Welcome one and all to the next edition of Through the Cracks. A belated Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrated; hopefully, we were all able to see something to be grateful for in this groaning and wounded world around us, maybe even a little hope. It is my very need to find and live into what Teilhard de Chardin called “constructive hope”1 that has inspired this version of the newsletter, which I will admit, has been a struggle to bring to life.
This year, obviously, I’m extending my understanding of the Thanksgiving season a little past the day of celebration. Sorry about that. Sometimes the reflective process just doesn’t line up with the calendar. But, given the fact that I began publishing Through the Cracks around Thanksgiving in 2022 (you can take a look at the first newsletter here), I needed to take a moment and say thank you to all of you who have found my work and taken the time to read it and be in dialogue with me. To say that thank you, I needed to offer you something thoughtfully created. I do not know where these words will take us, but “hopefully” we will go there together (I know, you see what I did there). Thank you, one and all; as always, your comments are most welcome.
And now, let’s chase some hope the long way around, through memories and music and more.
Happy Thanksgiving?
All during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, I found myself sitting and thinking about Carl Jung instead of the turkey that I’d just cooked and enjoyed. Why? I had just read a soul-provoking phrase written by Dr. Jung, the phrase “tension of opposites.” I couldn’t help but hear in Jung’s call to embrace this tension, well, a hint of hope for the complicated season in which we are living.
Remembrance, particularly the kind of remembrance associated with holidays, is complicated for so many. Memories flood us of those no longer at the table, absent friends and lost loved ones. We chafe at the discomfort we feel for all the ways that our own lives do not fit the conventional cultural picture of the holiday. But in this holiday season, in particular, our remembrances are not just personal. Here, there are stories that are wrapped into our very identity as a people, and the way we hold those stories, the way we retell them, well, that has influenced the larger world.
My sense of Thanksgiving identity has been torn asunder by my ever increasing awareness of the disconnect between actual history and the mythology that we have been told about it. There was no gracious sit down between the Puritans and the native population, no matter how many Thanksgiving pageants I have done where I played the faithful Pilgrim daughter. And George Washington may have offered grateful thanks for liberty at early version of the feast day in 1795, but those who prepared the food had nothing to celebrate.
The act of gratitude is an historical act; to be grateful requires a look backwards, as well as a clear inventory of the now. Which returns me to the work of Carl Jung, and his idea about the tension of opposites. In an interview following the end of World War II and the release of atomic fury on Japan, Jung was asked if it was possible for humanity to survive the atomic age. And his response was, and I paraphrase, that humanity would survive if there are enough people among us who can live with the tension of opposites that is at the foundation of our humanity, that we must all be able to accept both the dark and the light within us. Our ability to find gratitude for all the things, the good, bad, and the ugly, is fundamental for our survival. And to do that, we must face both past and present, with the clearest heart possible.
The best tool that I have to explain this tension of opposites is my own life experience. And there is no more complicated example to share than this one from my life as a musician. Take a look with me at the process by which the embodied tension around the musical genre that I often chose to offer at Thanksgiving weekend service walked towards the possibility of a more constructive kind of hope.
A Thanksgiving Pause
In the life of a church musician, from which I am gratefully retired, Thanksgiving week often provided a break from the hustle and hurry of the coming holiday performance preparations. Rehearsals for the main events, things like Christmas concerts, Sing-along Messiahs, seasonal Evensongs and more, these rehearsals often take a pause while people travel for family events before the performance demands of the season takes hold of all the time. I generally had no family commitments elsewhere, and so, more often than not, I was the designated worship leader for the Thanksgiving weekend service simply by default. Thanksgiving solo music is, well, limited, and while there was a piece of Handel that I sometimes sang, I preferred the better-known hymn/spiritual, Let Us Break Bread Together, a song associated more with the practice of communion than with the celebration of Thanksgiving.
Let Us Break Bread is one of those songs that most of us know…we’ve heard it somewhere. I mean, it was a favorite of Joan Baez, so even if you’ve never set foot in a church, there is a good chance you’ve made a passing acquaintance with the song. Personally, I met these lyrics as a child, as I sang them out loudly from a Presbyterian hymnal:
Let us break bread together, on our knees.
Let us break bread together, on our knees.
When I fall on my knees with my face to the rising sun,
O Lord, have mercy on me.
More than anything, it was the image of falling to my knees, facing the rising sun, that captured my spirit. That image remains with me even now, more than the sharing of bread, more than the idea of mercy.
For me, those words speak to that most personal of personal moments, the moment when we know that there is something more to our humanity than our physical presence and our intellect, whatever we might call that something more.
I know, that’s a lot to put on one line in a song in a hymnal, but that is the way music works for some of us. What I never did, as a singer and performer, was ask any questions about the song — where did it come from, who wrote it, how did it come to be here in this book of songs in front of me? Does it mean what I think it means? And I certainly did not ask what became for me the most important question of all — do I have a right to sing it, or does it and its meaning belong to someone else?
Separate and Definitely Not Equal
As I trained as a concert singer, that work included years of learning in German, French, and Italian, with the occasional dive into Spanish and Russian. I would NEVER approach a song in any of those languages without hours of painstaking research and translation work on the text, nor without learning everything that I could about the composer and the context in which the work was composed. And yet, for church solo music, I did no such preparation. The hymnal says composed by anonymous? Great. Fine. Just sing it. Listed as an Appalachian Spiritual?2 Great. Never a question about what the publisher might mean by that label, or even if there was such a thing. If a song like Let Us Break Bread Together was printed in the hymnal or in the latest volume of pieces for church soloists, we just sang it without tracking down which version of the text we were singing or considering who made those alterations. It never occurred to me that for this music, there was something that I would now call a cultural language that I might not yet speak. Two types of music, two practices in performance. One practice showing great respect for the art and the creation of the work in front of me, another practice completely ignoring the obvious fact there were human beings involved at all in the creation, people who deserved my respect and deserved to be known. And there, the first unspoken tension was created.
In the realm of concert music, the guidelines for this music were completely different, and yet, more respecting of that unspoken cultural language. Here, the rule was clear: no matter how often in church you might sing Balm in Gilead or My Lord What a Mourning or any of the other 10 or fifteen spirituals well known among white church congregations, in concert you would never sing anything labelled as a Spiritual if you were white. That prohibition conveyed to me the specialness, the sanctity of this music, a sanctity that reached beyond its use in worship services, but without ever telling me why. And there, the second unspoken tension was born.
One day, after years of performing on stage and in sanctuary, the tension between these ideas became too much to ignore. I felt called to sing this powerful and personal music and yet my professional world told me no. And, although I did have permission to perform it in my sacred work, I felt guilt about that performance and felt it was inappropriate for me to do so, because of the clear statement in the concert realm. The worst possible sin in my eyes was that of cultural appropriation, and it seemed that I committed that sin every time I picked up this music, even (or perhaps, especially) in a church setting. And so I started asking this question: do I have a right to sing this music anywhere, when I am descended from an enslaver, a soldier who added his sword to the destruction of the indigenous population in the Southeastern regions, when the simple color of my skin grants me more privilege in this society than I even understand?
Open My Eyes
Just as this internal tension became almost too heavy to bear, two teachers, one a new friend and the other an old, came my way to help me move on.
It was at conference presented by the Haden Institute in NC, an organization devoted to training in Jungian-based spiritual direction and dreamwork, that I had the chance to meet Dr. Catherine Meeks, Executive Director of the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing. I knew Dr. Meeks from other conferences and from her writings, but this was the first time that I had the opportunity to learn from her in a small group setting. And her topic for the conference? The interaction of spirituals and dream imagery. That meeting is what Jung would call synchronicity, a not logical but clear connection between personal psyche and seemingly random event.
There, in a conference room, on a North Carolina spring evening, I had a chance to ask Dr. Meeks all my uncomfortable questions about spirituals and my relationship to that music. I admit that I do not remember all of her answers. She was beyond generous with her time despite the late hour, as I struggled with my white guilt. She had no obligation to be so kind. But what happened after we spoke answered all my fears with more intensity than mere words could do. After we talked, Dr. Meeks leaned forward and took my hand and said to me: you sing this music, sing it with all you are, but know more than the words; know the story of its people and tell the story of its creation. You tell the story to those who might not listen otherwise. It was, for me, a revelation, a revelation that said to me that I must use all of my skills as a concert singer and a storyteller and show this music and the people who created it the deep respect that it earned through expression and survival. This music deserves more from me than the work of any German composer. Her words and that simple gesture invited me to reach back across time and make a human connection that my own ancestors failed to make. If I was to sing this music, I must do more than the music on the page. And with her words I could begin to feel that tension of opposites within me begin to create something new, that this very tension might be the road to change.
More encouragement to sing and tell the story, and the tools to help me do just that, came from an old friend and teacher, Dr. Eileen Guenther of Wesley Seminary. Dr. Guenther is the author of the the most complete and accessible reference work on the background of the development of the spirituals to date.3 She offers all of us these words from an interview with Anton Armstrong of St. Olaf College, an interview that appears in Andre J. Thomas’s volume, Way Over in Beulah Lan. Armstrong speaks words that shine a light on the way through the tension when he says:
In the twenty-first century, these slaves’ songs transcend any one race of people and have become a universal musical expression of people seeking release from whatever personal or society oppression enslaves us. They provide us with an inspiring treasury of song filled with the human exploration of pain, pathos, hope, courage, faith and freedom.4
You cannot doubt the humanity of those who created this music when you sing it. That humanity is there in every moment that the singer or the listener feels deep resonance with the pain, the joy, and the glory expressed through music and word. As Guenther writes,
Spirituals are the essence of transcendence, art born of the pain of slavery that has revived to shine a light on the horrors of enslavement. …They are a testament to the creativity and resistance of the enslaved.5
Jung’s very tension of opposites lives in this music. And this tension must be present in every performance, a tension that lives still in the actions of my ancestors and the ancestors of the creators of these songs. The tension that is the darkness of our bleak history mixed with the glory of the human spirit that allows it to survive unspeakable tragedy, and live on with the promise of today and tomorrow. With every note, I must tell the story of what has been and what might be, as well as what is now.6
Now I get what Jung is talking about. Our ability as human beings to hold this kind of complexity in all its potentiality, without fear and without guilt, with our eyes fixed on that possibility that there can be something better in the now and in the next moment, this grants us a kind of freedom that is not available to us in any other way. It is a freedom to see past the dichotomy that forms the tensions in the first place, into the possibility of a third, a different way. And in that path beyond, we have the chance to stop our identification with the accumulated ancestral shadow7 expressed through our history, a shadow that we all carry in the stories we know and the stories we do not know. And therein lies the potentiality for healing. Therein lies the power of hope.
Holding in Tension = Constructive Hope
If our eyes and our hearts are open, we cannot escape the truth that our American Thanksgiving celebration. Really, every single day of our lives on this planet, presents us with a weird combination of past and present and future, a swirling mix that carries a sense of guilt for actions that are both ours and not ours directly, the hold over mess of things we cannot change but yet that are a part of everything we love and hold dear. Knowing a little bit more about that tension that guides each and every breath we take, I have a better understanding of what Teilhard de Chardin meant by the phrase constructive hope, the place where I began this rather odd reflection on a very American holiday.
Constructive hope is not wild-eyed optimism. To me, it is a kind of hope grounded in clear-eyed reality, a hope that embraces the damage that has been done and the potential for healing within it. Constructive hope cannot exist unless we embrace the very tension of opposites that Jung speaks of, a tension that allows me to sit at the table last Thursday evening and give thanks for all the blessings in my own life, while knowing the work that must be done on behalf of others, the desperate call to all of us to participate as we can in a world that cries for tikkun olam, healing and wholeness.
Chasing Hope the Long Way Round
So now you know a little about what I mean when I call this holiday season complicated. Guilt is never the answer; it leads to a failure to understand the possibilities that still exist because it looks only backwards. But in the face of tension, gratitude and hope can help us find the strength to move toward peace. So I will end this Thanksgiving reflection with my gratitude for those who survived the struggle long enough to tell me the story of their human experience, that I might work to do better myself, by those around me, by those I will never know, and by the planet on which we live. Most of all, I accept the obligation to continue to tell their story, as best I can, any time I can.
And, I have a new way of remembering for this day and this season. As I fall on my knees, with my face to the rising sun, may I live in the hope that something, no matter how small, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, is possible, if only, as the Shaker’s say, I just pray AND move my feet.
I first encountered this term when reading through a prayer missal created from the writings of Teilhard de Chardin and it has stuck with me: Teilhard de Chardin Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Kathleen Deignan and Libby Osgood, Teilhard De Chardin : A Book of Hours (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2023).
Particularly in older hymnals and collections, you might see a work referred to as an Appalachian spiritual or even, sadly, a White spiritual. I always found the designation confusing but did not question it.
Eileen Guenther, In Their Own Words: Slave Life and the Power of Spirituals (St. Louis, MO: Morningstar Music Publishers, 2016).
Anton Armstrong quoted in Eileen Guenther, “Cultural Appropriation: Who is Entitled to Sing Spirituals?” The Hymn 71:4, Autumn 2020, 44-45.
Guenther, “Cultural Appropriation,” 45.
I would be remiss if I did not tell the story of the song that started this reflection, the beautiful Let Us Break Bread Together. Sadly, we do not know much. Dr. Carlton Young suggests that the music was formed in the Gullah/Geechee culture of the enslaved around St. Helena’s Island in South Carolina. We do know that is one of the early locations from which it was collected by folklorists and recorded in the volume Saint Helena Island Spirituals (1925) by Nicholas Ballanta. That version included the line “When I fall on my knees…” Dr. Guenther suggests that the song comes to us from the Commonwealth of Virginia, where it was known as a calling song, to secretly announce an early morning service of worship, an idea supported by slave diaries of the area. C. Michael Hawn, “Let Us Break Bread Together,” Discipleship Ministries: History of Hymns, accessed 11/14/23. https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-let-us-break-bread-together. Guenther, In Their Own Words, 109-110.
Jung’s original theorizing about the role of shadow in our psychological and spiritual makeup has, sadly, been much distorted in popular literature. Rather than representing only the darkest forms of human nature, in binary juxtaposition to our better nature, the shadow as an archetypal form represents unknown characteristics that are part of our deeper self, characteristics calling out for our deep self-exploration. The shadow is, most simply, an unconscious part of our being that does not align with what we think we know about ourselves. It can represent either positive qualities or negative ones. As a construct, it can be applied to cultures as well as individuals. Sandra Easter, author of Jung and the Ancestors: Beyond Biography, Mending the Ancestral Life (London: Aeon Books, 2016), suggests that the shadow transcends time and generations as well.