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Awakenings
In
her classic study of Christian mysticism, Evelyn Underhill observes that
the mystic’s path begins with an “awakening of the Self to consciousness
of Divine Reality.” This emergence of the mystic’s “passion for the Absolute,”
she writes, can be either gradual or abrupt, but she believes the “abrupt”
type more common than that “unmarked by any definite crisis.” There are
many examples of these sudden awakenings in the stories of our forerunners
in the faith: St. Paul on the road to Damascus, St. Augustine in the garden,
and St. Francis in the church at San Damiano, just to name a few.
While
we are not all mystics, we can identify at least in part with this experience
of a sudden coming-to-consciousness of some new reality that God is revealing
to us in our own life of prayer. But are these “sudden” epiphanies really
so “sudden”? Even Underhill acknowledges that an awakening might only seem
“abrupt” because it is so “sharply marked off from the long, dim struggles
which precede and succeed it.” While these experiences may seem like the
sudden blazing of a new star in the heavens, they might have been quietly
smoldering underneath the surface for years.
One
such experience in my own life of faith happened during my visit to a traveling
exhibit of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1992. Walking through the display,
I was struck by the intensity of the images and emotions in the panels.
After about half an hour of wandering through the exhibit, it dawned on
me that each panel represented a human life — and that I was only seeing
a tiny fraction of the whole quilt. It all became too much to bear, and
so I turned to leave. But then I came across one panel that stopped me
in my tracks: It simply bore a name and a few lines of music, with no other
words. I stood there transfixed, wondering what the song was — for while
I had some training in piano, I had no training then in sight-singing.
I started to walk away, but the music held me there. I simply had
to know: What was it? And why was it there? What had it meant
to someone?
So
I resolved to figure it out. Key? D-flat. I couldn’t sing a D-flat
out of nowhere, but I sang up and down a major scale just to get myself
in some key. First note? An A-flat — the fifth note of the scale,
which I found somehow, holding it in my head. Next note? The D-flat above.
I sang upwards, finding the D-flat, and then sang the interval — A-flat,
D-flat. I was getting somewhere! Next came another D-flat, and then a C,
and then a B-flat—just walking down the scale, which even with my limited
ability I could do. And so I sang the line: A-flat, D-flat, D-flat, C,
B-flat. Ephphatha! My ears were opened. Tears welled up in my eyes
as I recognized in an instant a song that I’d sung as a wide-eyed child,
mumbled as a rebellious teenager, excised from my life as a quasi-agnostic
20-something, and reembraced during my experience in the catechumenate
earlier that year: “Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say: It is
well, it is well with my soul.”
It
was as if my whole life had been leading up to that very moment. That “sudden
awakening” to the indomitable hope of one community of love surrounding
one suffering human being was the product of 25 years of experiences in
my upbringing and musical training — without which I would simply have
walked past that panel and gone out for pizza. Could I possibly have known
that as I was singing “It Is Well with My Soul” on any given Sunday? No
— but by the grace of God, that song was passed down within the Christian
tradition until it made its way to one little girl in a tiny little church
in middle Tennessee in the 1970s, so that I would have it on that day in
1992 and so that I could share this story with you today, some 14 years
later.
Our
liturgies give us this gift over and over again. Through the cycles of
seasons and feasts, the repetition of the stories of salvation history,
through Body and Blood, blessed and broken and shared, the liturgy plants
the seeds that will one day awaken to new life within us, so that they
may blossom and bear an abundant harvest.
ML
Deanna Light is a published liturgical composer, guitarist,
vocalist, lecturer, and workshop presenter involved with parish music and
liturgy ministry. She holds a master’s in liturgical studies from the Catholic
University of America.
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