Lift every voice

By Marion Kanour

Published: March 17, 2008

The first stanza in Kathleen Norris’ poem “Mrs. Schneider in Church” reads:

It’s the willingness to sing
that surprises me:
out of tune,
we drag the organist along
and sing, knowing we can’t;
and our quite ordinary voices
carry us over.

For the past five weeks, 750 Lynchburg residents have been participating in the Community Dialogue on Race and Racism. I’ll admit to my surprise at our collective “willingness to sing,” since we all knew from the start we’d be singing out of tune. We knew we were hoping our “quite ordinary voices” could and would “carry us over,” but there were no guarantees … still are no guarantees. We sing anyhow.

It’s an interesting coincidence that the study circles are meeting during the Christian observance of the penitential season of Lent. Our final circle discussions are next week during the last week of Lent. It seems to me that much of our group “singing” offers a kind of lament from our combined souls — sometimes sung in raw harmony, sometimes in grating dissonance. It’s so tempting, here in this season of Lent, to give up on the struggle to love one another. Sometimes it seems futile to keep on keeping on when we see so much hatred and despair and inequity in our world.

It’s a blessing, I believe, most of us are moved when we hear one voice begin to sing a lament. We know the words because they’re our own. The lament is a courageous song of the soul. It says things can and should be different; it says we’re worth more than this; it says we can make a better world; we can love one another more fully.

Without the lament, no real change can take place in our souls or in our world. It may be that change is slow—especially change in our hearts and minds. It may be that certain hurts are so deep healing will take a lifetime. It may be that some wrongs can never be righted. Our voices may always sound off-key or blend poorly.

What if no one sang? What if no one was willing to sing off-key? What if we all fell silent because of our rage or our fear or our arrogance or our self-loathing or our perfectionism? What if we never risked anything ever again because we just couldn’t bear to lose one more time? We must sing anyhow, even in our quite ordinary voices. We’re given to one another. Like it or not, we’re the only choir we’ve got.

The only way we can hear James Weldon Johnson’s beautiful hymn sung is if we give it voice. May we add our ordinary voices to his extraordinary words:
“Lift ev’ry voice and sing, ’til earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of Liberty; let our rejoicing rise, high as the list’ning skies, let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us; sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, let us march ‘til victory is won.”

Amen.