At the Seventh Annual Western Massachusetts
Sacred Harp Convention on Sunday 13 March 2005, Jenna Strizak gave a
Memorial
Lesson that was deeply moving and spoke probably for a lot of us who
have
come to Sacred Harp singing as outsiders, but now find ourselves,
sometimes
unexpectedly, enfolded in the warm and loving community of Sacred Harp
singers.
Jenna has graciously permitted us to post her Memorial Lesson
here.
Like many of us here, I did not grow up singing this music. I came
upon it by chance, and through the generosity of friends, in a chain
of events that in retrospect seems like the kind of lucky close call
"I could-have-blinked-and-things-would-be-different" I should
constantly be grateful for. The first time I heard Sacred Harp was in
a square. I was mostly perplexed, and overwhelmed, but I felt that
indescribable pull so many of us do. I immediately knew that whatever
this thing was, it was going to be very important.
I've often heard, in talking with other singers, that this
music - this community - this thing - takes hold of you, and works its way
into your life. What I wasn't quite prepared for was the way our
lives work their way into the singing. As I struggled to learn
shapes, to follow the voices next to me, I was also learning about the
people with whom I sang; witnessing their joys and their sorrows. In
coming to count them among my friends - indeed my family - those sorrows
became mine. Sometimes years after the fact. I came to love the
sense of inherited history that came with this community, both the
immediate group of people I sing with every week, and the wider family
I've come to love. With each new story of times before I started
singing, each new anecdote about someone I had never met, each new
illumination, I envisioned a web, a criss-crossing chain - a gnarly and
overgrown family tree - and just by showing up and being in the square -
by singing, by being present - I somehow became a part of that
richness. As did the loud alto next to me. And the bouncy tenor
across the square. All of us did.
Part of what I love about this tradition is how simultaneously simple
and complex it is. There is nothing more fundamental than gathering
with loved ones to sing. Yet the rich layers of meaning that our
experiences accrue seem to always develop, always grow more intricate,
always deepen. When a singer or a loved one is troubled, or passes on,
we sing with them and for them. Often that song becomes forever
associated with that person, that memory - but it's not only the new
experiences that get wedded to songs. When I came to singing,
eventually the texts of the songs, the way I felt when I was singing
them – I began to associate that with parts of my life that took place
long before I had ever sung from this book. This became a way to
think about losses I'd already experienced. It became another part of
the map I was piecing together to make sense of my own rambling walk
with grief. And it changes all the time. Our relationship to our
sorrows, like our relationship to this singing, is constantly
transforming as it is transforming us. We keep growing as our
experiences become a part of who we are.
The memorial lesson gives us a space to reflect that is at once
intensely private and public. It means something different to us
every time we participate in one. We sing to remember those who have
passed, names on this list, names heard long ago, names that never
made it on - but we also sing to comfort those for whom this is a
particularly hard year, and to support them as they begin their own
journey with this particular grief, to in some small way help make
sense of this new piece of themselves to grapple with. I don't know
that this can dull the pain of a loss - but it is a place in which the
richness, the overwhelming complication of the grieving process can be
left complex. There are no simple answers in the square - the
multiplicity of meanings here are embraced, in joy and in pain.
Last year our friend Laura was standing in this space, and something
she said during her lesson really stuck with me. She said: we grieve
because we have loved. I've been pondering that for an entire year,
and I would add that the converse is true; we are able to love because
we have grieved, and sung. With each other, and for each other. So
now let's sing for each other, for the names I'm going to read, and
for those that love them.
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