CMC's Spiritual Soundtrack

Part of the commitment to JVC is a commitment to incorporating spirituality into our lives -- individually and as a community -- and one way we do that is by having a weekly spirituality night in our community. (We also have community nights, alternating weekly with our support nights.) We take turns leading spirituality and community nights, and for my first spirituality night, I decided to focus on music.

I'm not sure I was cognizant of how important music was to me until fairly recently. Certainly my track record of quitting various musical instrument lessons after five or six years would suggest that I didn't care much. Yet music was a constant presence in my life, from Grandma Arnold's family party piano sessions to violin, guitar, piano, and drums lessons (guitar and drums were the only ones that stood a chance, as I thought they were "cooler" than piano and violin...). In high school, making the decision to quit volleyball in favor of dance, the fall musical and show choir was probably the first time I acknowledged that music was something that truly made me happy.

Even slower was my acknowledgement that music is important to me on a spiritual level, beyond but including its role in liturgy (the quality of music at a Mass is a deal-breaker for me). Music can move me or calm me in a way few other things can. For me, it adds a further dimension of emotion to psalms and religious sentiment: song is poetry to the prose of my prayer.

With this in mind, I asked each person in CMC to send me one song that has been meaningful on a spiritual level. I compiled the songs in a playlist, read this prayer, and we all just listened. It was a practice in silencing ourselves to be open to what we might hear and an exercise of stretching our definition of spirituality.

Here's the playlist of all seven of our songs (can you guess mine?), with links to youtube videos of really questionable quality:

• Turn the Page Again by Tim O'Brien
• Blessed to be a Witness by Ben Harper
• Don't Worry, Be Happy by Bob Marley
• Down to the River to Pray by Allison Krauss
• Go Light Your World by Chris Rice
• Something Beautiful by needtobreathe
• Sweetly Broken by Jeremy Riddle

I was between a few (Awake My Soul by Mumford & Sons, Take My Hand by Shawn McDonald, You are Loved by Josh Groban, Pachelbel's Canon in D, Debussy's Claire de Lune), but ultimately I settled on Blessed to be a Witness, which I first heard at my DSHA freshman retreat, as my song.