When I was born
-- or something near enough to that so that it doesn't matter-- I sang. I can't
remember a time I didn't sing. Spiders. Buses. Bonnie on the ocean harmonized
with Christmas carols and Hinei
Mah Tov. I drank it in and sang it out-- every note, every key, every word.
Even then, I
knew that when I sang, I was free. Or freed. Something. I felt light and joy,
and I loved how people would stop when I sang, and watch me, in wonder or
something close to happiness. And when I was finished, when the song was done,
invariably, they would coo and smile and tell me how beautifully I sang.
And in that
exact moment, I knew that I was beautiful. I knew that I was loved. Just for
that instant, even as my face grew pink and warm, and my toes curled with their
compliments, and I felt like squirming under their attention, in that instant I
knew that I could sing and it was good.
I don't remember
a time I didn't sing. From first grade junior choir at synagogue to the middle
school chorus and my high school stage (with summer theater camp weaving all in
and through those years), name a musical and I was probably in it. Name a song
arranged in four part choral harmony, and I sang it: first soprano, reaching
flawlessly all the way up to F above high C. And oh-- it was all amazingly
good! For the space of that performance, and the handful or two of minutes
while the applause lasted and the congratulations echoed off the auditorium
walls, it was good and I was loved and God was near.
And when I was
18 or 20 or some other difficult and existentially angsty age, I decided I
would never sing again. There were a thousand reasons for my declaration, every
one of them reasonable, well thought out.
They were all
lies, of course.
I didn't sing-- refused to
sing-- because I was angry--with the world, my life, my family. And God.
Oh, I was especially angry with God! And what I wasn't angry with, I was afraid
of-- everybody, everything. Singing was the one thing-- the only thing--
that allowed me to step outside my own head and breathe, really breathe, and
feel the presence and comfort and absoluteness of God. In a world where the
ground was constantly shifting, where people loved you and told you lies, where
less-than and lost were my constant companions, there was God. And one day, at
aome impossibly vulnerable, hormonal age, I crawled outside the confines of my
head, and was met with emptiness.
Where once there
was God, now was a howling, empty loneliness, coupled with the absolute
conviction that I was alone and God had gone. Somewhere. Anywhere. Certainly
gone from me. I
thrummed like a taut wire: abandoned by God and fairly buzzing with tension in
the face of my inability to fit inside my own skin or into the steady cadence
of life the rest of the world seemed to find so easily.
I tried. I tried
to find God, to fill that gaping open space. For a bunch of years, I searched,
but eventually, I couldn't bear the thought of my abandonment. A few years into
that howling emptiness, so vulnerable and so desperately raw, my twisted logic
led me to the only possible conclusion that made sense: having been rejected by
God, I therefore rejected the one thing that felt like holiness, the one thing
that lifted me to sacred. I'll show You, I declared into the silence that
suddenly filled me: I will not sing. Instead, it was so much
easier, so much more right, to crawl inside a bottle and hide there for a small
space of eternity and my own personalized tour of hell. It seemed like the
right thing to do at the time.
So, for the next
couple of decades, I didn't. and I did.
For the next
couple of decades, I did not sing. For the next couple of decades, I hid inside
a bottle of whatever was handy, as long as it burned like liquid oblivion going
down, and made me believe, if even for 37 seconds, that I was not alone in the
universe, and the voices in my head stopped whispering their siren song of
self-destruction.
For the next
couple of decades, I yearned for the connection I had once found in singing.
And for the next couple of decades, I denied myself the grace of it, with ever
sip, every glass, every hangover. There was a
lot of denial.
For more than
twenty years, I did not sing. And then I got sober.
I got sober, and
they told me, all those happy, shiny people who filled the smoky rooms and the
cracked leather couches and the gunmetal folding chairs that had seen better
decades, let alone better days-- they told me to find God.
I didn't need to find God. Hell, I knew exactly where
I'd left Him. Her. The Deity. I hate the grammar of the Divine. God was locked
away in a private little room, watching. Watching everything
through a window that looked out onto the world far, infinitesimally far away.
God's face was the face of Compassion itself-- filled with kindness and light
and love. And God wept, as He watched, at the evil and cruelty and waste and
sadness that filled the earth, day in and day out, world without end, amen.
God wept, and I
saw that Her hands were bound with barbed wire, powerless to act, impotent in
the face of a desperately broken world aand desperately broken people. What
good was God, if God could only watch, and weep?
I may have known
(unequivocally) exactly where God was hiding, but I searched anyway. They told
me to, those happy, shiny, sober people. And they had something I didn't have,
something I desperately wanted: they had joy. They had happy. They sat
comfortably in their own skins, didn't seem to want to crawl out of it all the
time, into a hole or the dark or... away. And I wanted that. all of it. I
wanted to be made whole, to fit, to be forgiven. So if the price of all that
was to seek God-- seek God I would, in twelve step meetings and self help
books, spiritual guides and therapy. I would practice willingness,
because they said it was the next right thing to do.
I managed to
make a friend at a meeting; turns out we had more than trying to stay sober a
day at a time in common. He was edgy, sarcastic, broken, looking for redemption
and God, and he was Jewish. My lucky day. He tended to go temple-hopping
on Saturday mornings and invited me to hop along. Not every Saturday, but every
so often, I'd hop along with him, and look for God in God's own house.
I stumbled
through the prayers. I didn't remember the choreography or the Hebrew. I was
convinced that I didn't fit, didn't belong. I didn't know what the hell I was
doing, and felt gauche and ungainly. I had that odd and unsettling, questioning,
searching,
just-at-the-tip-of-my-out-of-reach-almost-discovery-of-I-wish-I-knew-or-maybe-I-hope-I-don't-discover
sensation of being closerthanthis to
an answer kind of thing. But it was elusive and missing, an almost-whisper of
grace.
And then one Saturday
morning, the choir sang.
From above me
and behind me, a host (I swear it was a host, not just a handful or two of
earnest choristers) a host of heavenly voices filled the
sanctuary with this glorious, transcendent sound, a rising arc of prayer and joy.
It was rich and full and resonant. I could hear in it, in every note, every
chord that stretched from one note into a thousand (I swear it was a thousand)
before tumbling back-- like water, or laughter-- into a single note again, and
there was God: unshackled, unbound, present in a way that took my breath away.
And I knew -- knew-- that everyone around me
felt it. They got it-- they were in it and of it and surrounded by it. They
were whole and filled and it was all meant for them. This was the day that God
had made, and they were welcomed into the miracle of that moment. I could feel
their faith, their acceptance-- of God, of themselves, of the world around them
-- radiating outwards, a parallel arc to this music of God.
I stood
transfixed. I felt the power of that faith, the grace and majesty of it. I
wanted it, every drop, every heartbeat, every breath. I could feel the hunger
in me build, a surge of want and need. I stood at the jumping off place, poised
and motionless at the gate. A step. All I needed was a single step through, and I would find it, all of it,
all my yearning answered-- faith, redemption, forgiveness. God.
And I couldn't. I couldn't step or
leap or even move. I could only stand, rooted, outside of that glorious, joyous
song, knowing that there was faith and forgiveness and God. For them-- all of
them, the world entire. But not for me.
I stood, and I wept, and I did not sing,
knowing that my fear was stronger than any faith, louder than any music, vaster
and more complete than God.
I was silent, and I knew that my silence
would last forever.
