How Can We Sing?
A Lenten Meditation Part 2
What began as an article on a song from Godspell has now become a three-part series on my moving through the Lenten season.
We are at Day Eight.
In our own deserts.
The ash has faded. The resolve has thinned. The silence has started doing what silence does; expanding.
Earlier this week, I was thinking about longing. About “By My Side” from Godspell and the fear of being left. Today, the soundtrack shifted to “On the Willows,” the communion scene, and the tone that had changed with it.
The playfulness is gone by this time in the show. The paint and laughter have drained out of the room. The table is set. The light lowers. The words slow down. Something irreversible is happening.
“Take. Eat. Drink.”
“Remember me.”
Communion is farewell disguised as presence.
The title of the song echoes Psalm 137. “By the rivers of Babylon… we hung our harps upon the willows.” And then the question: How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
It is not a triumphant question.
It is an exile question.
John-Michael Tebelak conceived Godspell as his master’s thesis at Carnegie Mellon University after being illegally frisked by police while attending an Easter service. He was a young gay graduate student in overalls, searched for drugs because of how he looked.
He later said that instead of rolling the stone away from the tomb, they were piling more on.
And I thought, Oh, the stones we throw.
The music itself, including this communion scene, was composed by Stephen Schwartz.
Tebelak shaped the vision; Schwartz gave it melody.
One carried the wound. The other carried the tune.
That matters.
Because the joy in Godspell is not naïve joy. It is not church-basement optimism. It is defiant joy. The kind born after humiliation. The kind that refuses to let exile have the final word.
And yet here, in “On the Willows,” the joy softens. The harps are set down. The table is quiet.
Lent feels heavy this year.
I am only a week into a forty-day fast and meditation, and already I can feel the difference between discipline and awareness. Discipline tightens. Awareness softens. Discipline counts the days. Awareness notices the breath.
I listened to James Finley speak about Lent and love. He asked whether the season might not be about proving holiness, but rather about noticing the grace already holding us. Not performing sacrifice. Not optimizing our suffering. Simply becoming aware.
That is more demanding than giving something up.
Because awareness means I have to hear the inner voices. The ones that measure. The ones that whisper that I am behind, flawed, insufficient. The ones that ask whether I am doing Lent correctly.
Those voices exile me from myself.
“By My Side” was about clinging. “Where are you going? Can you take me with you?” It was the fear of losing proximity. As my friend, David, said, it was the last song before innocence breaks.
“On the Willows” is different. It does not plead. It consents.
By the time the bread is broken, the clinging has quieted. There is sorrow, yes. But there is also surrender. Not theatrical surrender. Not collapse. But the sober kind. The kind that says: you are leaving, and I will learn to carry this.
He could not have stayed. Either of them.
If he had, I would not be who I am. We would have left other roads unexplored, other people unmet. Love would have required different abandonments. Growth always costs something.
Communion does not erase absence. It reframes it.
The question underneath all of this is not whether I can be disciplined for forty days. It is whether I can refine my awareness. Whether I can stop staring at grace as though it were an object to be acquired and instead notice it as atmosphere.
How can we sing in a strange land?
Maybe the answer is not volume. Maybe it is attention.
The willows in the Psalm held the silent harps. Music paused because celebration did not fit the moment. And yet the question remained. Not whether God was present, but whether the people could perceive it in exile.
Day seven.
The table is set.
The desert is still.
I am not asking him to stay.
I am learning how to sing differently.
On the willows, I hung up my lyre.
TW