Boundless Gratitude: Blog

The text of a letter that I sent to the The Chronicle of Higher Education on May 8 appears below:
 
Dear Editor,
 
On April 12, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article entitled “A New Generation of Black-Studies Ph.D.’s,” highlighting students and dissertation topics in the first cohort of Northwestern University’s doctoral program in black studies. On April 30, a Chronicle blogger responded with an article entitled, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” I can’t comment on the dissertations because I didn’t read them. It turns out that the Chronicle blogger didn’t read them either, as she admitted in a later item. The blog essentially argued that black studies should help solve the problems of blacks in America, but that the dissertations in question did nothing but “blame the white man.” The blogger flaunted her right wing bias and raised a lot of left wing [...]

(to listen to a recitation of this piece while reading it, please go to: http://www.boundlessgratitude.com/music-19.html)
 
Lift Every Voice and Sing...
The Wall Street financial district in New York City, also known as the financial capital of the world, is built upon a burial ground for African slaves and their descendants. The actual Wall Street was originally a wall built by European settlers and their African slaves in the early 1600s to protect settlements from indigenous people, who at times joined revolting slaves in struggles for freedom. On January 1, 1804, during a time when sugar was as important to the world economy as petroleum is today, revolting slaves who had risen up from bondage on the world’s richest sugar plantations made Haiti the first truly free nation in the modern world. They also returned the name of the new nation to Ayiti (land of high mountains), which is what the entire island was called by its inhabitants before Columbus “discovered” [...]

Oh Ruhhul Quddus, Great and Holy Spirit, Atman, Chi, Axe, Divine Breath, One who cannot be named but to whom every name belongs, whose manifestation in all of your countless, vibrant and dynamic forms as well as in your silent and stationary forms is what we call life, and whose manifestations in ways we cannot see or comprehend is what we call death or non-existence; Divine light shining forth in darkness that is of none but you as well, please open our hearts.
We cannot see you, because you are the eyes with which we see, you are the light that carries vision to our eyes, and because you are the manifest one in all that we see. We cannot hear you because you are the ears that we hear with, the waves of sound that fill our ears and the divine vibration without whom there could be no sound. We cannot feel you because you are our ability to feel and to sense in all of our senses; you are the all of the sensations that come to us; and you are the one divine source of all of those sensations. [...]

An interview I conducted for a recent issue of the Children's Music Network journal, Pass It On!, also happens to say a lot about my own approach to Musical Storytelling. You can read it at the CMN website.

I’m a few weeks away from entering the Masters of Divinity program at the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, CA. Close friends and relatives, who know me well, stop for about half a second when I tell them this for the first time. Then they light up and say, “of course.” The idea of me on the path toward Unitarian Universalist ministry made perfect sense to them even when it was still an unmade decision for me. Nowadays, when someone asks my religion, I respond quite seriously, “music.” Music allows me to drink deeply and gratefully from all of the richly diverse spiritual streams in this world, without also imbibing either the indigestible dogma or the poisonous proselytizing that render so many religious waters spiritually impotable.
 
I already think of music as ministry. So why would I mess that up by not only entering a religion, but actually becoming a minister? Even I didn’t fully understand why until a few days ago. Unitarian [...]