Two Singers and the World and Jesus

As a general principle, I am against sniveling nostalgia and try to avoid it at all costs, especially when it comes to thinking or talking about my children. I love them but I don’t really expect anybody else to, so let’s talk about the more interesting vagaries of my laundry. But today I want to break my principled rubric and become a sniveling mess on the Internet. Don’t worry though it’s not about my children, it’s about my Grandmother.

First of all, it should be said that she died far too early, for me anyway, and that I still haven’t really forgiven her for this negligent act. Or maybe it’s God I haven’t forgiven. Sometime in the summer of 1999, when she was not very old, early 70s I think, my Grandmother played the opening chord of a hymn, put her head down on the keyboard, and was gone. That she was playing for a nursing home church service was kind of alarming, at least for all the much older people who had arranged themselves to worship God that morning. It’s upsetting when the pianist runs off to the next world before you can even sing the first line.

In the aftermath of this shock everyone explained to each other that it was a mercy for her and that if you have to die it was a jolly good way to do it. “But what about me?” I lamented to myself during all these conversations. “How am I supposed to reorder my life without this person?”

The day of the funeral finally arrived and I was amazed and floored to find that her small church, which I had never in my whole life seen full, was packed. There were no empty seats. Some people were milling around in the lobby. It seemed like the whole world had turned out.

It wasn’t the whole world, though. It was everyone my Grandmother had pulled by the ear and told about Jesus. Whether you were some lonely person wandering through life, or a kindergartener, or anybody, if you had known her for any length of five minutes, you had heard of the saving love of Jesus, and not so that you nodded your head and went back to your phone, but so that you opened up your heart to the persistent knocking of God’s mercy and grace.

The point of all this, though, is that she, my grandmother, was a singer. A beautiful singer. She had a soaring, clear, soprano voice and when she was in college all her professors thought she would make a splash in the world of music. She should Sing. She should sing all the great stuff. All the stuff that Florence Foster Jenkins insisted on singing, that’s what they wanted her to sing.

…..you knew this was going to come round to Florence Foster Jenkins, didn’t you?……..

I have to sing sometimes, like in church. I sit in my chair in the choir (please, please, someone join the choir and kick me out of that chair) and labor to reach moderately high notes, my voice cracking and cloudy. I can basically hit a note, sort of, if I pray a lot. I sit there every Sunday and think about her–not Florence, my Grandmother–and how effortless and beautiful was her voice.

Anyway, my Grandmother didn’t go into music. She turned her back on all that training and opportunity and got a degree in education and met my grandfather and went to Africa. Certainly she sang, otherwise I wouldn’t be roiling on in this way, but she sang for us, and in the church. She sang “I’d Rather Have Jesus”.

On Thanksgiving I, and my whole far flung family, clicked on innocuous little sound files and suddenly there was her voice–soaring, glorious–singing “Id Rather Have Jesus.”

And the incredible stark contrast between my Grandmother’s choice to deny herself, to lay aside this culture’s High Place of self expression, struck me to the heart. We have a single shiny god in this age, and it is the god of choosing yourself, clinging to yourself, identifying with yourself at All Cost. The saints of today are those who “follow their hearts,” who “pursue their dreams,” who “self identify.” If you haven’t gotten on YouTube and done Something to get your name out there, you aren’t really a person.

And here I am writing this on the Internet of all places, ready in a few moments to share it on social media. The irony of this would not be above my Grandmother, who would smile and wince and rub her knees and then stay up all night praying for my soul. There she’d be in the morning, having never gone to bed while others slept, praying that we wouldn’t wreck everything, that we would choose Jesus.

She deserved to sing at Carnegie Hall. She had the voice. She would have brought the house down. But she sang in an ugly robe in a choir pew in church. And now she is singing in glory. And I, well, I miss her. And I hope when I die that I have said no to myself even a fraction of the times she did. I hope I will have wanted Jesus rather than anything else. I hope that a few people struggling along through this difficult life will, as a result of this blog, catch a glimpse of how shadowy and pale and broken is the complete embrace of the self. What’s that old biblical saw? If you try to save your life you will lose it. But if you lose your life, for Jesus’ sake, you will save it forever.