Today’s offertory anthem is a well-known spiritual, arranged rather uniquely, by Mark Hayes. There are several choral versions of this particular spiritual, but this one appealed to me for a number of reasons. I love how the music paints the words, but never obscures them. Like many spirituals this one utilizes repetition as a tool to drive home the severity of the meaning of the words. This is partly due to the fact that African music itself contains a lot of repetition, usually in the form of a call-and-response mechanism. A leader will call out a line of music, and the rest of the group responds with some type of repeated phrase. I don’t know for sure why we call these pieces spirituals, but I can guess that the term is related to the tradition of repetition. Repeating a mantra is a spiritual practice in many traditions. In our faith tradition, we simply call our repeated mantras “Litanies.”

Sometimes you get to a point in your life that you have no choice but to repeat yourself. It’s not a gesture of despair, but an echo of certainty. The soul will hear repetition in ways the brain cannot. I picked this anthem, partly because I like it, but also because I’m tired. I’m tired of being in the storm of Covid-19. I’m tired of isolating, and quarantining, and social distancing. But we, as humans, are herd animals. When we are separated from the herd, we’re lost in the storm.

This anthem reminds us that we need time to pray, even in a storm. The slaves were deprived of the human freedom of being in a loving, life-affirming community. They were cut off from the larger community. They prayed not just for freedom, but for what God intended for all humans – togetherness. When the storm is over, I hope we won’t remain hunkered down, and isolated in a bubble of a virtual “reality.” I hope we will realize that we need real, human contact and interaction. If the pandemic has been our storm, let it also be our teacher. Allow the repetition of this music to drip down, deep into your soul. Let it rekindle our herd instincts as a species, and to awaken us to the life-giving freedom of togetherness.