Slow Seven: Hiding Places, Rom-Coms, and the Virgin Mary Punching the Devil in the Face?
Seven things I'm thinking about, listening to, and generally delighting in.
A couple of Sundays ago, in honor of Mother’s Day, our pastor in charge of music pulled out an oldie of a song for those of us who grew up in church in the 80s and 90s. He wanted to sing it in honor of Mother’s Day. It was a song his mom had sung to him as a lullaby in his childhood.
“You Are My Hiding Place” was sitting in the recesses of my middle. In a place where the songs from my childhood, the ones that comforted me but didn’t harm me, the ones that formed the most tender and good parts of my faith, the bits of faith that would survive the upheaval of my theology, practical spirituality, and my belief system. This song? It was still true for me, all the way through.
You are my hiding place.
You always fill my heart
with songs of deliverance.
Whenever I am afraid
I will trust in you.
I will trust in you.
Let the weak say
I am strong
in the strength of the Lord.
The words caught in the tender space below my neck, the way words sometimes do when I know they’re true. And as I looked around the room, I saw that so many others were feeling the same. Queer siblings in faith who had sung those words while hiding in a church they believed would never accept them, older folks who perhaps once held faith like an easy lantern and whose light now might feel like a flickering candle. Across the room, the brave women who showed up on Mother’s Day despite their own longing for motherhood, and their fear that church might rub in their lack, their longing, their sorrow, in order to acknowledge the moms in the room. And me, when I got the part about “the weak” while holding my tiny eight year old in my arms, his disabilities evident to everyone around us. His hands moving across my face, as he does when he’s feeling tender—silently pointing out my eyes, ears, mouth, nose—the order of the song in his mind. I don’t need the weak to say I am strong, I thought. I need the world to see him in his weakness and say he is good.
All of us need a hiding place. A place to be quiet. A place we can be safe from the wild demands of the strong ones. A place to be weak, to be delivered. A place to be seen exactly as we are, and to be called good.
You are my hiding place. I kept singing it all afternoon while I planted the vegetable garden, enlisting my family in the task, per my Mother’s Day request. And I’m singing it today too.
You always fill my heart with songs of deliverance, whenever I am afraid....
What’s a song of deliverance? And what does it mean to be filled with one? Let me know when you have an answer.
Until then, here are seven things I’ve been reading, listening to, and generally delighting in.
I’m lucky enough that I get to listen to Jayne Sugg’s angel voice every Sunday. She’s one of many incredibly talented musicians at my church. But, discovering her EP has completed the soundtrack for my month of May. Not featured on her EP but most played in my Jayne Sugg rotation? Her cover of Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U.” It’s slowed down and haunting. Of course, you can’t go wrong with with Prince. But, combining Jayne and Prince? Whew? I’ll take it.
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