"Thou, in the darkness drear
their one true light. Alleluia! Alleluia!"
--Hymn, "For All the Saints"
If you were to travel to New York and move down Broadway to
43rd Street you would find the Stephen Sondeim Theater. If you
bought a ticket and found your seat you would be in for a treat. The curtain
rises on “The Trip to Bountiful” which is the story of an old woman who wanted
to make just one last trip to her old home place in Bountiful, Texas. Her
family thought her mind was about gone and they did not want her to make the
trip. But she went anyway. Cecily Tyson plays the 80-year-old woman waiting to
catch her bus. With the dignity of all her years she stood and began to sing
the old gospel song, “Blessed Assurance.” At that moment someone in the
darkness of the audience began to sing. And then the singing moved across the
aisles until many of those in the theater were singing along with Ms. Tyson. The New York Times reported that this was not in the script. They wrote that
this phenomenon was peculiar—because most Broadway experiences do not include
audience participation. The author of the Times article called the song
unheard of—and something out of the ordinary.
But anyone who has been in an evangelical church—white or
black—would know this song. Why did the audience sing, night after night: “This
is my story...this is my song...”. I do not really know. Except out there in
the darkness the song must have touched a great many people. Some divorcee.
Someone facing a bad lab report. Someone contemplating suicide. Across the
aisle there might have been someone depressed. They sang because they had lost
their jobs or their faith or someone they loved dearly. And there in the
darkness they reached out and touched something that took them in and carried
them along.
I thought about that experience as I have waded through the
sad griefs of the support group I lead. The story brought to mind the friend
who lost a daughter unexpectedly much too soon or the friend who said goodbye
to her aging mother and those young parents losing their first-born. I
remembered those neighbors of ours lost in that terrible plane crash in Alaska.
I thought of much of the sadness out there in the darkness. Nineteen
firefighters in the prime of their lives are no more. The victims of the Boston
Marathon. Not to speak of our boys and girls that still come home in
flag-draped boxes. We all know that the darkness is real and difficult.
All of us need something powerful to hang on to either in
our own darkness or helping a friend go through their hard time. We long to get
in touch with the human chord that might just make us remember again that we
really are all the same. The unrelenting forces out there try to drive a wedge
between us and them—but we will know better. Most of those sitting in that theater were touched by
something primal and real. That’s why they sang in the darkness. For just a few
hours they were one—fellow-strugglers—all on a hard journey.
Toward the end of his life Wallace Stegner wrote a novel
called Crossing to Safety. It told the story of an old couple who
had been married for many years. They both had physical problems and found it
hard to get around. They had been through the ups and downs that life brings to
most couples. They were still together, she on her walker and he on his
cane. One of the characters observed:
“None of us can cross the choppy waters to safety alone—someone has to help
us.”
An old hymn may help many of us. Reaching out to others
sometimes does the trick. But from time to time we all need a reminder that the
human spirit is resilient. Those of us that are acquainted with the darkness
really can make it across the choppy waters. All the grievers who move away
from the cemetery can learn that the new-fresh mound is not the end though it
seems like it. Whatever life brings and often it is hellish—the human spirit
can get up from the most distressing of things and move on. Not alone but with
others and with a power that is unseen but very real.
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