(You can really tell lately how bad I am at titles... really, I suck at them. Ah well.)

I have been having the coolest week. I am attending a week-long lecture/workshop with Don Saliers (of Emory Univ./Candler School of Theology) and Emily Saliers (of the Indigo Girls). The workshop centers around their recent book, which you can read about here. This week they're talking about music as spiritual practice, the musicality of liturgy, the analogies between the Saturday night concert experience and Sunday morning worship experience, and so on. As someone who doesn’t like the (false) boundaries that are often set up between the so-called secular and the sacred, I’m having a ball. I also love watching the two of them as father and daughter. It makes me miss Dad terribly, but rather than feel bitter, it’s just lovely to bask in the wonderful bond and mutual admiration they clearly have.

And, I got to meet PPB. Those of you who read her wonderful blog might appreciate that I was actually as excited to meet her as I was to meet Emily Saliers! But part of that is, as many times as I’ve seen the IGs and as much as I love them, I’ve learned this week that I am so not a superfan. The poor woman could barely eat her lunch between sessions—people were quizzing her, asking for photos, giving her drafts of their book to read (that woman was a little scary, eh Bear?). Through it all she was as gracious and unpretentious as could be. We opened the Monday night session with a group song, and I thought to myself, “I am singing with Emily Saliers.” And then I remembered that I have sung with her many, many times.

The wonderful thing about music (as we’re hearing again and again this week) is the powerful way it encodes memory and feeling within us. And so every time I hear the song “Our Deliverance” I will remember hearing her sing it for an audience of 30 pastors, musicians and artists.

She sang the song later at a public lecture in the National Cathedral, and I remembered leading a workshop with a friend in which we gave each woman in our group a small rock, and asked each of them to consider what they need most in their journey. Then each of us would take a woman’s rock, hear her state her need (example: courage), and we would say, “[Name], I put courage into this stone for you.”

I want to put the words of that song, an anti-war song, into the stone pillars of the National Cathedral. Maybe in the midst of echoes upon echoes, some words of peace seeped into the cold grey slabs. I can hope, can’t I? I can hope that when this talented woman, who loves the church in spite of herself, having been wounded by it (as have so many GLBT people), speaks about our need to proclaim the radical and expansive love of God to all people, that those words will have some staying power in the church. Just like I can dream that the smudgy watercolor light from the stained glass windows passes over the same drab stones day after day until some of that color bleeds in.

Or maybe that shouldn’t happen. Maybe that would just entomb the words, the colors. After all, we are the letters of Christ, written with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on human hearts.

Her words and songs, and the colors pouring through those windows, have definitely soaked into me.


Next on reverendmother: meeting bloggers, receiving gifts, and the joys of crossing over into real life, whatever that is.