Dancing with the Stars

"Sure on this shining night of star-made shadows round
Kindness must watch for me this side the ground.
The late year lies down the north,
All is health. All is healed.
High summer holds the earth. hearts all whole.
I weep for wonder, wand'ring far alone
Of shadows on the stars."  James Agee

When  I began to emerge from a hopelessly rigid and cruel fundamentalist religion of my own making, there were several things that were pivot points for me.  They were pivots from my delusions of a hopelessly divided world of the sacred and the secular.   Before these pivots, I held a very rigid concept of what was God stuff versus everything else.  And it was only the God stuff that I thought mattered, And I held such a limited opinion of what God stuff consisted of.

As the 19th Century  European-Americans were moving west in growing numbers and as they were progressively displacing the native tribes, they  attempted to convert the American Indians from tribal religions to Christianity.  Many Indians, including my most favorite American Indian, Black Elk, converted to Christianity. They converted to both Catholic and Protestant religions.  But one of the many reasons most American Indians never converted was this "schizophrenic" way of life that they observed in the white man. These intruders apparently believed that part of their lives belonged to God, but most of their lives belonged to themselves. These Christian  trespassers, from their point of view,  had a special day, for example, to worship God. Six of their days belonged to them and one day belonged to God. Furthermore, to worship their God, on perfectly gorgeous days they left the beauty and solitude of the mountains, meadows and woods, of the broad rivers and quiet streams, they left all of this and went inside dark boxes. They traded the glory of God's creation to inhabit a small house they built from downed trees. It just didn't make good sense to them.

When I transferred to Samford University from the Enterprise State Junior College in the fall of 1973, I was still very much enthralled in my awful, exclusive fundamentalist religion.  As a music major with voice as my instrument, the only music I had any feelings for were the sacred songs such as the sacred art songs of Oley Speaks and the spirituals that were assigned to me. I sang other music. I sang the songs and arias of the Germans, Italians and French. And I sang them well.  I sang them for my voice teacher. I sang them for our Thursday afternoon "happy hour" in front of the music students and faculty.  I got rave reviews. I just didn't have any personal feelings for the secular songs. They didn't mean anything to me.

And then my teacher gave me Samuel Barber's Sure on This Shining Night to sing. From the first note of the accompaniment to the last note I sang, I felt something stirring inside of me. It was like that gentle shock of current when you touch something live. Words and music that said nothing about God or the Bible or church or salvation touched something primal in me.  I practiced and sang Sure on This Shining Night over and over again just because I wanted to.

You may not know that James Agee's text that Samuel Barber set for voice and piano came from a longer poem called Permit me Voyage. When I read the entire poem, it's like the well-known words that Barber chose are an island of coherency in an otherwise incoherent ramble.  Or maybe it's because when I read the poem, the memories of my discovery of the words Barber carved out as Sure on This Shining Night flood my psyche with wholeness and beauty. But obviously my not appreciating the entire poem  is a reflection of my lack of understanding and not of Agee's ability to write.

But Sure on this Shining Night was a turning point for me, to move from a narrow understanding of the power of sacred song, to a wider experience of being touched by poetic and musical beauty. It was an understanding that human kindness did not belong just to the God of religion but to the living God of the universe.  I then expanded that awareness to those art songs and arias that had held no meaning, no feeling. And I then expanded that recognition to other areas of my life as well. "High summer holds the earth."  What did that mean?  It meant that those words and that music suggested that beauty, wonder and mystery existed beyond the realm of things with a religious purpose. It meant that I could open the eyes of my heart to include the world around me. Until that pivot,  "I see men as trees walking" could not have  been any more appropriate for me.

"The late year lies down the north"?  I had no idea. But "All is health. All is healed"  I could understand.

Without this experience and the awareness that continued to expand over the years, I don't know how much longer it would have taken my eventual salvation to unfold. By 1987 at the National Gallery of Art, no one had to tell me that the original Picasso, Renoir, Monet and van Gogh I was viewing spoke from same source as  Agee's "sure on this shining night of star-made shadows round." They spoke of truths that originate from a well of inspiration that we all share.  The ability to draw from this wellspring of inspiration is just as powerful and mystical as the ability to create from it.

Black Elk, who fought against General Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and witnessed the massacre of his tribe at Wounded Knee, apparently left his "religion of the pipe" because he felt he had little choice. His tribe was scattered and his culture was dead.  He laid aside the garments of a Lakota Sioux medicine man and practiced the religion of the white man. He spent the last forty years of his life as a catechist priest of the Roman Catholic Church. On his death bed he told those gathered around him, "I never left the religion of the pipe.  I always kept it with me."

Maybe Sure on the Shining Night was my peace pipe.  I smoked it and made peace with the God of the universe. I made peace with myself. I just know that even now as I listen to Barber's choral arrangement that he wrote thirty years after the publication of his song, it still points me to the stars. It reminds me from whence I came. And I weep for wonder.