Don Saliers - A Song to Sing, a Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice

We live in an age of discovery and rediscoverywondering at what is new while also relearning deep truths humanity has been in danger of forgetting. Our ancestral ties to religion are evolving. So, always, are the musical forms of our life together. But our communal need for what is soul-nourishing is rising. This joyful, refreshing book celebrates the life-giving sustenance of music. It reclaims the inborn, freely given grace of song.

In the West, church has been one of the central places, and now one of the last places, we sing together. Don Saliers has been a creative center of gravity in the world of church music for most of his life. Emily is a creative center of gravity in the world of folk rock. Still, they love some of the same hymns. What a joy to see in these pages the words of a hymn I too have loved since childhoodto see it and recognize it for the first time as vivid theology and sung poetry:

For the joy of ear and eye, for the heart and minds delight,
for the mystic harmony linking sense to sound and sight,
God of all, to you we raise, this our song of grateful praise.

I first met Don several decades ago in a place with sung prayer at the center of daily ritual. The Saliers family had spent many academic seasons and summers with the monks of St. Johns Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, and I was conducting an oral-history project for that community that would plant seeds for my later radio work. Don was on my list of interviews. His eloquence was singular and unforgettable. He spoke one sentence that I ponder to this day: Underneath the surfaces and our preoccupations with immediacy, there are the longer rhythms of God.

This book is in part a meditation on that notion. It is a conversation between father and daughter on the way music seems to act as a mysterious mediator between us and the God we seek. It is also a searching, muscular reflection on the question of what is secular and what is sacred, and how much meaning there mightor might notbe in that distinction.

Years after I interviewed Don, I sat with Emily and her musical partner Amy Ray and heard about their love of church, their struggles with church, and their spiritual experience of making music in nonreligious places. We called the show that resulted, Finding God in Church, and in Smoky Bars.

To be clear: I am not sure I have ever had any experience that feels more sacred than attending an Indigo Girls concert, and I know Im not alone. Emilys songs, like the best of church music, are memorized at a bone-deep, heart-deep level. Every word of every song is memorized and sung by a roomful of strangers who act like community in raucous liturgical prayer.

The aboriginal Australian image of Songlinesthat the world was sung into beingis invoked by Don and Emily across these pages as an intuition that has only deepened across the lives theyve lived. Song, as these two live and transmit to us, is one of the ways we imagine and touch what reality is and what God might be. Music begins in our bodies, they remind us. At a deep, delightful, mysterious level, as this book both explores and evokes, certain music has a power to make our bodies feel like souls.

How glad I am that Don and Emily are in the world and that they have offered up the fruits of their lives in music, and their beautiful companionship and conversation around it, for our nurture and delight.

July 2018
Krista Tippett