First Parish Cohasset

“Spirit of Life”

A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
March 14, 2010
(delivered partially extemporaneously, so much of what is written below was not spoken,
and some of what was spoken is not written below)

Spirit of Life. It’s become the core expression for how we as Unitarian Universalists name the God we believe in and the God we don’t. Spirit of Life works. For some of us, it seems to wipe clean the scarred slates of our childhood religion. For some of us, it’s what we’ve grown up with. For some of us, it’s perhaps the not completely satisfying synonym for God or “the deity,” but we’ll let it be.

I sometimes imagine asking God or the Spirit of Life or the Great Whomever, “What exactly would you like to be called?” As yet I haven’t received an answer, but if we put that question to our larger world, so many names are offered before any ultimate voice could possibly be heard. It’s rather like an expected child who can’t speak for herself or himself, but whose relatives-to-be can’t restrain themselves from saying to the expectant parents, “Well here’s what I think works!”

Names matter. The ancient Hebrews understood one’s name to be one with the essence of that being. Perhaps that’s why YAHWEH was rendered only as an acronym for “I am who I am,” as YHWH. The name itself was too holy to be spoken or even written in full form.

In the second verse of the first chapter of The Book of Genesis, we read: “the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” In Hebrew, the Spirit of God translates “ruach Elohim.” It can also be rendered, the “wind of God” or the “breath of God.” In this particular Creation myth—and myth doesn’t mean an untruth, but a way of conveying truth—was spirit, wind, breath that was life giving. I don’t suppose that particular author of Genesis—and there were several—imagined that he was introducing what would be the core expression for a Unitarian Universalist understanding of the Creator.

Throughout the Bible, there are many renditions of what religion commonly uses as the default name—that is, God. There is ruach Elohim. There is Elohim. There is YHWH. There is Adonai, commonly translated as Lord. And there is God.

In this congregation, some of you wonder why we don’t give voice more frequently to the term, ”God,” and some of you wonder why we give voice so frequently to the term, “God.” If we took a vote, which we’re not about to do, Spirit of Life would likely win, hands down.

I see it in your faces when we sing Spirit of Life. It’s not just that this is the consensus about what to call the Holy; it’s the full flow of this song that has become in a few short years the Unitarian Universalist anthem. In her article for UUWorld, Kimberly French writes that:

     “No other song, no other prayer, no other piece of liturgy is so well known and loved in Unitarian Universalism as ‘Spirit of Life’ by Carolyn McDade.”

If someone asked you what you would sing if you were invited to describe our faith in song, I’m betting that most of you wouldn’t hesitate. “Spirit of Life,” of course. If I asked you what you would choose as the most spiritual song in Singing the Living Tradition, I’m guessing that “Spirit of Life” would again be your choice.

We sing it as a song ancient to our souls, yet it was born on a night in the early 1980s, so it’s not much older than our shared Principles and Purposes, adopted in 1986. Just as we proclaim our principles as if they’re creed, we tend to sing this song as a melodic credo.

Like all songs, this one had a pregnancy, a long one, a deeply soulful gestation. Its receptacle was the social activism that has described Carolyn McDade’s life for decades. While she now does workshops and recordings that find their life in congregations well beyond our Unitarian Universalist world, her primary community is not religious, but groups of women who sing together, write together, and join together in mindful activism. Buoyed by the feminist movement, she has allied herself with what she calls simply “the movement”—a term familiar to some of us who are children of the ‘60s. “The movement” for her is not only feminist, though a strong strain of “women’s spirituality” weaves its way through her music and gives voice to her social activism, just as her social activism gives voice to her music.

Born in 1935 and raised in rural Louisiana as a Southern Baptist, Carolyn McDade was just six years old when this nation entered World War II. Even at this early age, she paid close attention to the events of her larger world. The newsreels mesmerized her. Images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are engraved in her soul. In her words:

     “No God I had learned about would ever want or allow such behavior, such suffering, such brutality.”

Carolyn became a teacher, married, and had three daughters. During the time of the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, she lived with her husband and children in Austin, Texas; and she chafed when her church held silence. Her only choice was to break the silence. The theology of her childhood propelled her to action.

I empathize. In my own life and through my own early years in Presbyterian Sunday school, I often wondered why so many didn’t seem to take seriously the teachings of Jesus. Was it all just show, I wondered. A friend introduced McDade to the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, where she found her first political mentors and experienced her first demonstration, marching “from the State Capitol to the Air Force Base.” Peace and civil rights were among the initial causes that found her heart, mind, and body committed to activist social justice.

In the mid-60s the McDades moved to Boston. Jim McDade had found a job at Boston University, and the whole family joined Arlington Street Church, the Unitarian Universalist church just off Boston Common. Home-based sing-a-longs hosted by Carolyn became a feature in the life of the McDade family and the Arlington Street family. Eventually she was invited to coordinate the music for the “first women’s service” at Arlington Street. She found precious little written by women. This was a pivot point. Her own first song would emerge.

During the 1970s, she began to find herself completely at home in the growing family of female activists in Boston. While Carolyn McDade moved in a direction that left church membership behind, her early engagement with Unitarian Universalism left a spirited mark.

Carolyn’s activism moved in crescendo mode, finding voice in opposition to U.S. policy in Central America and the sanctuary movement that countered this policy. It was almost time for “Spirit of Life” to be born.

It was an evening in the early 1980s when she was on her way home with a close friend from a meeting for “Central American solidarity.” McDade reports feeling an overwhelming fatigue over what was happening in the world. Her friend simply sat with her—a presence that endears a friend for life. Once at home, she found herself going directly to her piano, where she prayed with voice rising and fingers on the keyboard. “Spirit of Life” came to life. It embodied her commitment “to continue in faith with the movement.”

Again and again she shared it with the group of women she sang with. When Singing the Living Tradition began to take shape in the early ‘90s, McDade’s song-prayer was so well known that the UUA Hymnbook Commission was unanimous in seeking to include it. Carolyn was reticent: “’I thought of it as a living prayer, not a hymn.’”

Thankfully for all of us, she relented. We find two other McDade songs in this hymnal. “We’ll Build a Land” is the Unitarian Universalist title for the song we often sing, though her chosen title was “Creation of Peace.” The other is “Come, Sing a Song.” In Singing the Journey, the new supplement to Singing the Living Tradition, we find “Rising Green,” which I hope will become as familiar to you as her other songs. Written by Carolyn, it was arranged by Jim Scott, who will be our pulpit guest just two weeks from today.

Our faith exposure to the music of Carolyn McDade is just a sampling of the many songs she has written and taught and performed. Now 75, a resident of Cape Cod, a single parent since the 1970s, and a grandmother of eight, Carolyn is an enthusiastic workshop leader whose primary participants are women who inspire her and collaborate with her in new songs and a ready stream of social activism. In her own words, “I write love songs to social movements.”

Spirit of Life, a love-song, a prayer written late at night. It continues also as the name we commonly give to the holy in our own prayers and meditations, as if it rose from that legendary moment when the breath of the Holy moved across the face of the waters. Imagine the primordial waters singing in chorus, “Spirit of Life, come unto me.”

Let’s lift our voices and sing the first stanza of this beloved song:

     Spirit of Life, come unto me.

We evoke the holy; we call it to enter us. In an intimate personal plea, we ask the Spirit of Life to “come unto me.” Join with me please in the next stanza:

     Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.

Sing, not just sound, but sing in my heart. Stir through song the most profound prerequisite for doing justice…compassion.

     Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;

Remnants of that Genesis force moving over the face of the waters, metaphors vivid for this congregation as we worship together on the edge of the sea, where the wind blows with abandon and the surf arches in tidal rhythms.

     move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.

Our songs and our acts are of the body, the work of our hands, from which rise the forms of justice.

     Roots hold me close; wings set me free;

Roots and wings, grounding and liberating our spirits and deeds.

     Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.

And so it does, if we open our hearts and our minds and our lives to what this will mean for each of us, for all of us, if we join in this love song to compassionate justice, this prayer that we too might become ever more committed to living this faith that we share.

So may it be. Amen.

Sources:

The Book of Genesis, The Bible (Revised Standards Version)

“Come, Sing a Song with Me,” Words and music: Carolyn McDade, in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 346.

Kimberly French, “Carolyn McDade’s Spirit of Life: Unitarian Universalism’s most beloved song, the woman who wrote it, and the communities that sustain her spirit,” UU World, Fall 2007, http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/35893.shtml.

“Rising Green,” Carolyn McDade, in Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition, Unitarian Universalist Association, 2005, 1068.

“Spirit of Life,” Words and music: Carolyn McDade, arr. by Jim Scott, in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 123.

“We’ll Build a Land,” Words: Barbara Zanotti (Isaiah/Amos), adapt., Music: Carolyn McDade (1935 – ), in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 123.