Singing Better Songs | Lilly West '23
“My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation,
I hear the real, tho’ far off hymn
That hails a new creation;
Thro’ all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul–
How can I keep from singing?”
Since this summer, when I interned as a Research Fellow for the Project on Lived Theology, I’ve had one line from my reading echoing within me. Charles Marsh, in his work Welcoming Justice with John Perkins, argued that we must learn to “sing better songs with our lives”1. This year of discernment and decisions has felt like one long question: what song can or should I sing with my life?
When I zoomed into RUF large group from my dorm room as a first year, I heard what I’ve since learned was our grounds minister’s annual welcome sermon: “Who are you becoming?” At its core, this sermon said something like this: these four years are powerful years, what are you seeking and how will it shape you? Reflecting on these words now, they take a different shape in my imagination than they did when I was a first year because my life and priorities look very different (mostly in a good way, I hope). These years have been powerful years, growing, stretching, and teaching years, which have left me (again–hopefully) more in the shape of the Lilly I’m created to be.
This year, my wonderful mentor, Jane Grizzle, gave me Henri Nouwen’s The Inner Voice of Love. In it, Nouwen writes a reminder that we are designed to “enter a new country, where [our] Beloved dwells,” and that this transition “requires the death of what has become so precious to [us]: influence, success, yes, even affection and praise.”2 Our Horizons Fellows summer reading, A Sacred Voice is Calling, argued that “remembering death helps us to get our priorities straight.”
While I agree, I might argue more specifically that as Christians, we must remember not our death, but Christ’s death. Christ’s death and resurrection means that we look forward to union with Christ in the new country3 after we die and that the new country is already peeking through into our lives now so we can be in union with Christ today. We live remembering our death to this world, our death to the old country.
Do not hear in these words an argument to disengage with the world or a call to apathy; it is the opposite. “For freedom Christ has set us free.”4 The body of Christ should reshape our social existence to reflect this liberation and carry it out in the context of our communities. So then, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “[t]he question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”5 The freedom of the new country rings out over our fallen land, “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”6
Since Christ is Lord of heav’n and earth,
How can I keep from singing?
As Christians, we are heirs7 with Christ of the promised new creation. This means our lives are hidden, or anchored, with Christ in the new country even as we exist in the old country. We have an incarnate God and an incarnate faith. “Sing[ing] a better song with our lives”8 means that our lives in the old country are cruciform, bearing the image of Christ to individuals, communities, and systems we encounter. We “put off the old self with its practices and ...put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator.”9
Here’s where I’ll make a public confession: I am too weak to walk in the new country on my own. I am too weak to put off my old self. So, as I’m thinking this year with the other Horizons Fellows about calling, constraint, and commitments, I confess that I’ve been, more than anything, afraid. As Nouwen explains, the new country is “where [we] are called to go, and the only way to go there is naked and vulnerable.”10 He testifies that the new country is the source of joy, true joy, and of life, but that he keeps “crossing and recrossing the border.”11
During my time in Charlottesville, surrounded by mentors and friends who’ve invited me to “sing beautiful songs” with them, I’ve felt the joy of the new country peeking into the old. I fear that physical distance from these friends and this place next year will make me forgetful of this joy. I worry, like Nouwen, that I’ll “feel afraid and start longing for all [I] left behind, so [I’ll] go back to the old country,” but I confidently hope that his conclusion is true; that if I venture away from the new country, I’ll “discover that the old country has lost its charm.”12 Looking around at our Horizons Fellows cohort, a group which once felt unfamiliar and intimidating, I see brothers and sisters in Christ who are singing such beautiful songs that I can’t help but sing along with them. Throughout this transition I’ll “risk a few more steps into the new country, trusting that each time [I] enter it, [I] will feel more comfortable and be able to stay longer.”13
“I lift my eyes; the cloud grows thin;
I see the blue above it;
And day by day this pathway smooths,
Since first I learned to love it.14”
1 Charles Marsh, Welcoming Justice, “The Power of True Conversion” (78)
2 Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love, “Entering the New Country” (21)
3 “Age to come” (Eph. 1:21)
4 Gal. 5:1
5 Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
6 Matt. 4:17 (emphasis mine [but also Jesus’s I think])
7 Gal 3:29
8 Ibid. Marsh
9 Col. 3:9-10
10 Ibid. Nouwen
11 Ibid. Nouwen
12 Ibid. Nouwen