Music is a mirror.
In January of 2003, the University of Tennessee Concert Choir began learning Frank Ticheli’s There Will Be Rest. For me, it was a beautiful work that took on even greater meaning when we sang it on February 3, just two days after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. I found it almost impossible to pronounce Sara Teasdale’s text:
There will be rest, and sure stars shining
Over the roof-tops crowned with snow,
A reign of rest, serene forgetting,
The music of stillness holy and low.
I will make this world of my devising
Out of a dream in my lonely mind.
I shall find the crystal of peace, – above me
Stars I shall find.
Unbeknownst to my colleagues, these words had already taken root in me for other reasons. Deeply closeted and desperately afraid of being honest with the world, I longed for a heavenly future, free from the challenges of this world, where I would no longer be plagued by my secret identity.
In the mirror, I saw pain and self-hatred.
Throughout that semester, I sang the words “I will make this world of my devising” as a commitment to change the unchangeable. I would “pray the gay away” at all cost. Meditation, study, conferences, whatever it took. The angry, judgmental god I worshiped would either fix me or kill me, and until then, I would live in silent shame. Obviously, these were some of the darkest, hardest days of my life, but thankfully those days were not eternal.
Sixteen years later, I returned to Ticheli’s work with the Jacksonville University Singers, approaching the piece as musical counterbalance to Veljo Tormis’s infinitely dark and righteously disturbing Raua Needmine (“Curse upon Iron”). Shortly after beginning rehearsals, memories of my time at UTK came flooding back, but now with new perspective.
A reflection is anything but permanent.
In the intervening years, God did “fix” me, but not in the way I imagined—isn’t that usually how it works? Instead of changing who I am, He changed my perspective. He taught me the difference between tradition and truth, transforming my opinion of Him from Angry Judge to Compassionate Healer. My journey brought me to drag queens and pastors, rabbis and linguists, revolutionaries and revivalists, and at the end, I found love and peace like I had never known before.
In the mirror, I now see love.
God loves. God is love. God invites us to love each other as we love ourselves. In fact, I’ve discovered that it’s impossible to truly love others when we begin by hating ourselves. Shout out to RuPaul for preaching and living this truth without compromise.
Now that the Jacksonville University Singers have performed There Will Be Rest a few times, I find tremendous joy in sharing with them the hope inherent in Teasdale’s words. Not from a theological perspective, but from the perspective of sharing life together.
I invite them—and all who read this—to see my story as a testament to the power of hope and the unceasing changes of life. When we focus on building community and lifting one another up—as so many others have done for me—life gets better. When we do this in the context of music, we enhance and amplify our connection to one another.
This is why I keep returning to the mirror. This is why I sing. Music is a mirror.