Memorial Day: mourning, hoping, singing like a Wayfaring Stranger

I’m a freak for the song Wayfaring Stranger. It’s moody in most artists’ renderings, and the eeriest is Jos Slovick’s pure and brilliant cover in the recent WWI film “1917.” Johnny Cash delivers the prayer most desperately in his late life, incredibly-better-while-fading voice. Eva Cassidy’s delivery is oddly almost bright, and yet, she’s going to die young. (I wonder if she knew, then, of her diagnosis.) Dolly Parton renders the folksong in a mood that’s dang near…happy?

You can call me morbid, but I’d say, when “America” turns into its evil twin “Amerika”, we avoid death like the plague—hm, strike that. (We failed at that pretty well didn’t we?) If we did better at living like we aren’t immortal gods, would we live consciously of our agency to do good and challenge our endless capacity for evil? Or just live like bats out of Hell, all party and self-indulgence? Thankfully, there are voices singing out in this land of so many sins and so much self-confidence, and getting important stuff done. And Death is the heraldic cry. Where else would the term ‘deadline’ come from?

I want to sing so I can live more fully. I’m not great at physically embodying space in this world and I’m more skillful in my head than in my bones. But singing draws me to join body and mind. My first lesson begins this morning. My prayer, absurd as it may be in this post-modern age, is mine. I find modern hymns are ways to recognize the journey of each person to live fully, to have enough, and to climb the Maslow ladder high enough for joy, not just bread and shelter.

But if Heaven’s a state of consciousness (for it’s surely not a distant star we reach after this life), and if I’m singing every day any song I damn well please, I will open more fully to it all. And so I begin, on this Memorial Day weekend, with a song about the end of strife, a pathetically perfect prayer for something better for those who’ve paid the ultimate price. We remember too, not just our war dead but all who’ve gone before us into what we hope is a brighter state of being.

I look forward to making prayers into songs today. Be safe this weekend, and don’t just mourn: Sing that sadness, loss, and strange hope stay alive in your heart.