Who Will Go With My People?

I can't remember why I decided to go to the Carolyn McDade retreat at Kirkridge. Months before, someone had introduced me to her music. We selected one of her songs with angry words for a large gathering of United Methodist Women: "I am enraged that children die with bellies round ... that people live in shacks of discarded tin, while we with our scriptures pretend, pretend."

Later I used the same song to lead worship at a board meeting of Friendship Press, the mission education arm of the National Council of Churches. It was a group of talented and caring executives representing many denominations, and in verse after verse we sang the "I am enraged" theme: "I am enraged that women, cast aside unheard, are robbed of our children as well as our word." Nothing sentimental in those words! Finally, we divided into three small groups and began each verse of "I am enraged" with participants expressing their rage antiphonally. One group simultaneously jumped up and down, another screamed their rage and beat on tables, the third yelled with fists in the air as we made our way through the verses. "If dare we see the fury within the dove, then dare we to labor, friend, with love, with love."

The words and the music of Carolyn McDade engage my soul like no other. Singing her songs, I feel the lid of my soul being gently opened to reveal the pain, the compassion, the uncertainty, the passion, the beauty, the vulnerability--all the things that I am-- being slowly and intimately examined for authenticity, for the measure of love that may be available to express the music in my soul and its capacity for healing in the world.

At that first retreat, as I watched Carolyn set up a rickety keyboard and trip over wires strung between the keyboard and a couple of amplifiers, I speculated, "This may be a long weekend."

Once she played a few bars and began to sing however, a beautiful journey was underway. In minutes, we were all singing with her, singing our hearts out. The music, winnowed from the depths of her soul, was a deep communion with her and with one another.

This modest woman is an artist with words who says, "I passionately believe in the power of song between and among us. To this I willingly and humbly give my life."

Her songs have traveled with her through a spiritual and political journey with the people of Nicaragua. Deeply affected by the Nicaraguan women in their struggle, working with them in a simple subversive act of clearing away stones for land to plant their crops, a song companioned her: "You ask me of compassion, ask me tomorrow. Did we clear away stones when to clear away stones was an act of subversion, when to refuse not to love was to break some law? Did we answer God's prayer for rain, passing buckets from the river hand to hand to hand to hand?"

As she explains about another song, Spirit of Life: "It was not written. It was prayed into being." During a time of intense anti-war and social justice activism, she returned from a late-night meeting. "Even now I remember the despair.... Finally at home, my family asleep, I did what I so many times had done. I moved to the piano. In the dark I sat. As always, in singing my heart was freed. There was no plan or expectation in that moment, only a deep and immediate plea by a despairing soul to all that moved generatively through life. My ardent desire was to stay faithful to the movements I loved, to the people of these movements, their tally of goodness toward a world healthy and just for all, a world in which reverence shone among us. The prayer was complete. It connected me and continues to connect me with that which I need to continue on."

For four years, her journey has placed her in a little cottage on Cape Cod, where she has created a bird sanctuary in the woods, at the edge of the marsh. "I am deeply thirsty to sit among the birds and the grass of the marsh. The voice within me continues to say that it is right that I be here in this quiet invisible way."

The voice of her soul writes yet another song about the Creation that shelters her and her fellow creatures: "Heron lays a wing, a dark and shaggy wing, upon the marshland flying... Blessed the heron flying in the wind... Blessed the generations struggling to be free. For deep though the sorrow, shining in the soul, Life lays a wing shaggy and whole."

It is a communion with the land, a tender touch of what is real, what matters in life, that she writes about. It is a part of the tapestry of goodness and liberating movement that are woven so beautifully through her life and music. It is music to accompany us as we go deeper into our lives.