Choose to Bless the World

Greetings, dear friends!

Well, it's happened....I got older today -- a nice prime number this time around, and have had a great day of feeling extremely loved and remembered.  What more could a person want?

It's been a busy weekend (ergo the late post!), but a good one, filled in part with rehearsals with my beloved Denver Gay Men's Chorus.  They're prepping for a very exciting collaboration at the moment, and one of the pieces they've begun rehearsing has struck quite a chord with me, especially as a new year of life begins.  The piece is "Choose to Bless the World" by Nick Page, and is based on three divergent somewhat unlikely elements: Page's own arrangement of "Niska Banja," a poem by a Unitarian Universalist minister named Rebecca Parker, and Michael Praetorius' well-known canon "Jubilate Deo" --   you can listen to/watch a recording of one of my new favorite people conducting it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xabP5G-Q1A

(I know, it has the Lentenly forbidden A-word, but try to forgive me...)

The full text of the poem is this:

Your gifts
whatever you discover them to be
can be used to bless or curse the world.
The mind's power,
The strength of the hands,
The reaches of the heart,
the gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing, waiting
Any of these can serve to feed the hungry,
bind up wounds,
welcome the stranger,
praise what is sacred,
do the work of justice
or offer love.
Any of these can draw down the prison door
hoard bread,
abandon the poor,
obscure what is holy,
comply with injustice
or withhold love.
You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?
Choose to bless the world.

Cynicism and exhaustion are by-products of almost any graduate program, I think (and as many of my AKI students will likely attest), and it can be hard to remember that we still have a choice.  We don't have to buy into the drama that our little grad program worlds tend to create.  Or, if we do, we can catch ourselves and make a new choice.  The circumstances of our lives are what they are, and on days when we're feeling the burn, it can be so hard to remember this, but we still have a choice.  In every moment, no matter how crappy we think we are, no matter how hard things have been, no matter how little we think we have to offer, the choice is still there.  We can choose to bless the world....and the secret wonder of making that choice is that it doesn't take anything away from us to do this.  Our egos and bone-weariness might convince us that trying to bless the world is like trying to get blood from a turnip.  But, it's not a matter of trying.  It's a matter of choosing to honor what we already are in a state of being....we are each and all a blessing to the world.


So, if you have the energy and the inclination, there are lots of cool things you could transcribe from the recording above, or you could teach yourself to hand-sign the canon in two parts (or three -- one with your voice and one with each hand), or you could always catch up on your sight-singing.  However, the assignment I'm going to work hard to embrace this week and in the coming year is this:


All Levels:
Choose to bless the world.