United We Stand, Divided.....

I'm in the midst of a dilemma....you could say I'm being impaled on its horns....I don't know if this is a genuine conflict, or if I'm just being a whiney-puss (again...still...). This requires some background.

This issue of my voice, and its unwillingness to behave over the last 8-10 weeks...there are lots of reasons it's bothersome, and many of them go waaaaaayyyyy back. And that background may hold the answer to my dilemma, but I'm not sure.

When I was 13 (a thoroughly foul and miserable age, I might add), God finally decided to cut me a break, and stop making my life a human misery.  I found these friends...who sang...and played instruments, mostly guitar...and they "let me in". Somewhat begrudgingly at times, but I was desperate, so I swallowed it and took what I could get.  As the months went by, we melded into a real "group" - we sang at 9 am Mass every Sunday, and practiced from 7 pm - 9 pm every Tuesday at our local Catholic Church. The longer we were together, the closer we became. We were essentially divided between the only two high schools in town, so we saw a LOT of each other. And we were good...and I do mean DAMN good.  It took a while, maybe a solid year (they'd been together almost a year before I appeared on the scene), but there was some kind of magic - and that is the only word that describes it - that happened when we were all together. We could ad lib, jam, harmonize, without any training (which, of course, would have cramped our teenage style big-time). We sizzled with energy, and nothing intimidated us. I think now that would be characterized as arrogance, but as the saying goes, "It ain't braggin' if you can do it".

At our peak, there were 12 of us (get it?). Six girls, and six guys, three of whom happened to be brothers (that's another whole story in itself). We had a pianist, a drummer, four guitars (give or take) and assorted hand-held percussion. The dear, somewhat docile priest who ran our parish was so thrilled that we kept bringing people through the doors on Sunday that he pretty much gave us carte blanche to do what we wanted, as long as we were respectful. I was part of a phenomenon that had no explanation, defied all logic, and would likely never come along again.

The music we made, while in retrospect not terribly liturgically correct, was the best we could come up with at the time.  This was a few years before the St. Louis Jesuits and their ilk, unfortunately, so we took songs that we loved and applied them to our own brand of theology, and sang them with all our heart and soul. "Here Comes the Sun", "My Sweet Lord", "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother", "Oh Happy Day" and the one that became our theme song, "United We Stand". When we got going, we rocked the house, and judging from the response we saw on the faces of the congregation, we rocked spirits as well. All it took was one note, one bar, one riff, and we could read one another's minds...our spontaneous version of "Brown Eyed Girl" prior to a rehearsal one night is a classic example. Funny thing is, we can still do that.  Being part of that incredible experience has forever colored my vision of what constitutes good music, cohesive performing, and eternal friendship. Although at the time it seemed like forever, in fact we were only together a total of about four years. The older ones began to graduate and go off to college (we were decimated after summer 1972), staff changed, and what replaced those who departed just couldn't measure up.  We were awesome, we knew it, and it broke our collective hearts when it ended.(Note: for some, it didn't end - two wound up marrying each other, we all sang at many of each other's weddings, and continue to be in touch, if not joined at the hip.)

Luckily for me, I happened to stumble into a very similar situation in college, only far more sophisticated liturgically. A very talented group of freshman who, like me, arrived in fall of 1974, saved my soul musically and personally. God was really being ever so much more generous than I deserved. This gift, too, lasted four years, until life - and graduation - kicked us out the door into the real world.  Having come from what could only be viewed as a pretty sweet pedigree, I stuck around in liturgical music, always thinking that if I tried hard enough, I could create in any run of the mill parish a version of what I experienced in high school or college. And for about thirty five years, I've been beating my head against brick church walls and marble floors, trying to do just that, and wondering why it wasn't happening.

That bias, which is really what it is, is not very fair to the people who with all good intentions have joined with me at various places along the journey. Nirvana is not meant to exist in perpetuity, at least in this case. And yet I persist. Until now. I think it's time to stop. But I don't know how.

So much of who I am is bound up in music, the thought that it might at some point disappear is slowly but surely beginning to terrify me. Who am I, if not the person who leads the music at Mass? Who am I, if not the person who plays a 12 string guitar (once a Yamaha, now a Martin - thanks, God!)? Who am I, if not the person called on to sing at family weddings, baptisms, and funerals? The self-imposed pressure of always being "on", of not making mistakes, of being able to wing it at a moment's notice without sheet music, sans rehearsals, has begun to take a toll on me, and it's not fair to the people who join with me, nor to those to whom we are supposed to minister. And yet I'm scared to let go. I think of how freeing it would be to relinquish this particular commitment/obligation, and it feels wonderful.  For about 47 seconds. Then I'm afraid I will become the bad person, who quit when it got tough, who bailed on a responsibility. The fact that I've been doing it virtually non-stop (save a couple years of time out for babies) for almost 43 years doesn't seem to matter to my perverted sense of responsibility.

But something's gotta give.....stay tuned.....