Laughter, Music and Healing, Garden of Roses, May 23, 2010

Laughter, Music and Healing

Garden of Roses
May 23, 2010

http://web.me.com/virginiajones/Compsassionate_Gathering/The_Garden_of_Roses/Entries/2010/5/21_Laughter%2C_Music_and_Healing.html

I've had a busy week and couldn't write a complete post. I have one I am working on about the importance of friends to walk with us as we heal, but it isn't ready, but I was a naughty girl this morning. Instead of doing some really important paperwork, I played around on You Tube and put together a favorite video/song list for my You Tube channel --

http://www.youtube.com/user/StopAbuseHealWounds.

I don't know how to create the link, so you will just have to cut and paste to get to the channel if this doesn't work.

My favorite songs lean heavily to funny and/or uplifting. I found a blog this week that accused me of being "icky sticky sweet". I take that as a compliment. Life is meant to be enjoyed. Even when terrible things happen to us, it is possible to find joy and laughter. Before I get to the songs I thought I want to add a few comments on joy and laughter.

I have two heros I will write about this week, St. Francis is the first. The second is the Dalai Lama.

I converted to Catholicism because of St. Francis. St. Francis believed in being joyful. Once he was asked what "perfect joy" was.

His reply was along these lines, "When you slog through the cold and the rain all day and then knock on the door and ask for shelter and they reply, 'We don't want the likes of you here.' and you are still joyful, then that is perfect joy."

Joy is a gift we give ourselves. No one else can make us joyful. Joy comes from recognizing in the beauty around us and embracing it instead of becoming dragged down by pain and loss and mistreatment by others.

Another one of my inspirations is the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama loves to recount a story of a monk who came to the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala, India, after being released from 20 years of Chinese detention. The monk told the Dalai Lama that he was very afraid during that 20 year imprisonment.

The Dalai Lama thought that the monk must have been afraid for his life and safety.

The monk replied that he was afraid that he would lose compassion for the Chinese.

This story is in the book Kundun on page 367. Read the whole book. It is a great book.

While your at it, read about St. Francis. I think if the two were alive at the same time, they'd be great friends. Another one of my inspirations who I am not writing about here is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who headed up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Desmond Tutu, a Christian, counts the Dalai Lama as one of his best friends. When he was still alive, the Catholic writer and Cistercian monk, Thomas Merton was also friends with the Dalai Lama -- which bears writing and thinking about -- something I am not going to do here and now.

My daughter, Sidney, has a friend whose father, Glen, is friends with the Dalai Lama and used to represent a Tibetan liberation group as a lawyer. He says the Dalai Lama has a great sense of humor.

Glen bought a statute of liberty eraser on a visit to New York. When visiting the Dalai Lama, he noticed that the Dalai Lama had the same mini eraser statue. The Dalai Lama told Glen that he meditated on liberty by contemplating the mini statue.

He flicked the statue with his fingers. The statue wiggled.

"See, liberty must be flexible," the Dalai Lama said.

Glen exchanged statues with the Dalai Lama. Now the Dalai Lama's former statue sits on Glen's fireplace mantle along with a Tibetan prayer flag and lots of Buddhist objects.

Glen was abused as a child by his father -- physical and emotional abuse. He said that meeting the Dalai Lama changed his life. He, without meaning too, poured out his pain to the Dalai Lama, who listened compassionately. Glen was so moved by the Dalai Lama's compassion that he decided to use his skills as a lawyer to help struggling not-for-profits instead of using his skills to make as much money as possible.

He has been a big help to me.

Humor, the way the Dalai Lama uses it, helps us lighten our mood and laugh at the things that cause us pain, which feels ever so much better than being depressed by them. Loss of liberty for Tibet has been a cause of much pain for the Dalai Lama since he was 16. He turns 75 on July 6.

Music is also offers support for healing because it helps us express our feelings in ways that are very healthy. My number one song on my song list, although the list is not arranged in order of importance, is "Hush Little Boys" This song was sent to me by singer and songwriter, Mr. Eric Gudmunsen, of the British Isles and the Canary Islands. He wrote it in

solidarity with the clergy abuse survivors of Ireland. He told me to share it. I asked if I could link it to my website and he answered, please do.

I don't want to get in trouble for copyright infringement, so I have to refer you again to my You Tube channel,

http://www.youtube.com/user/StopAbuseHealWounds , to hear the songs. I don't know what I can and cannot do legally, but I don't want to take risks. Except for the Janis Ian song, I tried to use only official version posted by the people with the copyrights on You Tube. I couldn't find an official version of the Janus Ian song.

Next up is the Janis Ian song, "At Seventeen".

Boy did I identify with this song as a teenager. I had pimples and almost no one asked me out. I felt unattractive, undesirable, unlovable. I was sure I'd be alone forever. It turns out that Janis Ian had motives other than the usual insecure teenager feelings. She was/is a lesbian and perhaps wrote the song from that perspective, but her song is so universal that awkward, insecure, seemingly un-datable heterosexual girls like me could identify with her words. I suppose the guys can identify too. Interestedly enough, Janis Ian endured an abusive marriage. This makes her words ring even truer for me.

My next song is "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life", by Monte Python from their movie Life of Brian. Sometimes when I feel down I sing this song to myself to help myself get going again.

"Life's Piece of *hit, when you look at it......."

"When life seems jolly rotten, there is something you've forgotten -- to laugh and dance and play and sing......."

I hope I don't get excommunicated from the Catholic Church for being sacrilegious. My favorite saint, Francis of Assisi was a big believer in laughter and was something of a troubadour before he became a religious seeker. God works in mysterious ways. As a mother of teenagers I am trying to maintain my children's interest in going to Church. I showed them Life of Brian during Lent and used it as a basis of discussion of the life and death of Jesus, by comparing the life and death of Brian to the life and death of Jesus. Some conservative Christians consider the movie sacrilegious, but as Eric Idle likes to point out, it should be clear that Brian is not Jesus, because Jesus appears twice in the movie -- at his birth in the manger next to the manger where Brian was born and in the Sermon on the Mount where the people in the back rows think Jesus is saying, "Blessed are the Greek," and "Blessed are the Cheesemakers."

The members of Monte Python came up with the idea for the movie Life of Brian after their big success with The Holy Grail. They initially planned to skewer Jesus. After reading the Bible for a few weeks, they decided that they couldn't skewer Jesus because the the things he says are "pretty decent". Instead they skewered Christians and just about everyone else. I guess we Christians do some hypocritical things that make us ripe for skewering.

Since some people are thinking by now that I am anti-Catholic, I have to point out that my next song is "Song of the Body of Christ" by David Haas. This song is sung during communion and is one of my all time favorite songs just for the melody and the words. I could easily make it the theme song for Compassionate Gathering.

The refrain is

We come to share our story,

we come to break the bread,

we come to know our rising

from the dead.

The second verse is

We are called to heal the broken,

to be hope for the poor;

we are called to feed

the hungry at our door.

What our organization, Compassionate Gathering, does, among other things, is create a safe place for survivors of abuse to tell their stories inside of a Catholic Church. Although the Catholic Church has been very good at covering up abuse and not caring adequately for survivors, it is also very Catholic to care for the wounded and the broken. This humble communion song says it all.

I won't go on and describe every singe song. I included some, "Over the Rainbow" and "What a Wonderful World" sung by Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwo'ole, the Hawaiian born signer. IZ advocated for Hawaiian independence through his music. He frequently sang in his native language. His music is, in the words of others, "simple and sweet". His Hawaiian people had their paradise taken away and their culture suppressed by white Americans like me. Listen to him and watch the You Tube videos that show Hawaii and his life. You may feel some sadness for IZ's early death and the plight of his people, but you will also be uplifted by the beauty of his music.

Some of the other songs on my list are there for personal reasons. I like the old American folk song, On Top of Old Smokey, because it is one of the few songs I am not half bad at singing. I also like the song because it is about lost love. When I have been in pain for all my Janis Ian reasons, I can sing it, knowing others have gone through what I had gone through too. The version linked to by You Tube channel is half stories told by the old country guys singing the song.

I often used to sing a version of that song when I was a Fisheries Observer 25 years ago. We often work 16 hours a day and sometimes more, so we Fisheries Observers changed the words to...

"On top of the Sulak (a Soviet mother fishing vessel), all covered with (fish) slime, I lost my true lover from too much overtime...."

The next song is another Monte Python song that takes me back to my fisheries days.

"I'm and lumberjack and I'm OK. I work all night and sleep all day..."

One of the observers sang this song during the observer radio hour except he changed the words to, "I work on all night, and I work all day."

He got into a lot of trouble because we were supposed to be all business. I guess we were not supposed to laugh or dance or play or sing to cope with long hours, bad food on Soviet and Korean fishing vessels and hard living and working conditions along the lines of the Discovery Channel show Deadliest Catch.

But you can't work 16 hours a day, seven days a week and not want some relief.

As I keep trying to say, laughter and music are a great relief.

The last song on my list is Amazing Grace. It is another one of those songs I can halfway sing. My daughter used to sing this song too.

It always made me laugh to here this sweet six year old girl sing

"That saved a wretch like me..."

I'd say, "Sidney, you are definitely not a wretch."

Now she is 11. I won't say anything about the wretch part at this time for fear she will .......

Amazing Grace also brings me great comfort and not for the opening stanza or the tune, but for the third stanza down.

Through many dangers, toils and snares...

we have already come.

T'was Grace that brought us safe thus far...

and Grace will lead us home.

Amazing Grace was written by an English ship captain named John Newton. John Newton ran a slave ship with little thought as to the morality of what he was doing. His conversion that led him to the priesthood in the Church of England, started during a storm that nearly sank his ship in 1748, was a slow process. It was not until 1788 that he published a pamphlet describing the horrific conditions of the slave trade. The slave trade was outlawed in Britain in 1807 but continued in the United States until Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation proclamation in 1863. It took until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for black Americans to receive full protection for their right to vote.

Although I am white this is a personal issue to me. The father of my biological children is black. Until I married someone who is black, I didn't fully understand how much racism still exists in the United Sates today. Did I ever tell you all the story of the time we found swastikas painted on the sidewalk outside out house? If not, I'll put that on the story list. It had an entirely different meaning when I had black children as opposed to when I was just a white, single woman.

Amazing Grace is not merely a beautiful Christian hymn, it is the song of a man involved in perpetrating injustice, knowing he has done wrong, struggling to connect to God and make things right in his lifetime.

The struggle for justice and truth lasts generations. We might as well laugh and dance and and play and sing along the way.

Contact: compassion500@gmail.com