Finding God in the Music

I lost Jesus at 14 when the woman I loved most in this world was crushed by an eighteen-wheeler. I didn’t trust God anymore. What kind of world kills your grandmother and her best friends on their way to a fundraiser?

In the absence of His love and that of my beloveds, I found myself a man; But in the end I couldn’t (and wouldn’t) trust him either. Neither did my own father remain steadfast in his love. Those years were swollen with pain, as I watched my family splinter, until there was little left upon which I could rest faith.

Shortly after I gave up on God, some of my siblings took up with him–in that boorish, effusive way of the freshly born-again. Their new-found love, only made me lonelier; and their certainty that Jesus belonged to them, left me wondering how he had ever been my friend.

In my twenties, I came to Al-Anon, and began dating my Higher Spirit, who remained faceless, and who never quite hit the spot like the handsome guy in robes with penetrating eyes and long, sandy hair. It would be decades before I came to peace without a spiritual beloved, and until then I searched for him in many faiths.

When I finally found what I was looking for, it wasn’t in a chapel or a temple or even a women’s circle, it was in the music.  On the night before my beloved grandfather’s funeral–the man who lost his wife to the tragedy that stole God–my sister handed me some music that she was ready to discard.

She saved my soul that night, though not in the way she had always wanted.

When the soloist delivered Jesus to me in her rich, sultry tones, it didn’t matter that the stirring I felt inside made no sense.

When the storms in my life are raging. When the weight of this world drives me to my knees… I found a Hiding Place…

I felt the love that had once been mine.

I reclaimed Spirit then, in every song and sound, no matter whence it sprang…

Allah, Yahweh, Jesus, Krishna, Shakti, Kuan Yin, Earth, Water, Sky, Home

With music–and now movement–I make sacred the mystery of this journey we call life, without needing to name it or know why.