Listen to the podcast of this week’s reflection.
I. No Prima Donna
Do you have a memory of hearing a song for the first time?
It was a Friday evening in January. I was 23 years old, living in Chicago. I had just hopped off the blue line train on my way back to the volunteer house where I lived. You had to get off the blue line at Harlem Avenue and take the Harlem bus down about four miles to our neighborhood. I decided to walk - I’m not sure why. I remember it was snowing lightly, and the sky was leaden gray. The snow had been plowed into big dirty piles along the road, and there was a narrow path of ice-free pavement on the sidewalk. Maybe there was so much traffic I figured I might as well walk. But I had my Walkman with me, and a tape I had swiped from my roommate Matt. One side was Van Morrison’s album “Poetic Champions Compose,” and on the flipside was a tribute album to Van Morrison called “No Prima Donna.” I put the headphones on, the tape in, pushed play, and started walking.
The first song on the Van Morrison tribute album was a cover song by Sinead O’Connor called “You Make Me Feel So Free.” It begins with a piano and sax intro, a rolling rhythm and blues tune, punctuated with drums. Music to walk with big thumping strides down Harlem Avenue in winter. And then Sinead O’Connor’s soft and beautiful voice breaks in. She moves, as she only could, between gentleness and ferocity, intimacy and a vibrant cry. She pours energy and humor and care into Morrison’s lyrics – “How can I even talk about freedom / when oh, it’s sweet mystery / but baby, you make me feel so free.” The song cut right through me.
It is one of the most vivid musical memories of my life. The intensity of the surroundings helped – the wind and snow, walking for a couple of hours down Harlem Avenue past bars, shops, Italian groceries, gaudy clothing stores, church after church. People bundled up against the January wind. The sun was setting as I walked south, and it was dark before I made it home. What was it in this song that was so moving? I don’t know – something in its evocation of freedom – the experience of feeling free, and all the risks that involves. And being in the presence of someone who makes you feel that free.
In my memory, that walk and that music are fused into a single experience. I listened to both sides of the tape, and flipped it again as I turned left on Wrightwood Avenue, just two blocks from home. And so the last song on the walk was Sinead O’Connor again. Freedom, and mystery, and risk as the price of love. I arrived at the old brick building carrying inside of me something new.
II. To Mother You
Sinead O’Connor died this past summer on July 26. She was 56, not quite ten years older than I am. She was living alone in London, where she had recently moved from a small village in Ireland. She was found dead in her apartment.
Her death filled me with grief. The public outpouring of mourning revealed how people dearly loved her. Thousands of people lined the streets in Ireland as her body journeyed to the cemetery. And the stories that were told, or retold, helped me to see how challenging and beautiful and broken she was. Her mother was intensely Catholic and profoundly abusive, and that early experience marked her deeply. Sinead was sent to a girl’s home run by nuns when she was 15 for getting in trouble. In many ways it was terrible, but it gave her some stability, and it is where she learned to play music. Her music career exploded when she was very young, and she shaved her head in defiance of industry executives trying to get her to sexualize her image to sell records. She was fiercely courageous and outspoken, particularly on political issues, at times at great risk to herself and her career. She struggled with severe mental health issues, reflected in her four brief marriages, and in many of her friends sharing how difficult she could be. But she was also intensely generous and giving, particularly to strangers. And she knew the kind of grief that no one should know - when her son Shane committed suicide in 2022.
I knew her music from the radio as a kid. And I rediscovered that voice when I began listening to Irish music in college, particularly her collaborations with the Chieftains. But the reason she is so important to me is a little EP she released called Gospel Oak. It only had six songs, and it was the same on both sides. It is O’Connor deeply reflective, searching, using love and vulnerability as great powers in the world. I’m not sure how I found the album, but I must have listened to it hundreds of times over the next few years.
The first song is called “This Is to Mother You.”
This is to mother you
To comfort you and get you through
Through when your nights are lonely
Through when your dreams are only blue
This is to mother you
She had had two children by this time, and in interviews she said the song just came out of some internal, mysterious place. And in many ways, she was writing it for herself, for the mothering she had not had.
But I didn’t know any of that when I first heard the album. I was a young man trying to find out what it meant to be brave and live in the world on my own. I had just moved to Chicago, my first year away from home, and was working at an inner-city parish. I was exhilarated and scared and overwhelmed. I would lie in bed at night, and listen to this beautiful song, and her voice is how I imagined the voice of God.
It is difficult to write about her. I make no claims about my understanding of her or her music. Or about what she represented and meant to other people. All I can say is that through her music, something happened to me that was good, and healing, and generous. And her music came through her, through the person that she was.
It was her voice – how she could move from a whisper to a scream in a moment. How she could embody every emotion of tenderness and flirtation and memory and rage. And her music and lyrics - she wrote songs of such searching and hope and pain. How her music insisted on humanity and dignity. And how she felt the relentless pull of God. How before concerts she would pray to be a priest in that show. “A priest is someone who helps them feel that God is real.”
When she died, I wrote the following in my journal:
“Such sadness and grief for Sinead O’Connor. For her troubled life and her many losses. For her brilliant beautiful music. How her music created a new space within me. Space for Ireland. Space for God. Through all her difficult life she gave – she created. To reveal and pour out such beauty.”
How her music made me more human.
III. Deepening
What are we looking for when we listen to something over and over again? When we memorize songs or poems or prayers? One autumn I decided to memorize poems, and I spent each morning walking back from the bus stop after leaving the kids, slowly memorizing a series of poems. I would say each them, repeating the words out loud as I walked. What was happening to me through those poems?
I heard an interview years ago on the podcast On Being. Krista Tippett was speaking with John Paul Lederach, a scholar at Notre Dame who works in reconciliation in communities that have experienced war and other terrible conflicts, and Lederach was telling her about some research his daughter had been doing in using music to help children who had been forced into conflict as child soldiers. Often we want to think about healing from trauma in a linear fashion – this is how it works. You do this and then move on. But he explained that there is something in music that seems to be healing in a different way:
And what we were discovering at several levels was that many of the things that were most important to healing and reconciliation are in the realm not only of the unspeakable, but are often in the realm of things that are not linear. That is, that they are circular. They may be repetitious, they may be ritualistic in form, because people have a capacity to experience and feel something for which they cannot give good, clear, or fully explainable words. The words just aren’t there to do it.
When in fact, going in circles may be doing something that’s very different. It may be about deepening.
He then made a fascinating connection to prayer and liturgy.
So, you know, I somewhat facetiously tell my colleagues at Notre Dame where I teach, I said, “Imagine for a moment if the funding agencies were coming here to Notre Dame and were inquiring about your behavior that they’re noticing, which is you keep doing mass, some of you every day, most of you at least once a week. Is there something that’s not effective about the way you’re doing mass? If you did it once, would it not be enough?”
We don’t apply that lens to something like mass or music or other things. We understand that the purpose that it has is to create a space that permits you to get back in touch.
This is essential in understanding religious practice as well as music and poetry. We do not repeat the rituals because we missed the information, or we failed to get it the first time. We return to these moments of beauty and silence and ritual because they do something inside of us. This is what the songs do. This is why we want to hear them again and again. It is the space they create within us, what it allows us to see and feel and know.
Owen Barfield, a philosopher and poet, and member of the Inklings with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, wrote in his book Poetic Diction about what a real poem or work of art can do when we encounter it:
It is as though my own consciousness had actually been expanded… Now my normal experience, as human being, of the world around me depends entirely on what I bring to the sense-datum from within; and the absorption of this metaphor into my imagination has enabled me to bring more than I could before. (Poetic Diction, p. 55)
Barfield calls this an effective metaphor – one that expands my world – creates a fuller experience. I can bring more to the world than I could before. It creates a faculty within me that I did not have before. And in our spiritual life, it creates the capacity to both experience God more deeply, and to see God’s presence in others.
This need to return, this reconnecting with an interior space, is not a flaw in human beings. It is the necessary spiritual discipline of a human life. To live a life through time means to return again and again to the things and people and places we love, but to always be deepening, seeing them again in a new way. It is why we return to prayer, why we make love, why we gather for meals, why we always sing the old songs again.
IV. Only Say the Word
There is a part of the Catholic Mass I have always loved. No matter how distracted or discouraged I am, I always find this moment brings me back. I am always able to pray this prayer. It is the moment just before communion, when the priest raises the host and tells us this is the Lamb of God. We respond - Lord, I am not worthy to receive you. But only say the word and I shall be healed.
Or that is what we used to say. In 2011 a new English translation of the Catholic Mass debuted. The previous translation, made from the Latin in the days right after the Second Vatican Council, was all I had known, and there were parts of the new language I really struggled with. And I really did not like the new translation of my favorite prayer at Mass. In an effort to connect more closely to the scriptural root of the prayer, it now read: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”
The enter under my roof, which reminds us of the centurion who asked Jesus to heal his servant, felt so clunky and unnatural. Every Sunday I found myself annoyed and distracted by the words.
And then – when my sister Tessie was dying of cancer, and we knew we would be taking her young son into our home - that prayer became my one essential prayer. Through the months leading up to her death, and the years since, that prayer has become so personal it is as if I could have written myself. Here is this child, who is Christ, the presence of God, and he is coming into my life, into my home, literally under my roof. And I am not worthy, I am not ready, I am not good enough to do this. O God help me. Heal me, make me enough so that I can be what is needed.
I smile as I write this, because that prayer which I so disliked was the necessary prayer I needed. I am sure without it we would have found a way. But because I had that prayer, it allowed me to see what was happening in our lives through the lens of those words. Those words stretched and expanded and revealed my own experience – my fear, my inadequacy, my grief, and my conviction that this child coming into our lives was also deeply God’s child, God’s beloved, and this is what God was asking of us. This is why I had prayed this prayer thousands of times in my life, at Mass Sunday after Sunday, year after year, so that when this time came I would be as ready as I could, and I would know that God was with us in the midst of this.
The words of that prayer are carved so deeply inside me that they have given shape to my life.
V. The Shape of Love
What is the gift of having a song inside you? A poem? A prayer?
These things give shape to who we are. We can see, and love, and care more deeply. We carry more pain. We can see the dignity in other people, even when it is difficult.
I have been thinking for months how to write about Sinead O’Connor, and what she meant, because what she meant for me was that there is space inside me that was not there before. It is that deeply human thing, what we long for, why we pray, why we sing. It is the shape of love.
For Reflection
Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. It marks a return to the beginnings, to God’s promise of love and new life.
What is it like for you to return here this year? Is there a way to see this not as simple repetition, but as a deepening? A reconnection that can return you to a place of new beginnings?
Here is a possible practice for Advent this week. Find some bit of language, or a song, that is important to you or inspire you, and weave it into your life. Memorize it. Play over and over. Use it as a sort of mantra through the week. And see what happens. I got this idea from a book by Sr. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun. She suggests writing a bit of a Psalm or a prayer on a little scrap of paper, and keeping it in your pocket. And then take it out every little while, and bring it into your day.
The benefit of having lyrics and poems and prayers and scripture inside our minds, memorized, is that we can access them more readily. We get to know them more deeply. It is said of old monks, who pray the psalms each day, that they have almost all of them memorized. They have become part of their bodies.
Here are a few possible suggestions from my own life:
The Way It Is – by Williams Stafford. This is a great short poem to memorize.
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die: and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
Psalm 42 – the first four lines.
As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
the face of God?
The Serenity Prayer
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
The first five verses of the Gospel of John.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
Resources:
On Being with John Paul Lederach: This is the full interview from Krista Tippett’s podcast. https://onbeing.org/programs/john-paul-lederach-the-art-of-peace/
Hallelujah Chorus and Alzheimer's. This is an amazing piece about the power of music and memory. For the 250th anniversary of Handel’s Messiah, the BBC was recording choirs around Britain singing the Hallelujah chorus. This is the experience of a choir that is dedicated for people with Alzheimer’s, many who can remember songs long after they have lost most other memories. Very moving piece. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b01cjwtn
And unsurprisingly - a lot of music here from Sinead O’Connor.
You Make Me Feel So Free
Rainy Night in Soho. A beautiful cover of the Pogues song, with the Irish Chamber Orchestra.
Danny Boy. Gay Byrne was a beloved television host in Ireland for many years, and he cared deeply for Sinead. He had her on his Christmas special, and she sang a beautiful acapella rendition of Danny Boy.
This is to Mother You (live). Sinead recorded this version when she was older, living in a small village in Ireland, and in recovery. It was dedicated to people struggling with mental health. I love how at the end she points to say “you”, and then smiles and points at herself - “and me.”
Foggy Dew with the Chieftains. Incredible collaboration with the famed Irish musicians on this song about the Irish Rising in 1916.
Steve, so touching and personal. i myself, find me returning, as you reflect, to the inner beautiful things. I can only encounter now and then. Being older, does this impede? I don't think so. These past few days, I have had hours of Christmas music playing on "Sound Scapes". Some take me back, Gene Autry, way back when even today , those voices of so many, of my days gone by, Are still in their 70's and 80's , and are still vibrant and singing. I went through a period of my life, were I could no longer sing. For me, it was devastating , but thanks to "2023 "and new ways- putting it mildly, my voice is slowly returning and I find myself singing gently with songs I sang in my own youth. Choir, Chorus and even a Quintet. All before graduation at 17 !! Music is for the Soul and I pray mine is returning. Our Father's plans , even for us older, always amaze me. Each day is a blessing to share it with him, and I believe he enjoys my reactions to what ever he gives me.
In my youth I to , memorized Poetry. Elementary school.
I grew up in the age that did this- One a week. "Trees" is still a favorite, and I am so humbled to enjoy the beauty of the Earth we have been given . Just sit on the porch or take a short walk-Creation is every where. It begins, I believe with in us, for God is the breath who breathes life in me each day. So late in life to find these Graces . given with such Love and Forgiveness and Mercies. I do not deserve them , but I embrace and accept them.