Ten-Year Anniversary
Sep. 11th, 2011 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
klsiegel320I spent my day singing. For that matter, I spent most of this past week singing. Ten years ago, I was new to Schola, new to being soprano, new to studying voice seriously.
Now, from September to June, I spend my weeks singing - and then it's time for the summer church solo season. It is a small offering, but it is what I have to offer.
I reread my post from the five-year anniversary, and was a bit alarmed and saddened to realize that much of it could have been written today. I am still frustrated, and we as a nation are, primarily, still sitting in the ashes and wailing.
Some of us are beginning to get up and do something. The wars are ramping down; I live for the day when my own private prayers for my own dearest departed are not trumped, subsumed, overwritten by "honoring the fallen" of wars we should never have been fighting. More and more people are beginning to understand that healing isn't just going to be handed to us; we are going to have to work at it. We are going to have to lay aside our anger and our pride, and do the work that leads to wholeness.
We have a President who understands this. Unfortunately, we have a Congress that still doesn't.
This weekend was the first time, since the month of the event itself, that I have attended or participated in a 9/11 memorial of any kind. At first, it was both too raw and something I didn't feel entitled to, since I didn't personally lose anyone I knew. Later, it became almost an allergy; I tried to escape the annual banal jingoism, and that was mostly what it was, five years ago.
But Schola was there, that day. We were in touch by phone and by email, reaching out to be sure everyone was all right - and they were. We threw together a brief memorial concert, because singing is pretty much our primary response to just about anything; because singing was what we had to offer. It felt small to me then; small and unimportant, set against the background of a horror so monstrous.
I have learned much, in the intervening years, and moreso in the past three, about what it means to offer the gift one has. One cannot offer the gift one does not have; one can only offer what one has already. It is not necessary to know what that offering does, for those to whom it is offered; sometimes we are given the privilege to know, but it is not required. All that is required is to take in hand one's gift, and offer it sincerely, and allow Spirit to use the gift as may be best.
So as the 10th anniversary approached, we pretty much knew we needed to sing again. But what?
Would we wallow in the sorrow and horror and grief, and spend an evening among the unquiet shades?
No. On this 10th anniversary, we acknowledged the grief, but we sang of hope, of how we can find a way forward. We sang an arrangement of Amazing Grace, with a Kyrie embedded in it. We sang a setting of "Do not stand at my grave and weep," a poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye, and a setting of the e.e.cummings poem "i carry your heart with me." We sang our director's arrangement of Materna, under a reading by a long-time friend and Schola supporter who was a "widow for a morning," believing her husband had been killed in the second plane strike until several hours after when he was finally able to get word to her that he was safe. We sang a setting of the Prayer of St. Francis (Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace). We closed with a song called "Give Us Hope," which is jazzy and engaging and uplifting.
And I barely made it through. I wept through most of Thursday's rehearsal. I wept through most of warm-up last night. The combination of "Do not stand at my grave and weep" (which made me think of all those I've lost - Dad and Grandma, yes, but also all the rest who have gone in the past ten years) and "i carry your heart with me" (which made me think of all those I do carry with me, and how much they mean to me, and how much I owe them) - just took me apart, especially coming as this inevitably does right near the anniversary of my father's death.
Ultimately, though, I found - beyond my own extremely tender spots - the place from which we can minister, bringing with us all that we are and bundling it into the music.
Yesterday, I confess, I really was starting to wish we weren't doing this. Today, I have to say - I'm ever so very glad we did.
Now, from September to June, I spend my weeks singing - and then it's time for the summer church solo season. It is a small offering, but it is what I have to offer.
I reread my post from the five-year anniversary, and was a bit alarmed and saddened to realize that much of it could have been written today. I am still frustrated, and we as a nation are, primarily, still sitting in the ashes and wailing.
Some of us are beginning to get up and do something. The wars are ramping down; I live for the day when my own private prayers for my own dearest departed are not trumped, subsumed, overwritten by "honoring the fallen" of wars we should never have been fighting. More and more people are beginning to understand that healing isn't just going to be handed to us; we are going to have to work at it. We are going to have to lay aside our anger and our pride, and do the work that leads to wholeness.
We have a President who understands this. Unfortunately, we have a Congress that still doesn't.
This weekend was the first time, since the month of the event itself, that I have attended or participated in a 9/11 memorial of any kind. At first, it was both too raw and something I didn't feel entitled to, since I didn't personally lose anyone I knew. Later, it became almost an allergy; I tried to escape the annual banal jingoism, and that was mostly what it was, five years ago.
But Schola was there, that day. We were in touch by phone and by email, reaching out to be sure everyone was all right - and they were. We threw together a brief memorial concert, because singing is pretty much our primary response to just about anything; because singing was what we had to offer. It felt small to me then; small and unimportant, set against the background of a horror so monstrous.
I have learned much, in the intervening years, and moreso in the past three, about what it means to offer the gift one has. One cannot offer the gift one does not have; one can only offer what one has already. It is not necessary to know what that offering does, for those to whom it is offered; sometimes we are given the privilege to know, but it is not required. All that is required is to take in hand one's gift, and offer it sincerely, and allow Spirit to use the gift as may be best.
So as the 10th anniversary approached, we pretty much knew we needed to sing again. But what?
Would we wallow in the sorrow and horror and grief, and spend an evening among the unquiet shades?
No. On this 10th anniversary, we acknowledged the grief, but we sang of hope, of how we can find a way forward. We sang an arrangement of Amazing Grace, with a Kyrie embedded in it. We sang a setting of "Do not stand at my grave and weep," a poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye, and a setting of the e.e.cummings poem "i carry your heart with me." We sang our director's arrangement of Materna, under a reading by a long-time friend and Schola supporter who was a "widow for a morning," believing her husband had been killed in the second plane strike until several hours after when he was finally able to get word to her that he was safe. We sang a setting of the Prayer of St. Francis (Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace). We closed with a song called "Give Us Hope," which is jazzy and engaging and uplifting.
And I barely made it through. I wept through most of Thursday's rehearsal. I wept through most of warm-up last night. The combination of "Do not stand at my grave and weep" (which made me think of all those I've lost - Dad and Grandma, yes, but also all the rest who have gone in the past ten years) and "i carry your heart with me" (which made me think of all those I do carry with me, and how much they mean to me, and how much I owe them) - just took me apart, especially coming as this inevitably does right near the anniversary of my father's death.
Ultimately, though, I found - beyond my own extremely tender spots - the place from which we can minister, bringing with us all that we are and bundling it into the music.
Yesterday, I confess, I really was starting to wish we weren't doing this. Today, I have to say - I'm ever so very glad we did.
