Four Christmases

At my Minnesota college, the biggest event of the year was neither homecoming football nor even graduation. It was Christmas Festival, a four-day musical celebration during which ten thousand people descended upon campus to wear Norwegian sweaters, to eat lutefisk  and lefse in the cafeteria and listen to the spectacle put on by St. Olaf College’s five auditioned choirs and its orchestra. That is (in part) why I chose to study there, to immerse myself year after year in perfectly blended anthems to baby Jesus.

I did not know that each November, five rehearsals per week would spin lyrics and melodies into my bones, and that those songs, like a scale, would measure out for me the contents of my heart. Christmas has a funny way of making us aware.

*

My first year, I signed up to give the devotional before our first concert. I signed up because I thought I was spiritually deep and had so much to say and not because I love speaking. That afternoon I ripped up paper after tear-stained paper trying to figure out what to say to 100 of my peers who were cooler than I.

So I showed up with scribbled notes and told the choir that our music, which was about Light and Grace being born within us, had something to teach us about grace. We didn’t have to be perfect. We just had to be present and recognize the holy before us.

My words were ahead of my heart. The whole concert through, my mind babbled. I thought I had worried too much what others would think of my talk; I thought about how it sounded; I thought about my brother and godparents visiting and how I could get my work done in time to go out to dinner with them after the last concert; I thought about how I was not really thinking about Jesus, how I was unrelentingly focused on myself, how therefore I was not good enough for this beauty and this moment and this Savior.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, I sang at the end of each night. I was unsettled.

*

I was a sophomore, and something was shifting in me. I was hurting. I had become entangled in painful new experiences. I didn’t know how to make sense of people, or myself. I was tired. The worst of “faith crisis” was yet to come, but the wondering and wandering were beginning.

O why should I wander an alien from thee, or cry in the desert thy face to see?

My comfort and joy my soul’s delight—O Jesus my savior, my song in the night.

I sang the words over and over, harder and harder each time, trying to mean them, trying will Jesus to comfort me. What reached back to me was silence.

In the middle of our Saturday night performance, I thought, How absurd we are, singing to this baby who was born 2000 years ago, calling him God. It seemed absurd in the way that if you look at the letter “h” long enough, you no longer recognize its shape or connections or meaning. It becomes only a collection black lines constructed haphazardly on a page.

Were the rocky friendships and faltering prayers just haphazard elements of my life now? Or was there a pattern? Stay with us, Lord Jesus, stay with us; it soon is evening and night is falling, we sang. I wondered if I believed this, or only hoped for it. I wondered if there was a difference.

*

Junior year: I was broken and small and lonely and full of an overwhelming sense of loss. For two weeks now I had been crying daily. I had ended a relationship that was good and affirming and simply not right. The innocent faith of my childhood was gone, being replaced with something that was still growing, still feeble, still slow. I had lost even my sense of myself.

I had not, however, lost God. I could not quite name it, but I had not lost my belovedness, nor my chance for a dazzling new beginning. Along with my sadness, there was in those nights an almost imperceptible sense of possibility. God so loved the world, we sang, and the conductor told us that the whole song was in the word “so.”

In just a few weeks I would travel to East Africa, and I would love its people and its land and its language and its version of me. I would meet, in great humility and sadness, some wonderful friends and my future husband and a sense of the miraculous that would pull me back to a lasting kind of joy. My friends back in Minnesota would chart their own new paths, some joyful, some more painful than ever before. In all of this, we would be so loved.

*

In every Christmas Festival, there is a magical moment—the choir has taken our places in a great circle around the audience. We are ready to sing our first two songs in the round before processing to the stage. The lights dim to black; the conductor raises his arm; there is a split-second of darkness, silence; the room is pregnant. Then the first lovely aching note of the strings is played, and perhaps a chime is struck, and we have begun.

What I don’t realize until much later is that we hold that empty moment in a tiny cavern inside us and we carry it with us for the rest of the night and it is the hope and expectation from which all our music springs.

*

We were seniors now, and we could scarcely believe it, in the way that twenty-two year olds think time goes by so fast. Before our final performance, Sunday evening, the other senior girls droned on about how they would be sobbing when it was all over, how their voices would crack and they would not be able to sing the last chorus. I, ever slow to process, was sure I would not cry.

After the last cutoff, the audience stood in ovation and I looked out over that crowd one final time. That’s when I spotted the woman, with newly graying hair and a wrinkle or two and a Norwegian sweater like everyone else. Her eyes were shiny with tears and she just kept clapping and clapping, and I could feel the depth of what this music meant to her. Perhaps she had once sung on this stage; perhaps she had been divorced or lost a job or her mother had cancer; perhaps her daughter, who had never quite found a niche in high school, was singing in the front row of the freshman choir; perhaps she hadn’t really heard, for a very long time, that God dwells among us in love.

For the first time in four years of singing, I imagined the life of the audience along with my own. I noticed that we were all there, together, wondering and worrying and over-analyzing and zoning out and then suddenly being caught up all together in the beauty of it—inexplicable, unreasonable, hard-to-believe but absolutely-rock-bottom-still-there. 

The palpable sense of God's love surrounded us all. Tears were streaming down my face.

A fool's heart

It is my first day of divinity school, and I have decided I need music in my life. I bike over to the music building and ask an undergrad where the practice rooms are. They are gloriously empty, and I find a beautiful Yamaha and sit down to practice for my choir audition tomorrow. I play through a book of spirituals, trying to pick one that sounds good with my voice range, one that my rusty vocal chords can handle.

I flip to Deep River and blink at the high A on the page, but decide to give it a try anyway. I play the intro and begin. It is a beautiful song, and when I reach the climax-- "that promised land where all is peace" -- I nail the high A. I sing it again, and again, and again, and I am in love with singing, and I am convinced this will be my place of refuge over the next three years. The practice room will be a prayer chapel, a place of worship, a break from heavy words and ideas.

In the afternoon I go back to run through one more time, but the practice rooms are full. Several undergrads wait in the hall. I decide to go home.

I get dinner in the oven and my roommates are gone and John is outside studying on the back porch. I find a the starting pitch on Youtube, and begin my song. I am happy, I am happy, and then I get to that climax again, the one I nailed six times in a row this morning, and I splat. I try again, and that gravelly crackly thing is in the way and I can't sing it anymore. It's not as though it's out of my range; there is a beautiful high A on the other side of the gravel--I know because I heard it this morning. But tonight, there is something in the way. I try ten times, probably, but I can't find a way to hit it consistently like I was this morning. This piece will have to go. I'll sing the safe piece for the audition instead, the one that sounds good enough, I hope. And then I will just cross my fingers that in the "warm-up" part of the audition, I can fake my way through the high notes.

"You sounded amazing," John says when he comes inside, but I am grouchy. He must think I'm being a perfectionist. He must not have heard it through the glass.

So I sing for him, demonstrate for him for the first time what it sounds like when that thing is in my voice, in my way.

He gets it. He agrees I should sing the safe song.

*

This isn't about an audition, though.

This, my friends, is about vulnerability and failure and longing. In this moment, it all comes back to me. This pattern started at age sixteen, and all through college I sang through and around it, some months thinking maybe I'd finally overcome that thing and could sing freely again. Clearly, I never quite have. This is the shape of my musical life. This is the tender piece of my heart which will always produce a tear. This is about when the object of joy and refuge and beauty becomes an object of frustration and inadequacy.

This is about the question, "Do I want to risk it all again? Do I even want to sing if it will dredge up all these emotions again?"

But I have a fool's heart, a longing for that snippet of beauty from this morning, apparently at any cost. So of course the answer is yes. I want to risk it. I want to sing.

And I will find a place to do it whether I make this choir or not.

//
(If you're interested, here's the back story on my saga with singing and failing and splatting high notes.)

I want so many things.

I want so many things.

Why do I want so many things?

I love people. I want to listen to them, cry with them, teach them, inspire them to be the selves they were created to be. I want to feed them and free them from prison and sing with them and help them find wholeness. I want to love them, to love them in North Carolina and Maryland and Minnesota and Gaza and Bangladesh and Tanzania. I want to reconcile us all with each other—the women and men, the liberal and conservative, the rich and poor, the young and old, the black and white and native and Latino and Asian and Arab and Jewish and everyone in between.

I love the arts. I want to write beauty and vulnerability and redemption. I want to sing with the spirit, to play the melodies and harmonies of hope.

I love this earth, this creation. I want to run and hike and swim and climb. I want to learn and teach us all to eat the fruit of the land rather than the factory, to find goodness and simplicity in the everyday processes of growing and eating and coming and going and waking and sleeping.

I love the church: its babies and nonagenarians, its liturgy and communion and song and scripture, its touchy-feely sharing and tearful prayers and most of all the God who is creating and recreating us all. I want to see the church willing to die and come alive anew.

I want so many things.

I cannot have or do all. This life, this in-breaking kingdom of God is too rich for me to drink it all in. And if I am to give myself fully to this world, I will have to choose: between the piano and the garden or between Maryland and Tanzania or between the incarcerated and the nonagenarians.

What I mean is that I have this one fleeting chance, as we all do, to run at the world holding all the love I can.

And when I choose where, specifically, to run, I will choose also where not to run. I will lose pieces. I will let go of the other dream, the other country, the other song. I will release them into the air and pray one day they come back and find me further on the journey.

I suppose in all truth, it is a good problem to have: the desire to love and create and heal more than is humanly possible. A heart too full to narrow itself to one passion.

The fullness in this heart, though—I just want to bring it to the right place.

I want so many things.

Losing my voice

After college, I resumed driving the old Taurus station wagon I used to drive in high school. One day when I was cleaning out the car, I found some old cassette tapes and popped one in.

It was a recording of one of my high school voice lessons with Ms. Eden. She was having me warm up my voice and, as usual, I was having trouble with the high notes. She kept trying different approaches, encouraging me to relax, breathe, keep a lighter tone. I kept trying to hit those notes. And then I burst into tears.

I shut off the tape. It was too hard to listen. The rest of the drive, I zoned out, remembering...

I was looking in the mirror, watching the shape of my mouth and looking for jaw tension. But I was not seeing tension, I was seeing tears in my eyes because here was yet another day I was not singing what I knew I could sing, and I did not know where my voice had gone, or why. After weeks of trying to hold it in during lessons, I cried.

And Ms. Eden sat me down on the couch and let me dry my tears and breathe again, and she said gently, “You seem very upset. Is this bigger than just singing? Do you feel like you’ve lost your voice in other parts of life?”

I shook my head fiercely—my eighteen-year-old identity was surely solid. I just loved singing too much to have it become so hard, so painful, so full of failure.

Photo by Phil

*

Ms. Eden was my third voice teacher.

My first voice teacher was my mother, who taught me to sing at bedtime, in the car, with a piano, while playing a tambourine in the local music class. Before long, I was singing solos at church and in the school talent show. It came naturally. I got nervous playing the piano or giving a speech, but I never got nervous singing in front of others.

In tenth grade, I was singing in the school and church choirs and had started my own a cappella group with a friend to prepare for my future as a choir director and music educator. There was only one thing missing—formal voice lessons.

So that January, I met my second voice teacher, Kelli—a big woman with a big soprano voice and an even bigger personality. Within the first month of voice lessons she had begun dramatically calling me, “EKATERRRRINA” as an encouragement to develop a big, operatic soprano tone. After a few months, I seemed to be making progress. That May, I auditioned for the top school choir and was accepted. My a cappella group was gaining reputation. Junior year was going to be perfect.

Over the summer I went to camp for six weeks and didn’t sing much other than church songs.

On the first day of school, my high school choir director had us sight read a piece of music we were going to sing. On the third page of the music, the sopranos got into the high F and G range. These are high notes for the average person, but not very high for an experienced soprano. I opened my voice to sing the line, and a terribly unnatural cracking noise came out instead.

I laughed nervously and hoped no one noticed. Apparently my voice had some catching up to do, from the summer!

I went home and fished out my voice lesson songs. I plunked out warm-ups on the piano and sang along. But the same thing happened every time I got into a higher range. Croak-scratch-silence.

I pounded my fist onto the piano keys in frustration.

*

Voice lessons became torture. It didn’t matter how many times we stopped and went to a lower key. When we went back up, I couldn’t sing the notes. Or sometimes I could, but only after the croak-scratch preceded the note.

So many people asked me if maybe my range had just changed? I heard it so many times I wanted to burst into tears when someone asked. A singer knows. When you are out of range, you are squeaky and off key and it feels stretched, but you can still sing the note. This was different. I had the range in there still. It did not feel stretched. But it felt like something was blocking my notes from coming out.

And no, it also was not a physiological problem. I went to the doctor. They stuck a giant scope up my nose and down into my vocal box while I tried not to gag. There were no polyps or nodes or scratches on my vocal chords. There was a little bit of excess mucous, the doctor told me as though he only wanted to be able to tell me something. He prescribed an anti-mucous spray and Kelli seized the idea and insisted I drink more water and wear a scarf all the time. Because that’s what singers do—Ekaterrrrina!

By the end of the school year, I was able to fake it enough to make choir manageable. I could sing the Fs and Gs, and maybe only half the time the croak-scratch would come before the note, and if I concentrated really hard and sang it really forcefully, half the time it would just come out, and I would breathe a sigh of relief. Voice lessons were another story. Kelli would smile and babble and have me lie on my back, or squat down as I sang high, or point my finger at the imaginary ribbon of sound I was attempting. And I would try and try and try, and come home and crash on my bed and sob for hours.

*

It was around this time that I dove deeper into my piano studies, playing a couple hours a night, sometimes in the dark, sometimes with tears in my eyes.

It was around this time that I made audition tapes for several college music programs, in both voice and piano, but I started leaning more towards piano.

It was around this time that I took an environmental science class and got excited about the demographic transition and the food crisis and international poverty.

It was around this time that I decided I was not going to major in music to become a music teacher. I wanted something bigger than suburbia and teaching some kids to sing. I was going to study English and Environmental Science and then I was going to save the hungry people of the world.

When I arrived at college, I majored in English and minored in Environmental Studies and traveled to Bangladesh and Tanzania to learn about the hungry people.

Halfway through my first semester, still battling the singing problems, I was halted one day, by the music we were singing in choir. Sigrid Johnson explained to our choir how to sing the Latin “lauda” like a praise, strong and free—and how to sing the same “lauda” like a plea in a sad moment, dark and full of aching. I was full of aching, and full of the music, and I rushed back to my dorm room, thinking, music can save the world too. For twenty-four hours I scoured the course catalog and tried to figure out if I could still switch to a music major.

But no, it was too late. And it wasn’t what I wanted anyway. Right?

*

We still don’t know what happened to my voice that year. I quit taking lessons from Kelli Young and had two amazing voice teachers over the next five years, Lisa Eden and Sigrid Johnson. I returned to doctors and clinicians and tried many techniques. At some point I started explaining it this way: Kelli Young was a big woman with a big voice. I was not. She tried to get me to make a sound like hers, but I had to push and force my voice to do this, and I learned some bad techniques.

And even though Ms. Eden worked through it with me during my senior year of high school, and even though I made the all-state choir that year and sang a high “C” in my recital, and even though three years with Sigrid Johnson in college helped me work on breath and healing and loving singing again, and even though I remained a first soprano—

It was never really fixed. It was never easy and free, as it had been. I don’t sing classically anymore, but if I did it would still be there, at least a little.

Sometimes when I hear a song that touches me, I wish music had become my career. I wish it had become my life. Sometimes the questions come, and they are enough to keep me up at night. Why did croak-scratch-silence come into my life? Why did the high notes never come back, no matter how hard I prayed, no matter how long I practiced? Why did I never sing in the St. Olaf Choir? Why did I finally quit voice lessons and go to Africa instead? Was I expanding my horizons, or giving up? What would have happened if I had never lost my voice? Will I ever have the opportunity to fully express my music again?

For all those years, it was music that would make my heart full. These days, there are many things that can fill it—maybe not quite as full, but still. A conversation with a good friend.  A book that feels like a good friend. Helping a student achieve a goal. An impromptu jam session with my brother when I am home. Praying in silence as the sun peeks out from behind the river and the trees. Writing my life and sharing it with all of you.

Maybe all of these things, in part, have become my voice.

Let me be clear. That still doesn't give me an answer to the whys and what-ifs. This is not an attempt to gloss over or try to tie loose ends together in a nice little happy-face package. A loss is a loss, and that is a real thing.

But there is also what we do have. There is also the way unanswered prayers and detours become their own lovely path.

After college, I returned to Africa to teach English at a boarding school. In the evenings, the lonely girls and I would gather in the classrooms and sing songs together, no high notes, no pressure, no fears, just beautiful music in three languages—me and sixty other aching hearts.

Making music

When I was little, she would sing with me, holding me on her lap at the piano or strumming along while I watched from inside the guitar case.

I know this mostly from photos.

The bedtime routine included a song every night. I remember You Are My Sunshine, and Blowin' in the Wind: "But what is the answer, Mommy? I know the answer is blowing in the wind, but what IS the answer?"

And she taught me to sing in music class, in church choir, in car rides to auditions, and long hours lying in her bed rehearsing my lines.

I was ten or eleven and I cried when she didn't let me play the lead--the DONKEY--in the Christmas musical that year but learned the limelight isn't the only place to make music.

I wanted to play the piano like her (to be like her) and she began to teach me at five.

When I decided to "quit" at age twelve--because I was going to be too busy with middle school--she made no protests, just let me stop taking lessons long enough to discover the love of piano for myself, and return of my own accord a few years later.

I was going to major in music (like her), just couldn't decide between singing and piano.

When I got caught up in "saving the world" instead, she joined the new song, and came to visit me in Africa.

We found ourselves learning new songs from the Maasai girls, singing late into the night in multiple languages.

*
In every decision of my life, without her needing to speak (though sometimes I felt she wanted to and still she held back) I felt her wisdom without putting it into words, simply pouring out of my fingers onto the keyboard like a well-practiced song.

She showed me what to do by loving example.

*

One day I saw it all clearly. I came home from college and the youth choir at church was giving a musical.

This one was different; the kids wrote some of their own script.

The popular kids and the kids who had never really bloomed--they told their own stories.

The singing was of God's love, and they knew it well.

Sitting in the back with my angsty college doubts and tears in my eyes, I knew that I, too, knew it well.

She taught it well.

*

Happy Mother's Day, Mommy!