A year into my blogging project, I confess that the title of this website is largely aspirational. The fact that I’ve written only a handful of posts testifies to my anxiety about publicly voicing ideas that have not been fully worked through and systematized, of taking the risk of having to walk away from an unfinished thought, ending on a comma rather than a period. I am less at home in the world of unresolved questions than I want to be.
I suspect that I’m not the only one: that a lot of us walk around with the first two bars of a symphony in our heads, imagining that someday, when we have a better idea of what comes next, we’ll start to play. Some of the most transformative moments in my life happened when a person or incident gave me the strength or abandonment to haul off and play to the end of that second bar and see what came next. But most of time I continue to walk around singing just the first note—sticking with where I feel comfortable, in control. When the note feels tired or insufficient, I sing it louder! Hoping it will make a difference. It never does. Newness never emerges until I can get myself to the edge of the familiar.
I have found this to be so true in the work of chaplaincy. As an illustration, I offer one of my most cherished memories from leading a weekly interfaith spirituality group on Adult Psych during my year of residency:
Because music is so much a part of my own spiritual practice and process, I used a lot of music in this group. The patients mostly appreciated this, too, because even if people don’t understand anything about faith, they can connect to music (which, I think, means they actually do understand something about faith). Typically, I would play a familiar pop song on the guitar and invite everyone to sing along, and a discussion or impromptu jam session or combination of both would organically follow.
On this particular day, however, in my increasing effort to trust the patients to take the lead in their own healing, I decided to eschew familiar lyrics and let the group participants be the lyricists. After reading them a short passage on the history and significance of blues music, I played a basic twelve-bar blues progression on the guitar and invited patients to fill in the verses following this basic structure:
First verse: I got the blues because (something I’m blue about)
Second verse: Repeat first verse
Final verse: I think I’ll (present a solution or, if there isn’t one, rephrase or reframe the problem)
The lyrics that emerged were heartbreaking, honest, imaginative, and playful.
I got the blues because my woman broke up with me…
I think I’ll make her a bed of roses.
I got the blues because I’m homeless…
It’s really hard being homeless.
In each case, the whole group sang along. It was almost as if you could see weight physically being lifted off of people, their bodies visibly relaxing as the room helped hold their pain for them in song. Finally, there was one person left who had not yet shared his own “blues.” He spoke his lyrics to the rest of the group:
I got the blues because my mother died.
I’ll think about her every day.
And then he burst into tears.
At this point a sense of fear overcame me. Had I taken this whole “trust” and “freedom” thing too far? As a chaplain, I spend a lot of time with people who are going through some of the worst moments of their lives, and tears and crying alone don’t make me uncomfortable or anxious. But was I really being called upon to sing this young man’s recent and devastating loss back to him in what suddenly felt like an inappropriately upbeat tune?
We let him cry for a bit. And then we confirmed we had his permission to sing his lyrics. The group sang to him and with him about the loss of his mother, and it felt risky and raw and vulnerable.
And he loved it.
That day I learned a lesson, one that most days I am still a little too scared and stuck on that first, familiar, comfortable note of my symphony to apply: that people are stronger than I think they are. Maybe I am stronger than I think I am, too. Strong enough to wander past the boundary of the darkness and survive. And strong enough to relinquish whatever delusions of control I need to give up on in order to accompany others in the messy, unresolved symphonies of their own lives.
We are now already a few days into Advent, wandering deeper into the darkness toward the winter solstice. One thing Advent provides for me is a reminder to keep singing and dancing and praying into the darkening days (and, in regards to the violence and disregard for human life unfolding the world around us, the spiritual and emotional tenor of the day has seldom been darker). Advent is the space the church has made for me to live in the memory that at the boundary of what I know to be possible, God has placed something new. To live fearfully and faithfully up to that point when I can’t possibly know the next bar of the song…
…and that’s when the choirs of angels come in.
Prayer:
God, grant me the strength to keep singing when I don’t know how the song ends.
And the courage to leave enough space for others to do the same.
Amen.
