The Prairie Thistle

One of the things I miss most about church is the singing. The bio-psycho-social benefits of group singing are well known and some days I just wish I could add my particular vocal reverberations alongside others and have a good soak. Anyone who has left the church and still enjoys singing has had to find other ways to partake in the practice.

To fill this particular gap in my life, I readily enjoy turning up the stereo and singing in my home or in my car. And I want to share a few songs that have stuck with me over the years that I have found particularly meaningful. Worshipful? Hmmm, well, these songs that have come to have an important affect on me and my spiritual journey. You may agree with my selections or not; taste is completely subjective. If I were honest, if we were all honest, we would find the songs that sing to our souls – that bring us to a worshipful place – do not always come wrapped up neatly in a Christian bow. And thank God/dess for that.

And so, Maestro, if you please…

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“Sarah” by Sarah Slean is a folksy-pop song with an upbeat tempo and poetical lyrics that nearly ran me off the road. The single from her seventh album, released in 2017, I heard this song for the first time in the fall of 2022 when I was driving on my way to a spiritual direction appointment. I had started seeing a spiritual director for one-hour sessions of guided, contemplative listening as part of the requirements of my spiritual direction certificate. Sometimes these sessions resembled a reassuring sit with a wise friend, sometimes they were like a plunge into an ice bath that would stop my racing thoughts cold and hold space for new neural pathways to form. Like a bowling ball encountering the bumpers in a lane set up for child’s play, these sessions became regular opportunities to check in with my self and what I viewed as my sense of the divine guiding my path.

In “Sarah”, Slean captures the feeling of leaving. It is painful, but also hopeful. The song is somewhat autobiographical for Slean who went through a divorce and so the words can be attributed to the call to move on from a literal breakup such as she endured.

For me, the end of 2022 had me confronting a number of endings: the end of my relationship with an evangelical church, the end of my involvement in an extended family (having been estranged from my family of origin for two years and counting), and the end of being involved in a marriage built on shared belief system (my husband having come out as atheist).

Grief is complex and the type of grief I was experiencing is not easy to define. I had not lost anyone to death and so could not grieve in a way many people could understand, but in many ways the losses I experienced were profound. And so I grieved.

Brené Brown introduced me to the term “disenfranchised grief” in her book Atlas of the Heart where she cites the work of Dr. Tashel Bordere. Brown writes, “Disenfranchised grief is a less studied form of grief: grief that is not openly acknowledged or publicly supported through mourning practices or rituals because the experience is not valued, or counted by others as a loss. The grief can also be invisible and hard to see by others. Examples of disenfranchised grief include a loss of a partner or parent due to divorce, loss of an unborn child and or infertility, the multitude of losses experienced by a survivor of sexual assault and the loss of a loved one to suicide. As an illustrative example of disenfranchised grief, Bordere explains that sexual assault survivors suffer from numerous losses, many of which are invisible to others, some of these losses include loss of one’s prior world view, loss of trust, loss of identity, self-identity, self-esteem, freedom and independence, a sense of safety and security.”

My sense of grief was tied into a loss of relationship and identity. In 2022, I was questioning a lot of the ways I had been brought up to see the world, how I saw my self in relationship with others, and how I saw God. I described my experience with my spiritual director and told her I felt fragmented, a sunbeam split into fractals of light. The experience was disorienting and isolating at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic was still preventing regular life from falling back into place for so many people.

I experienced my perception of God fragmenting in this way as well. I felt I could sit with many aspects of my previous faith and feel connected to a sense of God and my relationship with them, while other aspects I no longer believed in fell away. And the more I isolated each fractal for inspection, the less I felt like I “knew” God.

As I drove toward what I anticipated would be another direction session full of more questions than answers, I asked into the void, “What do you want from me? What are you trying to teach me?”

And this song came on. It was freaky timing. Literally, someone calling my name. It was dramatic. And I do enjoy a bit of drama. I’ve never heard the voice of God. But that day, I wondered if this counted. So let’s go with it.

The lyrics speak of days gone by and losing “him”. With the use of the male pronoun, I immediately connected it to my patriarchal view of God. I also felt it could apply to the relationship with my earthly father, with whom I hadn’t had an authentic interaction that wasn’t confusing and hurtful in years. And also I correlated it with the loss of how I had previously viewed my husband before he confirmed his atheism. In each area, I keenly felt not necessarily the loss of the person themself, but my view of what I thought they were. In each regard, I would have had to continue lying to myself in order to continue to hold onto my perspective of them – perspectives that were erroneous and had become harmful.

The second verse speaks of putting down new roots. It made me catch my breath. It was exactly the word picture for what I so badly knew I needed for my spiritual growth, my sense of self identity, and in my marriage.

The third verse loosely resonates with me about my relationship with Jesus. I have come away from seeing him as a Saviour, Son of God or sacrificial lamb figure, having moved away from an acceptance of sacrificial atonement theology. But the reference to “the wounded one” who had “been to the shadowlands” fits. And, yes, some part of me still wanted to love Jesus and hear him say something loving to me.

It was like I had asked, “What am I supposed to be learning throughout all of this?”

And Jesus/God/the Universe said, “Just wait and see. You feel adrift now, but you will have new roots. You will experience a deep and steady love again. It just won’t be what you thought.”

In that moment and in these lyrics I experienced a letting go, an easement into freedom from trying so hard to put all of these complex relationships into a box. My ideas of God that were loosely held became looser still. My need for a human father to love and protect me? Gone. My desire for a husband who believes exactly the same things about the Universe as I do? Removed. I was comforted.

There, I’ve done my best to put into words why this is a “worshipful” song for me. Maybe I needed encouragement and willed the meaning into the words? I don’t care. It was helpful to me when I needed help.

I played the song on repeat a lot that winter. During my silent retreat mandated by Shekinah, I was not so silent in the little blue cabin in the woods. I turned this song ALL the way up. I highly recommend you try it, too. Plus, the drawings in the lyric video are super cute.