Emily Garcia was raised
in the Evangelical Free Church. In her freshman year at Princeton
she was baptized at the Easter Vigil, and joined the Episcopal Church and the
Anglican Communion four weeks later when she was confirmed on Good Shepherd
Sunday. She is in the discernment process for the Episcopal priesthood, is a
published poet, and is this year’s Kellogg Fellow at the Chaplaincy. In this
column she will take a piece of “old” (or older) literature as a starting point
for an informal reflection on the religious life.
There’s
a song called “One by One,” and it’s been one of my favorite songs since I
first heard it. You can listen to it here, on NPR. It was written “around 3 a.m.”, sung in a slow,
steady voice by a woman named Connie Converse, and recorded in her friend’s
house at a dinner party in 1954. Twenty years later, Ms. Converse packed up her
things and drove off, and was never heard from again.
“We go walking in the dark,” she sings. “We go walking
out at night— / and it’s not as lovers go, two by two, to and fro, / but it’s one
by one—one by one, in the dark.”
About five hundred years before Ms. Converse was born, a
man named Kabir was born to a family which had recently converted from Hinduism
to Islam. He became a major figure in what we now called “the bhakti movement”—a movement of devotion
whose disciples spoke to their God in immediate, intensely personal language,
taking images from both Hinduism and Islam, and disregarding or opposing the
orthodoxies and hierarchies of both traditions.
These
poets—Kabir, Mirabai, Janabai, and others—speak in a language that would be
familiar to the Psalmist(s), to the author of the Song of Songs, as well as to
many Christians from different times and traditions. It is a language of
“passionate devotion” and “inward love,” as the translator Arvind Krishna
Mehrotra says. Here’s one of Mehrotra’s translations:
My husband is called
Hari,**
And I’m his young wife.
My husband is called
Rama,**
He’s an inch taller than
me.
Looking my best,
I go in search of Hari,
The lord of three worlds.
He’s nowhere to be found.
We live under the same
roof,
Sleep in the same bed,
But seldom meet.
Fortunate the bride, says
Kabir,
Whose husband loves her.
Now
this, I thought, was something that Connie Converse would also understand.
Kabir and the object of his devotion are together, but “not as lovers go, two
by two, to and fro,” but “one by one.” In the second verse, Converse sings, “We
go walking out at night. / As we wander through the grass / we can hear each
other pass / but we’re far apart—far apart, in the dark.”
When
I first thought of these two texts posed side by side, I had suddenly an image
of myself walking through a field of liturgy—murmuring the Nicene Creed,
mouthing petitions, following the rise and fall of the Great Thanksgiving with
my head and heart entirely somewhere else. The liturgy of the Book of Common
Prayer is the bed I sleep in, the field I walk in—the services of the Daily
Office, the rites of Holy Eucharist, and the many prayers for many different
situations. Like Kabir and Converse, I believe that the object of my love and
devotion is near, but at times—for days, or weeks, or months—“we seldom meet.”
I
thought of what the Psalmist says: “I was like a brute beast in your presence”
(73:22b). And then I remembered how this Psalm continues: “Yet I am always with
you; / you hold me by my right hand. . . . Whom have I in heaven but you? / and
having you I desire nothing upon earth” (23, 25).
And
this, too, is something that Converse knows, as she closes her song with this
verse: “We are walking in the dark. / If I had your hand in mine / I could
shine, I could shine / like the rising sun—like the sun.”
**Mehrotra
notes that while “Hari” and “Rama” are names of specific deities in Hindu
mythology, here Kabir uses them as names for “his personal god,” a god beyond
such identifications.)
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