III

What Song Shall I Sing?

Were there no God we would be in this glorious world
with grateful hearts and no one to thank
- Christina Rossetti

The songs we sing, the music we write, the words we speak all serve to articulate the conditions of our lives and our responses to those often confusing, occasionally frightening, sometimes phenomenally joyful moments when we know the power of love in action. Love, or its absence in our lives, evokes all the pathos, the glory and majesty, the power of which we are capable in the harmony, even occasionally cacophonous as it may be, for even dissonance produces a certain beauty. Love, response to its presence or lack in our lives, produces more of the music we write or perform than any other single event. A hauntingly lovely ballad from the heart and lips of Clint Black to which I listened one Sunday afternoon was as theologically pure as one of David's psalms before the altar of Yahweh. The passionate, evocative words of love in the Song of Solomon echoes in the eyes of two lovers, Romeo and Juliet.

Not long ago I attended a concert presented by the local symphony orchestra during which the musicians performed Tchaicovsky's Fourth Symphony. The history preceeding his composition of this work is one of the tragedy of love as he lived it; and his music blends all the sorrow and anguish with the magnificence that love awakens in the human soul. Tchaicovsky's music, whether this symphony of love begun with ardor and ended in madness and wretchedness, or his fervent sonatas or the resounding "1812 Overture," are testimony to the power and passion love engenders. His love for his mentally unbalanced wife, his reverence for his Russian homeland and its people, all his love and ardor pour forth in the harmonies and beauty of his music in this symphony. The final movement, with its lovely Russian folk song theme, speaks joy in the midst of desolation.

Probably one composer who awes me more than any other, whose music speaks to the deepest recesses of my soul is Beethoven. As a piano student in my early teens I learned to play his dark and moving "Moonlight Sonata" and the deceptively simple "Fur Elise." These remain very dear to me, melodious harmonies, evidence the love of a tortured man for his Elise and for life. Yet, even more powerful is his Ninth Symphony with its incomparable "Ode to Joy." I shall forever recall this one symphony as a hymn to and celebration of the power of the human spirit and the love of freedom we all share as written so eloquently by a man who never heard the splendor of this music. The performance, to me, so fully expressing this love of life as I have never before heard was one of the combined orchestras under the baton of Leonard Bernstein following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Love reduced that barrier of hate to rubble; and love keeps such music alive in our souls. The music from the hands and voices of those who performed that evening echoed the passion and power of freedom to be, to live, to love.

Love Songs Speaking From the Heart

Some songs of love move me to tears, so surely do the words and the gentle melodies touch the very reality that is life itself. These are the songs speaking to the heart and express that which each of us shares with all others around us. While Tchaicovsky, Beethoven or Mozart may not appeal as composers of love songs to many others, there are songwriters who can reach into our hearts and evoke response of recognition of our shared humanity. There are poets whose words, penned hundreds of years ago, still find their way into the new melodies today's singers record and disc jockeys play on contemporary radio stations. "Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be." Was it Robert Burns, that Scots poet who loved his wild Highland moors and wrote with simplicity, honesty and clarity? Today, Mary Chapin Carpenter sings those timeless words in a lovely prayer of blessing, as beautiful a wedding song as there ever could be.

What parent among us has not held an infant and crooned lullabies to soothe the weary child to restful slumber? Which mother has not cradled her fretful, feverish child, singing the songs most effective to calm and relax the little one. I recall many nights with those of my children who would allow the lullabies to quiet them into sleep in my arms, although Amanda resisted such cuddling from an early age, and neither Catherine nor Ross was still for very long. Yet, those long-gone moments in the old rocking chair are precious memories of days that ended so soon. Those songs, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" being one of our favorites, were our love songs shared in the quiet. I listen to Elton John singing a recent hit "Blessed" and understand so well his prayer for a newborn child, one all parents share in desire to make the lives of our children good.

I pick up the sheet music from the stack on my bookshelf, some of which I have played for more years than bear counting, looking long and with many poignant memories at the score of "Scarlet Ribbons," recalling the high, sweet voice of a small girl with dark brown hair. Amanda sat beside me on the piano bench many times, sharing the song, one very special to her. She sang the words and loved them even before she clearly could enunciate the consonants and blends, phonetics characteristics making the sounds somewhat difficult for so young a child. This was a love song she could sing and probably still does to her children.

Love Songs Through the Pain

Many of the love songs we sing are cries of frustration, loneliness and spurned gifts, sometimes even mistaken perception of rejection. Often we cannot sing the words for the massive pain and tears that constrict our throats and hinder our breathing. We love passionately and with power so often, and we stand alone with open arms watching those whom we love turn away, blind to the love we offer. There is nothing so painful as love left unaccepted, even refused; and our love songs sung in those moments are those of agony and confusion when we feel forsaken and unlovable.

We often share the jealousy and blind rage of Othello who destroyed his beloved Desdemona out of distorted love. The power of love metamorphosed into ugliness produces those cries of agony in the music of the anguish tearing out our souls and laying bare our ability to destroy even ourselves. Othello stands over his dead wife, fallen under his strangling hands, and knows his jealous perceptions were distortions of his fear and doubt, a sad misconception so many of us share with him.

While I may not compose musical scores to express my response to love, poetry often finds its way onto page after page, speaking much of reality integral to my soul. Love, by its very nature, is creative energy and focuses its power much as the magnifying glasses we used as children to concentrate the sunlight onto paper in an effort to start fire. The love guiding and blessing my life evokes words in meager effort to articulate my thanks for the gift. The songs I sing through the words I write blend with those echoed across the universe in gratitude to the God who finds joy in our very being. With the understanding we exist out of the power of love because, quite simply, God wishes to share life and love with us, to give us the delights of this beautiful world, I write:

Created For Joy

Love speaks from depths of stillness where dwells creative power,
where lives that desire to bring forth life from nothingness.
Love yearns to manifest its being into unmatched beauty,
or symphony which harmonies yet have been unheard.

The vital spark that is life born of freedom-giving love
into a universe of possibility commences from that great desire
of love to share its joy in relationship, from longing to speak
the unmatched energy that flows from unconditional gift.

Love expects, creates and thrives in atmosphere of joy,
creating beauty by its existence, lavishing music, laughter,
on a silent, dark and waiting world until the brightness
that is purity of loving brings the universe to song.

We sing love songs in the night to remind ourselves to hope when those we love are separated from us by circumstance, miles and time. Those words and melodies are replete with tears, with longing we acceptably can reveal no other way, can share with no one in the silent, lonely moments. They speak of our fears and comfort us in the dark, reminding us, when we hear a song we share as special with those we love, we are not alone, reaffirming the ones we love share the longings, and miss our presence as we miss theirs. These same songs serve to assist us in our ceaseless efforts to find purpose in pain, hope when we feel bereft, rainbows in the rain. These are our prayers for ourselves and for the ones we love. I remember songs I have shared with those I love probably more easily than I do conversations between us. Even now, many long years since that first boyfriend left to go to his family, whenever I hear a song he loved, I think of him with fondness and happy memories. The words remind me, for it is a hymn, we always have a resting place in God's love.

Many times through the course of my life songs come into my conscious awareness at highly significant moments, unquestionable answers to prayer in a manner no other words would affect in quite the same way. This may be attributed to the fact music is very nearly my first language; I hear it first before I perceive any verbal declaration. Other people have written the words, composed the music to sing their pain, their joy, their prayers, to find some understanding in the confusion of living; these are the songs articulating the answers, often in subtle, yet highly effective meanings. I reflect on one relevant song as example, although several others would do just as well.

Several years ago I had reached the occasion in a perplexing, painful process of decision where action was required, only one course seemed appropriate considering the whole of the circumstances. For years I had struggled with the knowing the moment would come when I no longer would be able to avoid action and when inevitable complications would cause much pain, both to me and to others whom I loved. I faced the realities of a relationship become ugly and destructive rather than creative, one undermining dignity and ability to function fully.

While the details of the process, the anguish of that time is not germane to the subject, how I made peace with the decision and found the strength to act bears directly on what song I sang at that moment. I walked several miles along the coast of Texas that day, asking for some sign by sundown confirming the appropriateness of my decision. I sought an answer assuring me I would not leave others in an untenable situation, one promising there would be strength and love for them, as well as for me. Before the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico, late on the November afternoon I see still, I heard a song I shall always associate as promise, as the answer to a prayer. "You'll Never Walk Alone," that inspired melody from Carousel, remains a song of hope and promise, one I sing as reminder of love with us always, assertion we are never alone.

What Are the Love Songs of Prayer?

Each of us sings love songs specific to our individual situations, longings, fears and joys, to our hopes and to the dreams we dare to remember each morning. Each of us prays, however haltingly, words speaking the yearnings for ourselves and for those we love, for situations about which we care in the world around us. What we pray, the integrity of emotion and commitment we express in the silence and solitude in which we are most honestly ourselves, are of far more significance than how we pray. For many, though, the roadblock to the love songs of prayer is the belief the language must be specific and special.

Sadly, many people do not realize the most beautiful of love songs of our prayers are those which come from our hearts in simple, straightforward clarity. No other person can better express the desires of our hearts in more effective language than the words coming from the reality of our longings and pain, from our joy and desire to celebrate and to share the love we know in our lives. Many times I have lifted my hands as if in minimalist, wordless melody, a love song to the God I know can supply the words I cannot speak, so acute and powerful is the prompting for the prayer.

I Don't Know What To Say

Through the course of many years of spiritual retreats, prayer workshops and formal study in the art of prayer, the most universal objection I have heard, one I am certain I shall continue to hear, is "I don't know what to say when I pray." With apology to those who sincerely might believe this is a hindrance to prayer, to me this is tantamount to admitting one does not know how to talk. I more readily understand many people are tone-deaf and cannot sing or, even hear, any melody; but their prayers can be melodious and beautiful, nonetheless.

All of us have some ability to verbalize our thoughts, though some are more adept than others in expressing the full range of feelings and ideas. While there are many who find verbal expression of those feelings, fears, desires lying in the center of our beings very difficult to speak in words conveying the extent of their thoughts, all of us have some capacity to frame a thought in recognizable language, at least within our own minds. If we cannot utter the thoughts, we can act them or dance them or stand before a loving, accepting God silently with open hands and willingness to share the feelings not easily expressed in any other way but through the frustration and anguish that we feel. All of us, then, can pray in some fashion expressing our deepest thoughts and longings.

Perhaps, the person who feels an inadequacy in finding the right words is not experiencing the reality of inability to pray so much as realizing a lack of awareness of the presence of God in one's life. Introductions may need to occur during which those who cannot pray meet the loving God for whom their spirits yearn and Whom they do not yet know. It is true we do not feel friendship, affection or even much beyond mild curiosity for those we do not know. With the process of becoming acquainted we learn histories, personalities, mutual interests. We learn to love this new presence in our lives as we find acceptance and appreciation in the maturing relationship. Conversations engaged early in the adventure of meeting a new person, were occasionally halting and difficult, and begin to flow more smoothly and into more depth. Trust grows in the place of suspicion. One day a love song emerges. With the effort to meet Shekinah in the moments of our lives we come to know and to appreciate this loving, accepting Presence. We begin to pray.

There are numerous books available in countless bookstores offering an almost endless variety of how-to suggestions, some more meaningful than others, all with appeal to someone who has need of that particular style. There are just as many, it might seem, other books with short, pithy selections upon which to meditate. It is all a matter of testing the waters, much like going to a music store with a complete selection of love songs. Any one of us would be overwhelmed at the available wealth of printed and recorded music. All of this abundance could paralyze even the sturdiest among us who wants to sing the songs speaking the most clarity, the one who wants to pray in a fashion best articulating that individual soul. Rather, it might be easier to pick up the first love song, to begin with the first words coming to mind; commence at the beginning and see where the quest leads. Once we take the first step on a new venture, a fresh challenge, we are forever changed by the willingness to begin.

Prayer is, most truly, a glorious adventure into the love of God. I can think of no other more appropriate analogy for a developing relationship with Creator Spirit through throwing one's self headlong into the experience of the love song of prayer than the relationship existing between two people who achieve the unity the purest of human love can create. Indeed, there is little difference and, to be sure, that only in degree of authenticity and time. Augustine wrote of how we learn the love of God most clearly and truly from our experience of human loving.

Now, with the opportunity and incredible gift to my life of human love that is as unconditional and mutual as any could be, I understand his statement. It is true. My love songs have new melodies with richer harmony because I understand a little more fully how God loves me. I sing the prayers speaking of a richness of relationship before not possible until I learned more of the nature of the openhearted, undemanding love between two mature, generous people, even though rare.

The trek up the mountain peak of a prayer-filled life open to all the possibility in God's love alters perception, enhances abilities and manifests that power to live fully, as we are created to live. There is an eternal orchestra of such majesty and unimaginable glory playing an enduring love song when prayer focuses towards the Love who produces the instruments and composes the music, then stands as Master Conductor encouraging each instrumentalist to produce the beauty of melody and harmony.

Sing The Simple Songs

The songs I sing, the prayers I place before the God who knows my thoughts even before I can form the words, begin simply. Sometimes it is as uncomplicated as the awareness of my releasing all the cares, all the fears, all the problems as I exhale and I allow God's love and peace to enter and to permeate my being with each breath. Any of our prayers need commence with nothing more than our first thoughts, or as a process when we deliberately empty ourselves of all save the moment as we relax into the knowledge of loving acceptance, for God loves us and accepts whatever we think and say, who we are without judgment. Perhaps, this is the key to beginning to pray, the assurance we are talking to the One who creates and loves us, who knows us well. Psalm 139 expresses so effectively the song of thanksgiving to God as mother who gave us birth and knew us even as we grew in the womb of creative love.

There is nothing hidden or secret from this Mother; and the love she exhibits is exemplified by many of our human mothers in generosity and acceptance. Even the mothers who gave us physical birth, and nurture us with their occasional irritating propensity to demand and to control our lives out of mistaken notions of making our lives better, still love us as we are and accept what appears as our waywardness from their desires for us, never questioning how dear and delightful we are. We are beloved children always. Although some of us may not believe our mothers love and accept us because they exhibit characteristics of domination and control troubling to us and, often, propel us into rebellion at some point, the reality of the love of the majority of mothers still exists, while it may be undeniably cloaked. Our mothers desire only for us to be our best and delight in our love when we speak of it. Just as the dearest words our parents ever want to hear from us are those of our love for them, so Creator Spirit finds greatest joy in our expressions of love. When we pray we sing love songs, even if only the words that express our need to be loved and wanted. Those are our most honest feelings.

We begin our prayer, our song to the Creator who loves us into joyful being, with our recognition of the majesty and glory of the Spirit of God. For those who begin to pray following the pattern Christ set forth as he taught the disciples, the Psalms of praise are magnificent prayers in response to the power and presence of God. It is often more comfortable to begin with the hymns and prayers already written in these beautiful chapters. There have been many mornings when I approach my time of prayer with no words, even no desire to search for words; I turn to these prayers, used since ancient times to praise Creator Spirit. I find thoughtful consideration of the Psalms often leads me to respond with my own words, and prayer begins gently and naturally.

To Touch God's Heart

It seems my love song prayers of praise are effortless in the times when I hike mountain trails that abound with beauty of endless variety. During the year in which I lived in a minuscule old cabin in a tiny mountain village, I was surrounded hourly by more loveliness than I often could absorb. I spent hour upon hour on the trails, in the canyons, up the slopes and over the ridges, feasting on the wealth as it nourished my spirit while my eyes took in everything I could see, as my ears listened to even the breeze through the pines, as my nostrils breathed in the fragrance that is beauty itself.

I sat over the creek running behind the village on a boulder shaped by time for my comfort, feeling the coolness from the always-chilly mountain springs as the stream danced and tumbled and sang over the rocks and around the boulders. I watched as ravens, Stellar's Jays, wrens and countless other birds swooped and soared and danced in the sky above me. I laughed at the antics of the squirrels who teased the village cats from a safe perch high in the oak tree behind my cabin. I listened to the morning chorus of robins, orioles, jays and hummingbirds joining in my prayers. I began to realize, without doubt, Creator Spirit gave us this beautiful world out of the joy of being.

Although I sing and even whistle, often without conscious intent, I could not sing on those trails, in the canyons or on the ridges of that beautiful mountain. I was mute, my soul echoing finite, silent human hymn to the magnificence of God's gifts. I became most aware of the inarticulated love songs of praise, so much so there was no need to sing one day as I hiked up Bear Canyon above the village.

The trail up this narrow, steep canyon begins behind the village church, following the tumbling, boulder-strewn course of Bear Creek for the first couple of miles up to the flats. The love song the creek sang over all the rocks, down the dancing waterfalls, as it raced into San Antonio Creek lower down the mountain was music enough and served as inspiration for poetry and an allegory of love I began to write in late summer. The trail is relatively easy, although somewhat steep and usually narrow for the first miles. There are less strenuous sections of the trail, deeply shaded, cool even in the warm Southern California summers, although hordes of gnats seem also to enjoy the shaded portions of the trail. There are often hummingbirds higher up the canyon to share to beauty and to add their high chatter, laughter in the afternoon sun.

After traversing several switchbacks up the mountain trail leading high above the creek, although I could still hear the music in the quiet, I came out into bright sunshine on a ridge facing east, overlooking San Antonio Canyon, Ontario Peak and the village below. The first time I hiked up Bear Canyon I was entirely unprepared for the vivid contrast of snowcapped mountain range, brilliant blue sky, multitudinous variety of green growth over rocks of gray and ochre. The beauty was, quite simply, breathtaking, and there was not one song even near expressing my gratitude for the gift, the feast for my eyes and my soul. I stood, tears pouring down my face, lifting my hands and heart in wordless song of joy and thanks for the unending generosity of a God who gives from infinite love and for no other reason.

At such moments in our lives, when we touch the face of God in the beauty of the world given into our care and for our enjoyment, our love songs of prayer require no words; indeed, it seems almost sacrilege to disturb the love song creation sings with any additions. We can permit the birds to sing those prayers for us, the music of the creek emerging from the obstacles in its path to play the symphony of our souls' recognition of our God as a glorious, awesome God. We can pause on the steep trails up the mountain slopes of our daily struggles to examine the minute, almost hidden wild flowers singing praise with the perfection of their diminutive presence, existing simply because they are beautiful and, I am convinced, because they bring pleasure. It is recumbent upon us to recognize and to respond fully and appropriately in such moments when our silence is our only fitting prayer. We humans are so often guilty of bringing our electronic noise into the silences when silence is the necessary quality we most need. We can express our thankfulness most effectively at such times by our attentiveness to the touch of the Sacred in our lives as we stand in the stillness, seeking to allow it to communicate to us.

Love Songs of Gratitude

Is the love song of prayer, first of all, one of gratefulness? Without second thought, I would have to ask, rather, how can our prayers not begin with thanks? When we love with the generosity of spirit healthy love exhibits, we find it natural to express appreciation, to compliment the one we love. Any woman on earth will readily attest to the reality of how a small, positive, verbal recognition of some kindness she has performed or, even simply appreciation for her self as being, will turn even the darkest night into a rainbow of light when the one she loves speaks those simple words. The old song, "Try A Little Tenderness" was written by a genius of thoughtfulness. It is so simple, so uncomplicated, to praise another, to appreciate vocally the efforts and gifts others make for and give to us. Our readiness to notice the goodness in others, to speak of it, brings joy, light in the dimness of demands and ingratitude with which we all contend.

Why should we think the God who loves us, who is personal and involved with us more intimately than we realize, would not appreciate our thanks, the recognition of our spirits in a rousing cheer of "Yea, God!" for the wonder and glory of the gifts we enjoy? Phyllis, my sister-in-law, has always been prone to unexpected surprise prayer cheers and she gifted me with the realization if we cheer for our favorite sports teams, why should we not also applaud with just as much enthusiasm the God who does such good and glorious things for us. To be sure, I have received many sidelong, condemning frowns for what appears as irreverence. My response has usually been another cheer.

Irreverent? To be happy God gives to us generously, ecstatic when God enjoys our pleasure and creates us and the beautiful world in which we love out of the joy evoked from love? I am convinced love, the songs we sing to express our love, the prayers we speak and write and play and dance must be, more than any other expression, ones of joy. Love, by its very nature, is joyful and life-giving. We are most complete, most expressive, most creative, most fully alive when we love, when we are wholly involved in the acts of loving. Our love songs, our prayers, are most eloquent when we allow them the full range of spiritual, emotional and physical involvement.

Songs To the God of Joy

Throughout the Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Hosea and writings of other prophets in the Scriptures we read how Yahweh delights in her children, how we are precious, how God loves us and longs for us to unite with Creator Spirit in eternal, passionate embrace. It seems, to me, a God who has the delightful humor to create such a variety of creatures as baboons, hyenas, giraffes, gamboling puppies, the laughter of children, the joy of shared union between those committed to one another in love, is a God who creates for the pleasure of sharing the joy.

This is a God who accepts my cheers as wells as my music and poetry. This is a God who laughs with me in the joy of a fragrant spring morning when I dance on the mountain in the sunlight, who sends the eagle soaring above my head and the gift of the hummingbird song. This is the loving Shekinah who listens and loves and sends the gift of love in the form of one who I never expected to meet and who is matched so well to my personality, interests, desires and even my needs.

Because my traditions of prayer and of family background were paradigms of rigidity and guilt, as is unfortunately true of so many of us, it did not occur to me until recent years how I might sing love songs of prayer with my body. Those of us with primarily Anglo/European antecedents have long found ourselves restricted mentally and spiritually by a negative, judgmental religious heritage. Our churches have done us no good service in heaping such great, stinking piles of ugliness in our souls wherein we have learned nothing teaching us the value and beauty of our whole selves and of the world in which we live. The traditions of Jansenism and Puritanism stain the loveliness of praise, the practice of our theology and communal worship, dilute and deny the beauty and goodness of God's most glorious, intricate creation, humankind.

Return to the hymn of creation in the first chapter of Genesis. God created and saw all creation is good. God, who is all of Love, who is Goodness and wholeness and all beauty cannot create anything ugly or lacking in beauty of form, suitable to its purpose. While we may choose action and thought denying our beauty of being and soul, while we may destroy and remove beauty to replace it with the nothingness of darkness and ugliness, that is our action, not God's. It follows, then, who we are in our beginnings, physically and spiritually, is good and beautiful. It is our choice whether we remain so. We are created from love, to love in return. Our songs by which we express that love are just as readily and appropriately good and beautiful prayers expressed in our dance, prayers we utter with our hands as we serve others, love songs through the work we do to meet our daily needs.

Prayer And Forgiveness

Love songs include elements of pleading, longings often unspoken through other means. In some ways it seems we feel freer to articulate the deepest desires of our hearts through our songs, through the movements of our bodies in rhythm to music, spoken in the silence of tears that flow more easily than words at times. There are moments when we need not speak at all to the one whom we love most dearly. Our eyes may meet and smile, our hands touch, our hearts beat as one sharing a love transcending limits of place and time. So, too, prayer is the avenue through which we may move towards our Creator Spirit in honesty as we express our yearnings, our needs, our wants. We understand we may stand empty-handed and inarticulate, allowing the longings of our hearts to speak for us, knowing Yahweh hears the thoughts we often cannot say. Once we know we may ask or speak anything in the freedom of any manner we choose, we learn to trust and to know we are accepted and loved regardless of the lack of prudence, the selfishness or thoughtlessness we may occasionally exhibit in our prayers. We know we are free to give our nothingness, realizing God will fill the emptiness and quench our thirst from bounty and love.

It is through our acceptance of our emptiness, acknowledgment of our failures and mistakes, contrition for our sinful, destructive behavior we begin to recognize and to welcome the always available forgiveness. Our love songs and our prayers whisper our need to know we are forgiven by those in our lives whom we hurt and by Great Spirit. Through the coming home of accepting forgiveness we realize this gift is God's love song to us. We are forgiven and free to live. There is no more healing music than the words from our beloved whom we have wronged who speaks soothingly and honestly of forgiveness without judgment, acceptance without demand.

Yet, forgiveness, both to give and to receive, is one of the more significant difficulties we face in building and maintaining healthy relationships with ourselves, with others and with Creator Spirit. We are so inculcated with the notion we must prove ourselves, must earn anything and everything we receive, must somehow make ourselves worthy, convinced we fall far short of the absolute freedom we already own, freedom bestowed by complete and unquestioning forgiveness. The only requisite is our acceptance.

As we understand the reality of forgiveness through the love in our lives, whether it is expressed in the songs from those others with whom we share daily life truth springing comes from the faith and knowledge of God's love, we begin to know how to forgive. This is an often missing rudiment in relationship, mutual, unquestioning forgiveness. Its presence adds depth and increased recognition of our interdependence. The power of freely offered forgiveness, given without demand or judgment offers healing to such a degree unquantifiable in its effect on relationship. In some instances, that capacity, to forgive honestly and from the heart, can heal the wounds of broken lives, perhaps not restoring bonds long ago inflicted wounds destroyed, but reaching into the old pain and allowing it to ease and to find release.

Too many of our love songs begin with the pain we cause each other but do not reach satisfying conclusion when we do not acknowledge the need for or put into practice forgiveness. We find ourselves caught in dilemmas possibly requiring us to deal with our humanity and the wrongs we have done, unable to accept our weaknesses and to forgive ourselves. Are we so fearful of admitting we have weaknesses, ashamed of our failures? Can we not learn to trust in the love present in our lives as we trust the truth of forgiveness, not only possible, but necessary? Have we not yet perceived the healing achieved as the result of mutual acceptance and forgiveness?

Our inability to make peace, to practice the gift and acceptance of forgiveness underscores our inability to understand we have nothing to prove to those who love us, most particularly to the God who loves us first and last. We impale ourselves on the spear of self-judgment and guilt, not heeding the gift of freedom already available. We lock ourselves in to prisons, chained by our cruelty to ourselves. We do not even forgive ourselves for being the limited, needy humans that we are. Who are we to usurp the place of Jehovah, passionate lover of all creation who finds creation good? Who are we to cast ourselves as condemning jury and hanging judge in one gesture, when not even Shekinah does that to us when we behave our worst? Unconditional love neither expects nor demands. It is gift of freedom requiring nothing from us but our willingness to let love create the joy and beauty of its presence in our lives, willingness to hear love songs and to sing them in return.

Love songs of forgiveness convey their own unique, timeless beauty. In these beseeching, often anxious songs we voice our fears, our sorrows; we allow ourselves to reveal our vulnerability. We come closest in these moments of honesty to understanding without the healing presence of love in our lives, there is nothing giving meaning to life. We begin to realize our oneness with our world and with those who inhabit it with us when we recognize we share the human conditions of greed, selfishness, thoughtlessness and a host of other less than lovely characteristics. In forgiving ourselves and those in our lives we begin to build mutually accepting unity. When we stand, empty and needy, before the loving God who embraces us in that emptiness, when we accept that which is so readily and generously offered to fill and to heal, when we listen and heed God's love song of forgiveness we begin to understand we are home, we are where we want to be, within Shekinah's loving mother embrace.

We look at Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son, that masterpiece of forgiveness and humble contrition, and see ourselves as the son who has recognized his desire to be home as it has whispered softly through the clamor of selfish thoughtlessness. We feel no guilt, no condemnation in our vulnerabilities, our weaknesses; these are commonly shared human realities binding us together into family as we love each other through the pain and into wholeness.

Loves Songs and Prayer - Expressions of Trust

Ultimately, our love songs, our prayers, are the vehicles by which we most honestly express our trust in and our commitment to those whom we love. We use the words to place our promises and faith in each other into living action. We listen to and sing the words of countless hymns and contemporary songs, Baroque or Renaissance classics or old spirituals to commit ourselves to the love and its life-creating possibility. Music frees us to cry, to laugh, to rejoice, to plead, simply to speak love.

While we may not write the music or pen the words, there is someone who has already spoken the words to assist our efforts to give our hearts. There is a little Cyrano de Bergerac in most of us as we borrow the elegance of language and melody from some more gifted being to share the depth of feeling we wish to express. Those of us who are able to write words speaking the hearts of those who are not as adept, are delighted when we can share in the harmony of the universe as it listens to love songs to each other and in our prayers, our love songs with our God.

Prayer frees our souls to recognize and to accept a God laughing with us, sharing our sorrows, rejoicing in our accomplishments, yearning to share all the bounty of this world and of God's love with us, accepting us even when we do not accept ourselves. While we may feel more at ease by beginning our prayers with scripture, written prayers from centuries of tradition, or the many books of meditation helps, at some point we learn to allow our deepest self expression through whatever means of prayer speaks most clearly in the moment. We lay aside the pretense of our public face and stand naked in the warmth and radiance of God's love.

Just as we sing our adoration of our beloved, God sings delight in us through the words of Isaiah in the forty-first chapter: "I have called you by name. You are mine. ...I give ransom for you.....you are precious in my sight.....because I love you." The love songs Creator Spirit sings abound: the lofty, mighty mountains covered with pristine snow, pink in the evening sunset; the soaring, graceful flight of an eagle; the darting, quick movements and unexpected magnificence of the Anna's hummingbird in song; the laugh of an infant; the wordless, accepting hug of a friend; the quiet moment at the end of a day that allows a long breath as the light begins to darken, bringing the beauty of the starlit night sky. These are songs of love if we listen and see. We have but to stand, to be still. We will find the Yahweh of the burning bush, the Jehovah of the whisper after the fire, the earthquake and the wind, Shekinah who continues to create love and beauty, still sings loves songs through the touch of those who love us, through the sunrise each morning, the birdsong as we walk through the woods. It is for us to learn to listen.
 

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