Abide With Me

Somehow, I made it through 21 years of life and regular church-going with my parents without encountering Abide With Me.  We'll chalk it up to it being a Lutheran hymn and my attending a Presbyterian church. 

The first time I sang this piece was in my college choir during my senior year.  Our director Dr. Armstrong pulled out the absolutely transcendent Greg Jasperse arrangement for...I think it was our domestic tour.  I loved it immediately.  Something about it made me feel as though I was curling up in a warm, comfy blanket.  The melody is not innovative or complex.  The rhythm is straightforward.  But sometimes, simplicity speaks volumes.

As we were preparing for our concert, Dr. Armstrong's mother passed away.  Suddenly, the piece took on a new, very personal meaning.  Dr. A never said so directly, but every time we rehearsed Abide With Me, it was in homage to her.  We could see it written on his face, and we sang to lift him up.  All of this happened without anyone speaking a word to one another.  We just knew.

Singing at Carnegie Hall

A couple of weeks ago, a friend's mom contacted me about singing at her brother's funeral.  I really don't do the soloing "thing" anymore, but when a friend asks I will never say no.  Anyway, she chose one of the pieces (The Lord's Prayer), but left the other one up to me. 

I talked with my friend and he suggested the Pie Jesu from Faure's Requiem, but shockingly the organist did not know it (???seriously.  Dude, you are a church organist and you don't know this piece....how in the...ok that's neither here nor there) so we decided to just pick a hymn from the hymnal instead.

The organist suggested On Eagle's Wings which I immediately vetoed because: 1) it was already in the service as the second hymn, and 2) no.  I hadn't sung or even thought about Abide With Me in years, but I knew immediately that it was the right choice.

Singing in a funeral is kind of a surreal experience.  At a wedding, everyone is celebrating and even if you don't know the family personally, you just get dragged into the party.  At a funeral, you're part of the day but you are also necessarily an outsider.  I hoped I could help their family in some small way, but at the same time I felt incredibly pretentious for even thinking I could make a difference.  Who was I to even be there?

I have never felt so simultaneously honored and humbled in my life.  Honored that my friend had asked me to take part in remembering his uncle, humbled by the love I saw in front of me that day.

I'm not sure why that particular piece resonates with me to such a degree.  Part of it, I'm sure, is the emotionally charged circumstances under which I first sang it.  Part of it is also the fact that my time at St. Olaf was so treasured, and the tune takes me back to that time - but then so does every song I ever sang in college.

Honestly, I think it comes down to the last two lines of the second verse:

Change and decay in all around I see
O thou who changest not, abide with me

Whether you are Christian or not (I'll be perfectly honest - I am not.  And yet I sing in a church choir and go to church every Sunday.  That's another topic for another day), there's something to those lines.

"Change and decay" is not, I don't think, a negative thing.  It's the natural state of the world.  Everything changes, everything eventually dies. Desiree Rumbaugh said something really insightful the other week at her workshop (well, she said many insightful things, this is just one of them) - that the world as it is, is the world we were meant to be born into.  Wars, poverty, hunger and all.  This is the world we were meant to live in, and our challenge is learning to be steadfast.

I love and believe in the idea that there is something abiding and constant in the world.  Whether it is God, another higher power, your soul, the nature of the world we live in, or something else entirely is (I think) up for discussion, but it's what Abide With Me is all about.

One Decade

Ten years ago I was an eighteen-year-old freshman in college, ready to begin my second week of classes. I was away from home for the first time, but after two weeks on campus I had started to make friends and enjoy my classes, and was beginning to shed the paralyzing fear homesickness that had kept me locked alone in my room for most of orientation.

I had just met my now-husband at a party in Lindsey Reed's room and had begun what I knew would be a wonderful friendship, but had no idea that it would eventually result in a walk down the aisle at 28.

I was loving getting to know these beautiful women and dorm-mates, many of whom are still my close friends and several of whom were at my wedding. Lindsey (far right) officiated our ceremony, and Kristin is missing from this shot only because she was taking the photo.

On Tuesday, September 11 2001, I got up at 8am to shower before my 9:30 music theory quiz. Before class I had a bowl of cereal and went over my notes, but did not turn on the radio or check the news before making my way across campus to Peter Hamlin's Theory I class where I sat down next to Janet Toews (now Janet Cowan, with a baby on the way).

Professor Hamlin walked into the room, wearing a bow tie and looking (more) nervous and distracted (than normal). "Well, I know it might be difficult to focus with everything that's going on but we're still going to take the quiz." I had no idea what was 'going on' so I asked Janet, who replied that she wasn't totally sure but she'd heard that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon.

After that class, I ran back to the dorm to find out what had really just happened. My dad was traveling in Philedalphia for work at the time and I was worried about him. I remember watching the news for at least 45 minutes in the room of some guys I had never met before - I think it was the first room in 1 South so it must have been Kevin and Nick's room. I remember spending an hour on the phone with my mom - my dad was fine, just stuck in Philly - feeling scared and sick to my stomach.

Surrounded by the idyllic safety of our world on a hill in Northfield, Minnesota, it was difficult to wrap our heads around the scope of what had just happened 1,000 miles away. I traveled to New York with my dad that summer, and the city I experienced in July 2002 was quiet and introverted, a very different place from the one I had visited just one year before. It was evident that this was a city in mourning.

I realize that there is no way to make up for the loss and tragedy we experienced on that day - we lost so many brave and wonderful people, and today we should remember those people and celebrate their lives. But I also remember that for a brief moment, between the Bush-Gore election drama and going to war in March of 2003, it felt like our country was united. I remember how much we had to lose to realize that we are all in this together, and how quickly and easily we have forgotten.