On Being Blog

I love every sensory aspect of Christmas. I love the sights and the smells, but most of all I love the rich and textured sounds. In short, I love Christmas music.

More than any other holiday, my Christmas season is hemmed in and held together by music. Music is a common thread woven through all the little holiday rituals, traditions, and memories that I share with my family and friends. Beautiful music. Nostalgic music. Radio music. Nature's music. Muzak music. The music of Christmas is everywhere, and I love it all, but nothing quite so much as the season's sacred music.

There aren't quite words to describe the warm and inviting glow of a church sanctuary illumined by candlelight on Christmas Eve night, and the peace that washes over me when friends and strangers gather and sing the sweet strains of these well worn hymns. These simple songs bridge the chasm of time and space, and help me to be present to the miracle of Christ's birth.

In an uncertain world, they stand for me as guideposts, pointing me always towards the certainty of hope. The exuberant and joyous African American Spiritual, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is no exception to this rule. This carol is at the top of my list, because it so beautifully captures the joy of this season.

Though its precise origins are unknown, many believe this spiritual was discovered shortly after the Civil War, and popularized in the early- to mid-twentieth century. It has been a song of hope rising from the valleys of southern plantations, and issuing forth from the deep heart of Appalachian Mountain trails. It has been a gospel song enjoyed round cozy family pianos, by church choirs, and sung from main stages of grand concert halls. Peter, Paul, and Mary once adapted its lyrics and utilized this song as a civil rights hymn. It has been covered by an eclectic group of musicians ranging from Mahalia Jackson to Dolly Parton. In short, this is a carol that has seen a rich history.

Needless to say, I was delighted when two veteran artists, Margaret Becker and Jennifer Knapp, included it in their 2012 collection, The Hymns of Christmas, and gave it the royal musical treatment. For their collaboration, Margaret and Jennifer took ten Christmas classics and infused them with heavenly harmonies and their signature guitar work.

Encountering their arrangements is a bit like running into a dear old friend wearing a brand new dress, every bit as gorgeous as you had remembered and then some. From the looks of their sampler video, Jennifer and Margaret were busy weaving friendship alongside their harmonies. For anyone who needs a delightful burst of Christmas cheer, do yourself a favor and give this album a listen. You can start with, "Go Tell it on the Mountain."

Photo of choir by Flickr/Duncan Harris, CC BY 2.0

Marcy Bain is an ordained Presbyterian minister from Dayton, Ohio. She's convinced that she does her best theology when she slows down, settles in with good friends and a glass of mulled wine, and lets the twin sounds of laughter and harmony permeate her household.

Want to recommend a song for our Tuesday evening melody? Submit your suggestion and a little bit about the tune. We’ll take a listen for possible publication on the On Being Blog.

"I just want to love God."
~Piscene Patel, Life of Pi

A boy, the son of a zookeeper, grows up in picturesque Pondicherry, India. He is bright and inquisitive and unusually attuned to the world around him. He is, by place of birth, a Hindu, and a devout one. He discovers Christianity ("Thank you, Vishnu, for introducing me to Christ"), and then finds the religion of Allah, especially its profound witness to the practice of daily prayer, to be life-giving.

His parents are perplexed. ("If you believe in everything, you will end up not believing in anything at all," warns the boy's rationalist father). His older brother, as older brothers are sometimes wont to do, sneers, scorns, and mocks the young boy's earnest faith.

The boy, Piscene Molitar Patel, named by an uncle after a famous Parisian swimming pool, is patient with his critics and resolved to love God and the world and everything — everything — in it. As a teenager, a shipwreck and a harrowing ordeal in a lifeboat sharpen rather than diminish or extinguish his religious sensibilities. He emerges with a story, he says, that "will make you believe in God."

It is tempting to dismiss Life of Pi as a parable of the postmodern quest for “spiritual fulfillment” without the messiness of doctrinal commitment, to see Pi as a cipher for what each of us is encouraged to be: a discriminating consumer of religious experience — trying on this or that belief or practice, picking and choosing what “works” for us, discarding or ignoring the rest.

I understand the temptation.

But I also think there's something more or something else at work in the life of Pi. During his 227 days at sea, the necessities of survival (killing sea creatures with his bare hands and wolfing them down ravenously, animal-like) merge with his emerging sense of his own insignificance. After witnessing a spectacular display of thunder and lightning, Pi says (in the book, but not in the movie):

“For the first time I noticed — as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next — that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant . . . My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.”

With its echoes of the book of Job and the Psalms, this is not the sentiment of the contemporary seeker-shopper of religious goods and services. It is not the familiar narcissism of much of middle-class Christianity, nor is it the well-meaning but hollow piety of the “God-never-gives-us-more-than-we-can-handle” school of thought.

And after calculating his odds of outliving his lifeboat companion, a 450 lb. Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, Pi says: “You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.” This, too, reveals not the sunny optimism of religious individualism (“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life”) but a clear-eyed embrace of a fundamental truth of existence: we are going to die.

When Pi makes peace with this truth he gets on with the business of living which, in his case, immerses him in the material exigencies of his plight: paying attention to the weather, monitoring his food supply, training his carnivorous companion. But it also means attending to the glorious beauty around him: inky-black skies swimming with stars, whales elegantly breaking the water's luminous surface, a school of dolphins moving synchronously as if in a dance of pure joy.

And at journey's end, when the middle aged Pi, who has been narrating the story all along, tells an aspiring novelist that he regrets not being able to thank Richard Parker and tell him that he loved him, we see the young Pi Patel again, who was attentive to beauty, full of wonder and a desire for the holy, who only wanted to love God and the world, and who might have — as a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim — found a kindred companion in a contemporary poet's own clear-eyed assessment of the truth of our finitude:

It was what I was born for—
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.

Mary Oliver, “Mindful”

Debra Dean Murphy is an assistant professor of Religion and Christian Education at West Virginia Wesleyan College and serves on the board of The Ekklesia Project. She regularly blogs at Intersections: Thoughts on Religion, Culture, and Politics.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication at the On Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

"Hope is a function of struggle."
~Brené Brown

Winter is now upon us in the Midwest. The temperature is dipping into the single digits and the winds are gusting steadily. On this Thanksgiving weekend here in the States, these beginning lines from Walter Rauschenbusch's gorgeous family prayer, now more than a century old, call us to pay attention and be grateful:

For the wide sky and the blessed sun,
For the salt sea and the running water,
For the everlasting hills
And the never-resting winds,
For trees and the common grass underfoot.
We thank you for our senses
By which we hear the songs of birds,
And see the splendor of the summer fields,
And taste of the autumn fruits,
And rejoice in the feel of the snow,
And smell the breath of the spring.
Grant us a heart wide open to all this beauty...

This has me wondering about others' ways of giving thanks.

Do you have a special prayer or ritual? Drop me a line at tgilliss@onbeing.

"We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts."

Photo by cmorran123/Flickr, cc by-nc 2.0

“Guilt-prone people tend to carry a strong sense of responsibility to others, and that responsibility makes other people see them as leaders.”

One of my early illusions about good leaders is that they are strong, impenetrable, and unaffected by any failings (their own and those of others). But Stanford researchers, Becky Schaumberg and Dr. Francis Flynn, suggest that there is some merit to having a guilt instinct or response, especially if you want to be a leader. There is a difference between "guilt" and "shame." Though both are responses to a blunder, the difference is in the responses to the error. Those who feel shame shrink away from the error, those who feel guilt feel a responsibility to others and are perceived as leaders. This distinction the authors make between guilt and shame is one that Brené Brown makes in her research as well.

In one experiment, researchers surveyed guilt proneness, shame proneness, and extraversion, among other characteristics. They found that "guilt-prone members of the group seemed to the rest of the group to be making more of an effort than others to ensure everyone’s voice was being heard, to lead the discussion, and generally to take charge." Does this mean that people who feel more guilt feel more obligation to the wellness of others? How would this serve a leader in a large corporate setting?

It may serve leaders in any setting who recognize their human obligations and connections to others, especially their charges. It seems to be a sensible response when others do not live up to expectations. You may want someone to feel guilt when they don't meet goals. Guilt even has a place for workers, too. Dr. Flynn and Ms. Schaumberg also found that guilt in the workplace is very good for the employers, in fact, "guilt-proneness motivates employees to work hard on their tasks, perform well in their jobs, and feel committed to their employer."