Dear Friends,
How wonderful to rejoin All Saints my first full week back with Hymns in the Courtyard! I love that so many of you come to this joyful event: choir members and pew singers, children and young adults and retirees, members and friends of friends all joined together in song. This time there was a marked preference for the hymns in Lift Every Voice and Sing (LEVAS), and we ended with the All Saints’ anthem “Canticle of the Turning.”
We sang for 90 minutes straight and left the evening lighter of heart, joyful, more connected to God and one another (I hope our neighbors felt the same). All the research that says singing together makes you feel happy and connected was proven on Wednesday night!
Even as I write about this joyful gathering I am aware of the unsettling and worrisome events in our everyday and civic life. Why go on about a hymn sing? Well, because I think what makes life meaningful, what thickens community bonds, and what gives us hope, is this very kind of connection, the simple joy of being together, singing in tune together.
Environmentalist and poet J. Drew Lanham’s new book Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves captures some of this, especially in the poem of the same title. In it, Lanham braids together our history of struggle for racial and environmental justice and sings of how joy can be wrung even out of our hard history with both; he is honest about that hard history, the incomplete victory, and the need to keep singing our song:
Joy is the justice
we give ourselves.
It is Maya’s bird
sung free past the prison bars,
holding spirits bound—
without due process,
without just cause.
(You can read the whole thing or listen to Lanham perform it.)
Let’s keep singing and deepening our ties and strengthening our spines and thickening our community here at All Saints and out in our neighborhoods and city and country trusting that joy and goodness, like the luxuriant green of spring and summer can, will, spread.
See you in church!
Faithfully, Suzanne+