To sing in secret

confessions of an accidental hesychast

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For the Spirit himself never ceases to pray in him. Whether the person is asleep or awake, prayer never from then on departs in his soul. Whether he is eating or drinking or sleeping or whatever else he is doing, even in deepest sleep the fragrance of prayer rises without effort in his heart… the voices full of sweetness with which such people never cease to sing in secret to a hidden God.  ~ Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetic Treatises

As I’ve said before, Christianity is not my religious belief, because I don’t believe in much at all. But Christianity is my natal myth, my archetypal alphabet sung to me by my elders, and sung to them by our Quaker ancestors as far back as I can trace.

I raged and ran from some of the freakiest manifestations of institutionalized Christianity’s shadows and abuses - and refused to have anything to do with it explicitly, overtly for decades. It had shattered my immediate family of origin into pieces after all, pounded it into dust.  

But over time I came to accept that poisons can be medicines, and medicines can be poison, and I surrendered to the reality that for good and ill there was no escaping my first mythological language. The years that I spent studying the Upanishads and the Vedas, the sutras, the Koran, helped me find other frames and different models of the metaphysical universe, extricating me from the simplistic parochial dualities that mainstream Christian thought seemed to be packaged in.  Much later Jung offered me a psychospiritual frame for exploring myth and scripture that allowed me to subdue the triggered and reactive responses to the mythical substratum I had grown from.

I could then hear the story behind the stories, and the song within the songs, and the hidden music behind those too.

It also showed me that any low-grade fantasy I had of immersing myself in some other religious schema, heading off to an ashram or a temple, would be, for me, a ridiculous co-option of a world view that could never be organic to me. These archetypes would never flow through my veins, wrap themselves in my DNA, they had not been fed to me with mother’s milk. These songs and schemas could mean something to me, but they could never be “mine.”

The Christianity of my parents and step-parents was a noisy declarative fraud, a manipulation, and abuse of these songs themselves, and of the people who were told these distorted tales.

But behind that I remembered my grandmother sitting quietly on Sunday afternoons, crocheting white silk bandages for people with Hansen’s disease. Silk yarn so it wouldn’t bind to their wounds and reinjure them they were removed and cleansed. She only told me what she was doing because one day I asked explicitly. This is how she had routinely spent her Sunday afternoons for years, never saying anything about it.

I’d asked because I’d loved sitting on my grandmother’s lap in the rocking chair, her arms wrapped around me, her fingers busy behind my back.  I’d press my ear against her chest and hear that she was humming to herself, almost imperceptibly. I could hear the melody of a hymn rolling around in her chest while the thread flew in slippery loops from fingers to needle and back again. The crochet hook, the rocking chair, her feet on the floor and the silent hymn all moving in one steady rhythm.

This was my “Om” my “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” This was the hum of life.

I knew the words to this hymn because I’d shared her hymnal and sung it alongside her – The words were still there somehow; I could feel them inside the hum.

 Oh Lord have mercy.

Have mercy on me.

While I am praying.

While I am waiting.

When I’m in trouble.

I am your child.

Have mercy on me.

I began to hum it to myself too, silently, wordlessly, so no one noticed, just like my grandmother.

At my parents’ church, before it all blew to smithereens, the choir would sing similar words, - in a haunting minor key - when the grown-ups lined up for communion:

Oh, lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.

Have mercy on me.

I liked the ghostly sound of it and it folded into my imperceptible humming repertoire.

I noticed that the plea had to be asked over and over and over, that there was never a definitive answer.  The unanswerable plea held something. The hum became a place I could put all my powerlessness, my fear, my yearning, my devotion – sending it on sound waves up to outer-space, and down into the protons, neutrons, and electrons in the atoms of my body and everything around me.

In high school I read Salinger’s Franny and Zooey and saw myself in Franny’s nervous breakdown, her supposedly impossible attempt to pray the Jesus Prayer – “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me…” (I’d clip off the “a miserable sinner” bit at the end – it seemed excessive) - without ceasing.  “Without ceasing” seemed particularly ridiculous to her older brother Zooey but it didn’t seem so far off to me. I didn’t understand why Franny had to move her lips.

The silent hum was almost always with me – sometimes in different shapes, different melodies, different bits, and pieces:

“For I am the Lord of the Dance said he…”

“Whosoever treasures freedom like the swallow has learned to fly.”

“Any day now, any way now, I shall be released.”

I hadn’t become a hesychast intentionally.  It just happened, like an ear-worm, or more properly a chest-worm, the hum sat on my heart, totally silently, or when no one else was around or maybe in the shower, a little bit out loud.

As I grew older my internal play list expanded:  Om-shanti-s from a yoga class, and Ram-Sita-Ram from kirtan folded themselves into the mix.

Pieces of Godspell or Jesus Christ Superstar. Gavin Breyar’s and Tom Waits’ Jesus Blood Never Failed Me yet, an arrangement of a recorded song sung on an endless loop by an unhoused elder was added to the concoction: When I woke up in the morning, I’d catch the hum in mid-melody.

“… never failed me yet, never failed me yet –But one thing I know that he loves me so…”

Raising babies meant hours and hours of lullabies and humming – singing the songs my grandmother sang out loud to me and to herself, with their little bald heads resting on my chest. These babies - now young adults about to leave home - were Korea-born, severed from their mothers and their mother-land by an adoption industry I had been complicit in.  Arirang  - a haunting Korean folk song about the yearning to reconnect with loved ones on the far side of the mountains – became the melody that held all my love, sorrow, yearning and devotion for the sake of the children.

When my mother was dying a dead friend showed up in a dream and told me that the lyrics to Look to the Rainbow from Finnian’s Rainbow would comfort me. That song rolled alongside my heartbeat and breath for weeks and weeks. And it was a comfort.

Christianity is somehow all tangled up with the song:  - and it has nothing at all to do with institutions or congregations or anything dogmatic at all. “In the beginning was the Hum and the Hum was with God.”  

I don’t know who or what receives this silent devotional song – and I frankly don’t care. I don’t think it is any of my business if there is any entity “there” to receive it at all. I don’t need to know, and I certainly don’t need to believe anything about it.

What do birds believe about their songs?

The hum is a song of devotion directed toward mystery, toward unknowability, to uncertainty, the unimaginable.  I am as content to hum at a completely confusing Trinitarian God, or a pantheon, or an incomprehensible multi-verse composed of an infinite number of contradictory timelines, or the miracle of a sunset or a wildflower. It is all the same to me. The hum carries on regardless. It was there before I was, probably before humans were - and I will only carry it for the briefest moment - and I suspect it will continue long after I, and maybe all of us, are gone.

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