Hello and here is my essay as we enter into November! If you enjoy my writing, this is a reader-supported publication. You can upgrade your subscription any time for $5/month to get an extra monthly essay along with my audio narrations. (Some have told me they feel like mini audio books!) Thanks for reading!
Every Sunday I sing songs in a church. We gather together; we always start with music. It is liturgy, a single thread of words and notes that we wrap around our fingers, re-introduce to our hearts; we tie this thread tightly to hope and will it to never break.
We who gather start in different places, albeit in the same room. But every song is a step, the kind of dance where partners start across the room, the choreography drawing them closer, to once space, away from their respective corners until they’re suddenly able to touch, to support each other, to hold each other’s weight, if need be. We sing songs side by side, staring into our faith, asking for eyes that see, for ears that hear, for a heart that loves.
I once heard a man from Nigeria explain haggling in the marketplace. “It’s not rude, like Westerners might assume. Instead, it is through the art of negotiation that we find a place of relationship, a form of intimacy, even. We both listen, we both share, we both decide to move from where we started, ending up somewhere different in deference to what we’ve heard the other person say. It’s much more to do with relationship, a sort of dance that exonerates the other, that draws each other in to share the same space of agreement, than it is about simply trying to get what you want.”
When we lift our voices and sing, we tip-toe closer to each other. We negotiate with the truth. And the funny thing about the truth is that it doesn’t move, not even an inch, but we get to see new aspects of it. We talk about what we see and learn and hear today. And as we listen to each other, we move closer to the truth.
Recently my husband TJ and I went to an estate sale. Just the name alone—estate!—gives me visions of wandering around a castle similar to what Belle stumbles into in the movie Beauty and the Beast. “How much for this 17th century, French singing wardrobe?” I’d wonder aloud before moving on to the forbidden West Wing. But the actual estate sale we visited was nothing like that. Once I went to a British Amusement Park. Now, say the words Amusement Park to an American, and we get certain thrilling ideas. But the amusement park we went to in the UK had a manor you could walk through (yippee), some candy you could buy (like in any old gas station anywhere in the states), and one of those boxing rings with two huge Sumo wrestling blowup body suits you could try on. Desperate for any kind of amusement at all at this alleged amusement park, my brothers decided to don the sumo wrestling suits. The things were so heavy, they could barely even lift their arms to box each other, and ended up just laying on the floor of the ring looking up at the sky. Anyway, there weren’t any roller coasters. Not even a log flume or a merry go round or a splash pad to run through. There was a sign indicating a roller coaster, but all we found was a simulator that made us feel nauseous as it jerked us around and tried to convince us we were actually going somewhere.
All this to say, the British Amusement park was about as drastically different from Great Adventure as the estate sale we visited was from any visions I might conjure up from hearing the word estate.
We walked through a very normal looking house. Everything was for sale—I mean, even the cardboard boxes of sleepy time tea with half the tea bags gone had a price on it. There was a woman sitting behind a makeshift table who greeted us as we walked in. “It’s all for sale!” she said with forced cheer. I assumed she was related to the homeowner who had died. I judged her a little bit for trying to make money off Uncle Whoever He Is so fast. I judged her for selling the wheelchair that was still parked by his bed. But then I asked her directly, “Are you the owner’s family?” I said it with a proper amount of sadness.
“Oh my, no!” she said, laughing. “I never knew him. I’m just hired by the family to try to make whatever they can off all his stuff!”
Now that I knew she wasn’t watching me summarily dismiss everything her loved one had enjoyed in his home, I felt better, less vulture-like. So I decided to dig through the kitchen unreservedly (what else do you do). That’s when I saw a whole set of pyrex measuring cups. Now I was interested. I also noticed a new waffle maker that was still in the box, unopened. I motioned to these things to TJ. He noticed that, together, they equaled $30, and waved down the lady from behind her table. “I’ll give you $15 for both of these,” he said.
Her eyes got wide with offense as she said, “I’m trying to actually make money for the family and myself, ya know. The price stands.”
“You won’t budge from $30?” TJ asked.
“Not today,” she said, giving us zero doubts about her resolve. “But if you come back tomorrow, everything that’s still here is half off.”
“We can’t come back tomorrow,” TJ replied, “You sure you can’t just give us tomorrow’s deal today?”
Now I am not sure I’d ever actually heard someone scoff in real life before, but this woman scoffed. I don’t believe she could have looked any more shocked if TJ had offered to slow dance with her while his wife sings My Funny Valentine in Italian. She did not look particularly sad to see us go, but anyway, she would not be moved. She wouldn’t even think about being moved.
There was one time a woman got up in church. She shared about her husband passing, she shared about the light of God that was walking her through grief. She barely needed to say the words, though, because I could see it on her face. Not simply the grief, but the light, too. I could see that she was hurting and hopeful—both, at once. Two ideas that seem disparate mingled on her face in a kind of beauty that is unique to the human experience. Her words made me negotiate with my own feelings. Perhaps I don’t need to be so afraid; perhaps the worst can happen and there is still an invitation to live. It was hard to deny this might be the case when evidence of it was right in front of me.
Going to church—regularly singing these timeless songs about hope in despair, rejoicing in sorrow—forces me to leave room for negotiation. Makes me realize all over again that I don’t see everything. Perhaps my feelings are wrong, perhaps there is more I can learn, perhaps hearing someone else’s story will move me, change me, mature me, build me, convict me. Perhaps God’s creativity is greater than life’s own ability to be hard. Perhaps perhaps perhaps. Even that word belies the fact that there is more than I can see from here—or at least there might be, which is hopeful.
I have a friend who lost his son (there is a world of pain in those ridiculously small words). He was quiet for a long time, but when he was finally ready to talk about his tremendous loss, he spoke about ritual. He talked about how his already solidified practice anchored him when he would have otherwise gone adrift in grief’s considerable waves.
“Before my son died,” he said, “I was already in the habit of reading the Psalms every night before I went to sleep. The first night I came home from the hospital without him, I didn’t know what to do with my body, so I just did what I’d been doing for years. I read the Psalms. I read it through blurry eyes. I read it like a hungry man trying to find bread.”
It wasn’t magic for my friend. It was a slow crawl through pain and grief no matter what. But when he read David’s beautiful line—
I would have lost heart, unless I had believed
That I would see the goodness of God
In the land of the living. (Psalm 27:13)
—He was faced with hope. He had to stare at it, suddenly dropped on his plate, so to speak. He had the choice to take a bite, to mull it over, to see what might happen if he swallows. Every night, he’d do this until, one day, he realized he agrees. He still believes the goodness of God is for now—not someday, not after death, but now, despite the sorrow that had eclipsed his world.
When my first husband left, I did what I’d always done. I sang in church. I have always loved a microphone, always felt moved by melodies and lyrics, and grief didn’t change that. After singing one Sunday, somebody stopped me, “I know what you’re going through. How can you keep singing?” he asked, not unkindly. “I know you’re in terrible pain—how do you keep getting up on Sundays and singing these songs?”
I blinked back tears. He was right, the pain was terrible. “I…I think I have to sing these songs now more than ever,” I said quietly. “I need them more than I ever have. Singing about being sorrowful but ever rejoicing finally makes sense—and it helps me to sing. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have this ritual right now, actually.”
I am grateful for the regular practice of singing. I am grateful it has been steady throughout all of the seasons of my life. I am grateful that I make myself gather with other humans who are fragile and tired and weary and joyful and hopeful and trying to make it, too. I am grateful that, together and no matter how I feel, we sing songs about hope and truth and grace and love. We do this over and over again. Time has proven this practice to be valuable, a motor that continues to carry me.