong with how she was treated differently from us. It had nothing to do with socioeconomics: we weren’t affluent; my father was a Tech Sargeant in the Air Force. This had to do with skin color and skin color only, and I knew it. The “N” word was used frequently on my father’s side of the family back then. I was guilty of using it as a child myself, before I learned what it meant and the hate and harm it inflicted. Yet I loved Rachel and her dignity and the light she held in her heart. I’d hear her sing, and the world became a flood of hope, and pure joy, and some startling kind of amazing grace. I began to sing her songs because they stirred something deep and good inside me. How could anyone look down on such beauty, especially when it was just because of skin color? Something didn’t make sense.
During the late 1800s, a group of people, black and white, all educated, felt a similar way and decided to transcribe the slave spirituals they heard on plantations so the songs wouldn’t be lost. Two of them—Col. Thomas W. Higginson (a friend of Harriet Tubman’s) and Henry George Spaulding—were Unitarian ministers. Transfixed and transformed by what they heard, not unlike the way I was as a child when I heard Rachel sing almost 100 years later, they compiled the music into a book entitled Slave Songs of the United States. It is to this day one of the most invaluable resources we have. Without it, we, all of us, black and white, may never have heard “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” or “Down in the Valley to Pray,” or “Rock My Soul,” or countless other songs that have become a part of who we are in this culture.
Not too long ago, I got an email from an AME Zion preacher friend. The subject line read, “Things That Really, Really, Really Make You Go Hmmm.” In the email was a link to a newspaper article about a Nigerian couple who gave birth to a white baby girl, along with his brief comment: “I got nothing on this one … your thoughts?”
Now, before you jump to any conclusions or make any assumptions, I want to let you know that mother was faithful to her husband. There was no white ancestry on either side that either knew of. In fact, interracial relationships in Nigeria are almost nonexistent. Yet this baby has blue eyes and a huge shock of blonde hair. We’re not talking albino. That baby is normal, healthy … and white! All the scientific experts said mixed-race ancestry would be necessary on both sides for the baby to be born the way it was, and even then, the blonde hair is an anomaly, because it should have been brown or black, but not blonde, and certainly not straight.
One scientist said he could come to no conclusion but gene mutation.
Think about that one for a minute.
Maybe all of us who are white are the result of a gene mutation. It kind of changes things, doesn’t it? Maybe, after all, we do all come from the same place in Africa. Maybe all those divides we set up for ourselves—skin color, how much money we make, where we live, what kind of religion we subscribe to—maybe that’s all just a bunch of hooey we come up with to distract ourselves into thinking we’re something we’re not. Maybe God is sending a message through that Nigerian couple, who love that little girl no matter what color she is. Maybe he’s telling us to wake up and start getting along. Because, as Christianity, and Buddhism, and Islam, and Judaism, and all of the major spiritual practices or religions in the world preach, love really does conquer all. And therefore, hope always prevails.
OK, let’s get back to that gospel choir I sang in, the one where I wouldn’t say the word “Jesus.” As much as I loved all those songs I heard as a child, which Rachel and my father had both instilled deeply in me in their different ways, as an adult, I came to gospel music armed to the hilt with my defense-stuffed baggage.
Christians weren’t cool. Too much had been done in the name of Christianity that, in my opinion, was evil. The Crusades, the Inquisition, clinic bombings, bilking people out of millions of dollars, well, those were a few of the things I had a problem with. Now, Eastern religions, those were cool. I immersed myself in Buddhism. I began to learn more about different religions and the truth that’s at the heart of them all. My husband to this day calls me a Buddhatarian. But something interesting happened when I joined that gospel choir. I “got it,” not just intellectually, but here, in my heart. With no judgment attached, with nothing but the music, pure and heartfelt and triumphant, the songs began to change me. I began to realize that gospel music is universal in its message.
And I saw what happened to other people who came to hear the songs. They were brought together in one spirit no matter how different their backgrounds, and it was a sight to behold. I saw that my baggage was much too small to encompass the big, bold and broad truth of gospel music, which is, above all else, a celebration of traveling on the rough gravel road of life, where no one escapes unscarred, and yet, through steadfast hope, we can all make it through to the other side. Gospel music is about the best part of being human, which, interestingly, is the part where we let ourselves feel God, however you define that. It’s about that fearsome trouble that can grab hold of any one of us at any time, but it’s also about the triumphant light each and every one of us holds in our soul … and it waits patiently for its chance to help us rise above if we only let it. Because of gospel music, I let my baggage go, and I said good riddance.
I began to realize something else, too. Being a Christian and being Christ-like are not necessarily one and the same.
The slaves in our country came from a place that knew nothing of Christianity. And the hypocrisy of their enslavers who tried to convert them to a religion that espouses freedom, peace, love of thy neighbor as thyself, was not lost on them. Yet when they heard the stories of Moses and his people, of Jesus and that stone being rolled away, they made the connection between their plight and the plight of those in the Biblical stories. They found hope and grabbed on. They sang about it. They shared it with others. They took whatever they related to in those stories and made them their own, based on their own fragmented understanding of the Scriptures. That’s why you so often hear gospel songs with both Old and New Testament stories mixed up. (O Mary don’t you weep, Martha don’t you mourn, Pharoah’s army, drowned in the red sea.) In the beginning, those songs had little to do with Christianity as a religion and everything to do with the underlying principles of freedom and justice and a better place to get to.
To illustrate how the slaves freely mixed religious metaphor with their own earthly life circumstances, Laura Towne, a teacher who lived with slaves on South Carolina’s Sea Islands, wrote about how one former slave tried in broken English to describe his grief after Lincoln’s death. ‘“Lincoln died for we,” he said. ‘Christ died for we, and me believe him de same mans.’” (Darden, 109)
As Robert Darden states in his very good book People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music, “African Americans resisted, to an extraordinary degree, the very human tendency to exact a well-deserved revenge on their former masters” (111). If that isn’t Christ-like, I don’t know what is.
Perhaps the right question isn’t, “Is gospel music just for Christians?” After all, one could easily argue that gospel music is so deeply embedded in our culture--blues, rock and roll, R&B, soul, pop and pretty much every form of popular American music comes from it, after all--and its themes are so universal, that it extends far beyond any one religion. Gospel is universal the same way all religions have universal principles at their core.
Perhaps the right question is, “Is gospel music for anyone who needs it?” That’s much more inclusive, Christ-like, and, in my opinion, much more relevant to the songs the slaves sang.
The beauty and power of gospel music lie in expressing and feeling the real suffering and pain of life, while also being able to transcend that suffering and turn it into something glorious. You’ll often hear the gritty realities in the verse. But in the chorus springs the spiritual, the hope, ever eternal, ever defiant, ever triumphant. “I ain’t gonna study war no more.” “I’m tired, my soul needs restin’, but I can’t stop now where the saints have trod.” “I know I’ve been changed and the angels in heaven done signed my name.”
Unmarried and pregnant at age 17, I went on welfare instead of going to college. I inherited the alcoholic gene of my Irish ancestors and did a downhill slide like nobody’s business. But, determined to be a success story instead of another statistic, and with some kind of divine grace to help me, I pulled myself up and worked my way through school, through recovery, and into a better life. I know what it’s like to suffer and to come out on the other side.
This is why I relate to gospel music, and why I can indeed sing it, Christian or not.
My story is of course nothing like what the slaves had to endure. But still, when one suffers, it’s real, and it’s hard. Who among us has not suffered? Who among us has not at one time or another clung to hope, no matter how tiny and fragile its thread, no matter how much "darkness", like Helen Keller said so beautifully in the reading today, "lay on the face of all things"? And who among us has not at some point in our lives needed to believe in transcendence, and then, because of that belief, were able to live it? That is what gospel music is about. It is about being human yet losing yourself to something greater. You don’t need to be Christian to celebrate that. But you do need, I think, to be connected to something bigger to “get it.”
Oh, and by the way, even though I’m not a Christian, I do sing “Jesus” now. Gospel music helped me get over myself on that one. I can transcend religious and all kinds of other boundaries and get to the heart of the matter when I sing gospel. So can you. And that is a beautiful gift indeed.
Sources:
Allen, William Francis, Ware, Charles Pickard & Garrison, Lucy McKim, eds. Slave Songs of the United States. New York, A. Simpson & Co., 1867.
Darden, Robert. People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2004.
Wheeler, Virginia. "Black Parents ... White Baby." London: The Sun, 20 July 2010.
Friday, August 06, 2010
The Roots and Branches of Gospel Music
While writing a sermon I've been asked to give at an upcoming UU service in Portland, ME, I came upon one I gave last year. A few people asked to have the text sent to them, and I thought it would be good to post as well on this blog. Here it is:
The Roots and Branches of Gospel Music
Text from a Sermon Delivered at Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, Portland, Maine, on August 16, 2009
© Dawn Boyer. All Rights Reserved.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver died this week. The media talked for days about how she started the Special Olympics, how, through her passion, the lives of millions were, and continue to be, enriched. The pain of her sister Rosemary’s tragic lobotomy had such great impact that Eunice vowed to change the way the mentally or physically challenged among us were treated. And so she did.
Aside from this powerful legacy, why am I talking about this very wealthy, white, privileged, well connected Irish Catholic woman when the topic of today’s sermon is the history of gospel music?
Because of how the footage of her funeral showed that a gospel song sung at her service brought her mourners together. I’m talking specifically about the closing song, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It stood out because of how it lifted everyone in the church as they sang. You could see it; you could feel it; you could definitely hear it.
But hold on a minute. What does a song known for being played while African American mourners walk down a street in New Orleans behind a casket have to do with a rich white woman’s funeral in Cape Cod? Those are two totally different worlds. One doesn’t seem to belong with the other.
Ah. But that is the beauty of gospel music. As Gwendolin Sims Warren states in her wonderful book entitled Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit, gospel is universal:
“Growing up, I remember singing as many hymns by white composers such as Wesley, Watts, and Newton as I did black gospel music and spirituals. In fact, it was quite a while before I realized that such hymns were not exclusively [black] songs ….And yet, what a perfect example of the universal appeal of these sacred hymns and songs. The songs … are not exclusive to our race. These are songs that speak to the hearts of people from all cultures and races, of all ages, and from all eras of history. They are songs that heal, encourage, strengthen, reminisce, and excite. They are timeless, they are powerful—and they belong to everyone who will embrace them.”
We, the members of Rock My Soul, embrace them. Our mission is to celebrate them. And, even though (as you may have noticed already) we are mostly white, we do our darndest to make sure we get the word out about how important they are, for we’ve seen firsthand the way gospel music transforms people, and we honor and respect the great gift we’ve been given through the songs.
Let’s talk about that for a moment, this whole white versus black thing. I admit, there’s a tiny voice inside that sometimes whispers, “Who am I, a white, Irish-American woman like Eunice Kennedy (only ex-Catholic and definitely not rich!), to go around singing gospel and preaching about it?” An AME Zion preacher friend once put his arm around my shoulders and said, in a rather suggestive voice, “Do you ever get approached by any radical blacks who ask you what you think you’re doing singing their music?”
I was more than shocked, and I can happily say that has never happened. In fact, the opposite has been my experience: our work has been embraced by every African American audience we have sung to, and I am grateful for that. One wonderful woman in our community, who is responsible for making Black history known in Portsmouth, NH, put it in a way I think Gwendolin Sims Warren would have liked. She said, “Blacks can talk about how important gospel music is, and the white community is only going to listen to a point. But when the white community says it, too, then white people start listening and learning.” Then she chuckled and said, “When you think about it, most of us are pretty much a mix of white and black anyway, so why shouldn’t it belong to everyone?”
African American scholars—Horace Clarence Boyer being perhaps the most prominent—illustrate clearly how African-born slaves listened to and sang fervent hymns written by white composers during the Great Awakening in the mid-1700s, which started in New England and had a profound effect on the southern states, where slaves would attend services with slave owners. They in turn took their own understanding of rhythm and music and stories in the Bible and created the deeply personal Negro spirituals. From the spirituals to the Azusa Street Pentecostal revivals in California in the early 1800s, where whites and blacks shouted and sang and shook the walls together until social racism split them apart and white gospel and shape-note singing was born, to the jubilee quartet songs that started in the workplace after emancipation in 1865, to the birth of the black gospel choir in the 1930s, to the Civil Rights songs in the 1950s and 60s that were based on spirituals and hymns and sustained those who were committed to doing the right thing, and finally to 1969, when a black man named Edwin Hawkins reworked a Baptist hymn called O Happy Day, which was written by 2 white men from the 1800s, and that arrangement busted right out of the church and into the American Top 40 mainstream culture, gospel music has brought white and black people together to change our country for the better throughout history. And it is important for us all to embrace it and cherish it and keep telling the stories so they never get forgotten.
Last November, Rolling Stone magazine published a list of the 100 greatest singers of all time. The top 4 came from gospel roots. These were Aretha Franklin (#1), Ray Charles (#2), Elvis Presley (#3—yes, even Elvis started in gospel), and Sam Cooke (#4). These singers developed their style, their soul, their very musical essence in the church, then branched out into the secular world, and captivated millions with what had been instilled in them. Something’s going on with gospel music.
Why does gospel reach down so deep and out so broadly? Pain. Pain is the root. Who among us has not felt it? Pain is universal. We listen to the words of people who were ripped from their homeland, forced to labor without reward, made to live lives of unendurable pain, and we respond with our own voice of pain deep down inside. “Yes. I know that feeling. I can relate.”
And yet, from those roots of pain come branches of hope and triumph. Gospel music’s true power comes from its nobility. Listen to any gospel song—“Go Down, Moses”; “Steal Away, Jesus”; “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; “I’ll Fly Away”—and you can’t help but feel the dignity, the grace, the pure grandeur of the spirit laced through the words and music. Milan Kundera, the great writer and philosopher, said, “when the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.” These songs speak from the heart, a heart that has been battered but has gained wisdom from the light within, and says, “here, take the hope I have to offer, for it will sustain you.”
And sustain us it has, for more than 300 years. The songs are just as fresh today as when they were first sung.
Let’s go back to “When the Saints Go Marching In” to get an idea of what I mean.
• It began as a Negro spiritual sometime in the early 1800s.
• Louis Armstrong was one of the first to make it into a nationally known pop-tune in the 1930s.
• It was brought into early rock and roll by Fats Domino and by Bill Haley & His Comets.
• Other early rock artists to follow Domino's lead included Jerry Lee Lewis and The Beatles.
• It is nicknamed "The Monster" by some jazz musicians, as it seems to be the only song some people know to request when seeing a Dixieland band, and some musicians dread being asked to play it several times a night. The musicians at Preservation Hall in New Orleans get so tired of playing it that a sign is posted that stipulates it will cost $10 to request the song.
• It’s often used as a popular theme or rallying song for a number of sports teams.
• Judy Garland sang it in her own pop style.
• Elvis Presley performed it during the Million Dollar Quartet jam session and also recorded a version for his film, Frankie and Johnny.
• Dolly Parton included the song in a gospel medley.
• Bruce Springsteen performed it as an encore during his Seeger Sessions Band Tour a couple of years ago.
• It was sung at Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s funeral a few days ago.
Gospel music’s branches reach into every part of our society—past to present, poor to rich, young to old, black to white, and everywhere in between. And it is important for us all to embrace it and cherish it and keep telling the stories so they never get forgotten, so that all of our lives and our spirits continue to get richer, and wiser, and brighter. Can I hear an Amen, somebody?
Sources:
“100 Greatest Singers of All Time.” Rolling Stone. November 27, 2008, p. 103 (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/24161972/page/103)
Boyer, Horace Clarence. The Golden Age of Gospel. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Brobston, Stanley Heard. Daddy Sang Lead: The History and Performance Practice of White Southern Gospel. New York: Vantage Press, 2006.
Johnson, James Weldon & J. Rosamond. The Books of American Negro Spirituals. New York: Da Capo Press, 1977.
Sims, Gwendolin Warren. Ev'ry Time I Feel the Spirit: 101 Best-Loved Psalms, Gospel Hymns & Spiritual Songs of the African-American Church. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1999.
“When the Saints Go Marching In.” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Saints_Go_Marching_In
The Roots and Branches of Gospel Music
Text from a Sermon Delivered at Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, Portland, Maine, on August 16, 2009
© Dawn Boyer. All Rights Reserved.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver died this week. The media talked for days about how she started the Special Olympics, how, through her passion, the lives of millions were, and continue to be, enriched. The pain of her sister Rosemary’s tragic lobotomy had such great impact that Eunice vowed to change the way the mentally or physically challenged among us were treated. And so she did.
Aside from this powerful legacy, why am I talking about this very wealthy, white, privileged, well connected Irish Catholic woman when the topic of today’s sermon is the history of gospel music?
Because of how the footage of her funeral showed that a gospel song sung at her service brought her mourners together. I’m talking specifically about the closing song, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It stood out because of how it lifted everyone in the church as they sang. You could see it; you could feel it; you could definitely hear it.
But hold on a minute. What does a song known for being played while African American mourners walk down a street in New Orleans behind a casket have to do with a rich white woman’s funeral in Cape Cod? Those are two totally different worlds. One doesn’t seem to belong with the other.
Ah. But that is the beauty of gospel music. As Gwendolin Sims Warren states in her wonderful book entitled Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit, gospel is universal:
“Growing up, I remember singing as many hymns by white composers such as Wesley, Watts, and Newton as I did black gospel music and spirituals. In fact, it was quite a while before I realized that such hymns were not exclusively [black] songs ….And yet, what a perfect example of the universal appeal of these sacred hymns and songs. The songs … are not exclusive to our race. These are songs that speak to the hearts of people from all cultures and races, of all ages, and from all eras of history. They are songs that heal, encourage, strengthen, reminisce, and excite. They are timeless, they are powerful—and they belong to everyone who will embrace them.”
We, the members of Rock My Soul, embrace them. Our mission is to celebrate them. And, even though (as you may have noticed already) we are mostly white, we do our darndest to make sure we get the word out about how important they are, for we’ve seen firsthand the way gospel music transforms people, and we honor and respect the great gift we’ve been given through the songs.
Let’s talk about that for a moment, this whole white versus black thing. I admit, there’s a tiny voice inside that sometimes whispers, “Who am I, a white, Irish-American woman like Eunice Kennedy (only ex-Catholic and definitely not rich!), to go around singing gospel and preaching about it?” An AME Zion preacher friend once put his arm around my shoulders and said, in a rather suggestive voice, “Do you ever get approached by any radical blacks who ask you what you think you’re doing singing their music?”
I was more than shocked, and I can happily say that has never happened. In fact, the opposite has been my experience: our work has been embraced by every African American audience we have sung to, and I am grateful for that. One wonderful woman in our community, who is responsible for making Black history known in Portsmouth, NH, put it in a way I think Gwendolin Sims Warren would have liked. She said, “Blacks can talk about how important gospel music is, and the white community is only going to listen to a point. But when the white community says it, too, then white people start listening and learning.” Then she chuckled and said, “When you think about it, most of us are pretty much a mix of white and black anyway, so why shouldn’t it belong to everyone?”
African American scholars—Horace Clarence Boyer being perhaps the most prominent—illustrate clearly how African-born slaves listened to and sang fervent hymns written by white composers during the Great Awakening in the mid-1700s, which started in New England and had a profound effect on the southern states, where slaves would attend services with slave owners. They in turn took their own understanding of rhythm and music and stories in the Bible and created the deeply personal Negro spirituals. From the spirituals to the Azusa Street Pentecostal revivals in California in the early 1800s, where whites and blacks shouted and sang and shook the walls together until social racism split them apart and white gospel and shape-note singing was born, to the jubilee quartet songs that started in the workplace after emancipation in 1865, to the birth of the black gospel choir in the 1930s, to the Civil Rights songs in the 1950s and 60s that were based on spirituals and hymns and sustained those who were committed to doing the right thing, and finally to 1969, when a black man named Edwin Hawkins reworked a Baptist hymn called O Happy Day, which was written by 2 white men from the 1800s, and that arrangement busted right out of the church and into the American Top 40 mainstream culture, gospel music has brought white and black people together to change our country for the better throughout history. And it is important for us all to embrace it and cherish it and keep telling the stories so they never get forgotten.
Last November, Rolling Stone magazine published a list of the 100 greatest singers of all time. The top 4 came from gospel roots. These were Aretha Franklin (#1), Ray Charles (#2), Elvis Presley (#3—yes, even Elvis started in gospel), and Sam Cooke (#4). These singers developed their style, their soul, their very musical essence in the church, then branched out into the secular world, and captivated millions with what had been instilled in them. Something’s going on with gospel music.
Why does gospel reach down so deep and out so broadly? Pain. Pain is the root. Who among us has not felt it? Pain is universal. We listen to the words of people who were ripped from their homeland, forced to labor without reward, made to live lives of unendurable pain, and we respond with our own voice of pain deep down inside. “Yes. I know that feeling. I can relate.”
And yet, from those roots of pain come branches of hope and triumph. Gospel music’s true power comes from its nobility. Listen to any gospel song—“Go Down, Moses”; “Steal Away, Jesus”; “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; “I’ll Fly Away”—and you can’t help but feel the dignity, the grace, the pure grandeur of the spirit laced through the words and music. Milan Kundera, the great writer and philosopher, said, “when the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.” These songs speak from the heart, a heart that has been battered but has gained wisdom from the light within, and says, “here, take the hope I have to offer, for it will sustain you.”
And sustain us it has, for more than 300 years. The songs are just as fresh today as when they were first sung.
Let’s go back to “When the Saints Go Marching In” to get an idea of what I mean.
• It began as a Negro spiritual sometime in the early 1800s.
• Louis Armstrong was one of the first to make it into a nationally known pop-tune in the 1930s.
• It was brought into early rock and roll by Fats Domino and by Bill Haley & His Comets.
• Other early rock artists to follow Domino's lead included Jerry Lee Lewis and The Beatles.
• It is nicknamed "The Monster" by some jazz musicians, as it seems to be the only song some people know to request when seeing a Dixieland band, and some musicians dread being asked to play it several times a night. The musicians at Preservation Hall in New Orleans get so tired of playing it that a sign is posted that stipulates it will cost $10 to request the song.
• It’s often used as a popular theme or rallying song for a number of sports teams.
• Judy Garland sang it in her own pop style.
• Elvis Presley performed it during the Million Dollar Quartet jam session and also recorded a version for his film, Frankie and Johnny.
• Dolly Parton included the song in a gospel medley.
• Bruce Springsteen performed it as an encore during his Seeger Sessions Band Tour a couple of years ago.
• It was sung at Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s funeral a few days ago.
Gospel music’s branches reach into every part of our society—past to present, poor to rich, young to old, black to white, and everywhere in between. And it is important for us all to embrace it and cherish it and keep telling the stories so they never get forgotten, so that all of our lives and our spirits continue to get richer, and wiser, and brighter. Can I hear an Amen, somebody?
Sources:
“100 Greatest Singers of All Time.” Rolling Stone. November 27, 2008, p. 103 (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/24161972/page/103)
Boyer, Horace Clarence. The Golden Age of Gospel. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Brobston, Stanley Heard. Daddy Sang Lead: The History and Performance Practice of White Southern Gospel. New York: Vantage Press, 2006.
Johnson, James Weldon & J. Rosamond. The Books of American Negro Spirituals. New York: Da Capo Press, 1977.
Sims, Gwendolin Warren. Ev'ry Time I Feel the Spirit: 101 Best-Loved Psalms, Gospel Hymns & Spiritual Songs of the African-American Church. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1999.
“When the Saints Go Marching In.” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Saints_Go_Marching_In
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
A white atheist avant garde pop music icon's take on gospel
Brian Eno, known to many as the brains and brilliance behind Roxy Music, and also the production muse on albums by David Bowie, The Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay, was interviewed recently in The Guardian. He has a lot to say about music in general, but I was struck particularly by his take on gospel music:
"I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything's going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distill what they all have in common it's a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It's also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They're to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious."
I wanted to jump up and down and shout "Hallelujah!" when I read this. What do you think?
"I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything's going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distill what they all have in common it's a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It's also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They're to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious."
I wanted to jump up and down and shout "Hallelujah!" when I read this. What do you think?
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Music as a Lifeline
I just finished watching War Dance, a moving 2007 documentary about children from a village in civil-war-torn northern Uganda. The focus is on a national music competition that the children prepare for, and shows the power of music and dance to help lift the children out of the tragedy of their lives. Most are orphans whose parents were killed by rebels. Watching Rose, a pre-teen, tell her story of soldiers lifting her mother's and father's heads out of a cooking pot to identify them, is heartbreaking and almost too much to take. She says, "when I saw my mother's head, I felt like I was losing my mind."
She lives with an aunt who sees Rose mostly as a tool to bathe the children, cook meals, do laundry, clean the house, and a myriad of other chores; we see Rose being threatened with a beating if it's not all done right. One wonders how on earth this child has any spirit left, and it's easy to think there's no hope for her.
But then we see her singing with a choir and preparing her costume for the traditional dance part of the competition. Her aunt doesn't want her to go. But we hear her voice tell us, "my heart tells me I must go, so I am going."
And there's the boy who carves and builds his own xylophone for the musical part of the competition. We watch him shave blocks of wood until the sound is right to his ear. If it doesn't sound the way he wants it to, he somehow knows how to shave off just the right amount for the correct tone.
I kept thinking about the parallel to what the slaves had to go through in our own country. It's not that far removed a story. The beatings, watching one's relatives killed or taken away by force, the fear they must have lived under. All of it is common. And, sadly, it still goes on.
But it is a wonder to behold the power of music and dance to lift these children out of horrible circumstance into a second, a moment, an hour of transformation, infusing them with the strength and the grace to carry on. These children have nothing to hope for but the possibility of winning the competition. We see how it drives them, how it gives them pride and hope for better things.
During the dance competition, Rose puts it all into perspective: "When I dance, my problems vanish. The camp is gone. I can feel the wind. I can feel the fresh air. I am free and can feel my home."
I'm struck by how so many us of have similar feelings when singing gospel music. And that's why it's important for us to keep on with our mission of bringing the songs and their history to as many people as possible. "We are free and we can feel our home." I'll bet the slaves felt that, which gives Rose's words even more poignancy. Our problems vanish, no matter what difficulties we struggle with. And that's what makes gospel music universal and everlasting. To see the African part of where it comes from in this film was powerful, to say the least.
Watch the movie if you can. It will change you.
She lives with an aunt who sees Rose mostly as a tool to bathe the children, cook meals, do laundry, clean the house, and a myriad of other chores; we see Rose being threatened with a beating if it's not all done right. One wonders how on earth this child has any spirit left, and it's easy to think there's no hope for her.
But then we see her singing with a choir and preparing her costume for the traditional dance part of the competition. Her aunt doesn't want her to go. But we hear her voice tell us, "my heart tells me I must go, so I am going."
And there's the boy who carves and builds his own xylophone for the musical part of the competition. We watch him shave blocks of wood until the sound is right to his ear. If it doesn't sound the way he wants it to, he somehow knows how to shave off just the right amount for the correct tone.
I kept thinking about the parallel to what the slaves had to go through in our own country. It's not that far removed a story. The beatings, watching one's relatives killed or taken away by force, the fear they must have lived under. All of it is common. And, sadly, it still goes on.
But it is a wonder to behold the power of music and dance to lift these children out of horrible circumstance into a second, a moment, an hour of transformation, infusing them with the strength and the grace to carry on. These children have nothing to hope for but the possibility of winning the competition. We see how it drives them, how it gives them pride and hope for better things.
During the dance competition, Rose puts it all into perspective: "When I dance, my problems vanish. The camp is gone. I can feel the wind. I can feel the fresh air. I am free and can feel my home."
I'm struck by how so many us of have similar feelings when singing gospel music. And that's why it's important for us to keep on with our mission of bringing the songs and their history to as many people as possible. "We are free and we can feel our home." I'll bet the slaves felt that, which gives Rose's words even more poignancy. Our problems vanish, no matter what difficulties we struggle with. And that's what makes gospel music universal and everlasting. To see the African part of where it comes from in this film was powerful, to say the least.
Watch the movie if you can. It will change you.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Opening for Sweet Honey in the Rock! Rehearsal at the Merrill last night....
Wow, what a privilege. Ten of us from Rock My Soul, combined with 10 members each from the Brunswick Naval Air Station and Women in Harmony choirs, rehearsed last night at the Merrill Auditorium in Portland. On January 18, as an opening act for Sweet Honey in the Rock, we'll sing 3 songs: "I Don't Feel No Ways Tired" by Rev. James Cleveland, "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round," (a traditional spiritual turned Civil Rights song) and "Total Praise" (not sure who the author is). All are so inspiring! Everything came together last night--what a sound! Everyone is so excited; it is such an honor to be part of this concert, which will serve to raise money for the Portland chapter NAACP. Here are some photos of us rehearsing....
I'm hoping we can get a grant to fund Steve and Kalli to come to some of our rehearsals and lead us in the near future. I love the way they teach everything by ear and feel. As Steve and I were saying last night, it helps us sing from the heart and not the head. Their approach reminds me of the one Sister Alice Martin used with our workshop in Omega a couple of years ago (see the July 2006 post on this blog). Very refreshing! I'm truly enjoying working with them--they're great guys.
 |  |  |
| Kalli leading "I Don't Feel No Ways Tired" | Tracy and Brett, joking as always | Steve (left, on piano) and Kalli leading BNAS |
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