I've said before that if I don't tear up a little in church on Sunday mornings I figure it hasn't been a complete worship experience. Here's what did it to me this morning. At the Presentation (where the gifts of bread, wine and money are brought up front) the congregation sang "This Is My Song." The video below is the best rendition I could find - we sang it a little more upbeat than this.
The lyrics (below) are by Lloyd Stone, whom I've seen described as "a more-or-less obscure poet" who wrote it in the interval between WWI and WWII when he was 22 years old. The music is the hymn version of Jean Sibelius' "Finlandia."
This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for
lands afar and mine.
This is my home the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
But other hearts
in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as
mine.
My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
And
sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;
But other lands have sunlight
too, and clover,
And skies are ev'rywhere as blue as mine.
O
hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their
land and for mine.
- Words: Lloyd Stone (1934)
Music: Jean Sibelius (1865 - 1957)
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Remembering Heros
In a discussion list that I'm part of, the topic came up a couple of weeks ago about remembering those whose shoulders we've stood on to accomplish change. I contributed this to the discussion.
I just spent Friday and Saturday in Concord, CA (SFO East Bay) at my 90-year old aunt’s funeral. It was a great time with my cousins and their kids (including two new baby girls, 9 and 11 months old, new grandchildren of one of my cousins) and my sister and brother-in-law remembering Charlotte and how she affected all of us.
On the drive home yesterday (7 hours on I-5) I spent a good part of the time listening to Sylvester’s Greatest Hits on CD (for the first time in years) and playing his live performance of Patti LaBelle’s “You Are My Friend” over and over. The lyric “I kept looking around and you were here all the time” made me realize how important “friends” are – whether those are people we see every day or people we never really knew personally but whose work or contribution or whatever inspired (and inspires) us to keep moving forward. (If you don’t know Sylvester, check the Wikipedia article on him).
When I was in my late 20’s (that would have been in the mid- to late-70’s), Syl used to perform on Sunday afternoons at Elephant Walk, a gay bar at the corner of Castro and 18th in San Francisco (“ground zero” of the gay community in those days) and we would all hang out in there and just be mesmerized by him and his two backup singers (Martha Wash & Izora Armstead, later to become “The Weather Girls” – they did “It’s Raining Men” – after Syl’s popularity and health waned). It may have been “disco” music, but listening to it all again yesterday made me realize how it – and he, especially – made us realize we could be whoever it is that God made us – and how he inspired us to be brave and be ourselves and get out into the streets and fight for that right. Syl eventually died from AIDS in 1988 at age 41.
For a trip down memory lane (or maybe a new introduction),here's a recording of what I was listening to. It’s a recording of a live performance and Syl introduces each of the women – and they each do a little solo piece of the song. At one point he says about them, “I hope you understand that we love each other, y’all.” So this song has deep meaning for me on two levels – one in the lyrics, reminding us that the most important people in our lives are right around us (both literally and figuratively), and the other in the relationships between him and “his girls,” reminding us that it’s the love that we share that helps us make Powerful Shit happen.
I just spent Friday and Saturday in Concord, CA (SFO East Bay) at my 90-year old aunt’s funeral. It was a great time with my cousins and their kids (including two new baby girls, 9 and 11 months old, new grandchildren of one of my cousins) and my sister and brother-in-law remembering Charlotte and how she affected all of us.
On the drive home yesterday (7 hours on I-5) I spent a good part of the time listening to Sylvester’s Greatest Hits on CD (for the first time in years) and playing his live performance of Patti LaBelle’s “You Are My Friend” over and over. The lyric “I kept looking around and you were here all the time” made me realize how important “friends” are – whether those are people we see every day or people we never really knew personally but whose work or contribution or whatever inspired (and inspires) us to keep moving forward. (If you don’t know Sylvester, check the Wikipedia article on him).
When I was in my late 20’s (that would have been in the mid- to late-70’s), Syl used to perform on Sunday afternoons at Elephant Walk, a gay bar at the corner of Castro and 18th in San Francisco (“ground zero” of the gay community in those days) and we would all hang out in there and just be mesmerized by him and his two backup singers (Martha Wash & Izora Armstead, later to become “The Weather Girls” – they did “It’s Raining Men” – after Syl’s popularity and health waned). It may have been “disco” music, but listening to it all again yesterday made me realize how it – and he, especially – made us realize we could be whoever it is that God made us – and how he inspired us to be brave and be ourselves and get out into the streets and fight for that right. Syl eventually died from AIDS in 1988 at age 41.
For a trip down memory lane (or maybe a new introduction),here's a recording of what I was listening to. It’s a recording of a live performance and Syl introduces each of the women – and they each do a little solo piece of the song. At one point he says about them, “I hope you understand that we love each other, y’all.” So this song has deep meaning for me on two levels – one in the lyrics, reminding us that the most important people in our lives are right around us (both literally and figuratively), and the other in the relationships between him and “his girls,” reminding us that it’s the love that we share that helps us make Powerful Shit happen.
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