Today’s communion anthem is a well-known spiritual arrangement by Mark Hayes. There are several choral versions of this spiritual, but this one appealed to me for several 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 meaning of the words. This is partly because African music itself contains a lot of repetition, usually in the form of call-and-response. A leader will call out a line of music, and the rest of the group responds with some type of repeated phrase. The army does this while they march. It’s called a military cadence. Railroad workers did it. “I’ve been working on the railroad all the live-long day.” Repeating a mantra is a spiritual practice. That’s why we call work songs spirituals. In our faith tradition, we simply call our repeated mantras “Litanies.” Do you remember the Great Litany from last Sunday? It’s a lot of work to repeat all those prayers. But worship has its roots in the word work – liturgy (or litany) or worship is the work of the people.

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 faith working in your life. The soul hears repetition in ways logic doesn’t. Like all affirmations, this anthem reminds us that we need time to pray. Yes, you can. The slaves were deprived of all human freedom, yet they sang. They were cut off from being able to commune with each other, to have the freedom to play. All they knew, for the most part, was work.

So, what they did was they played while they worked in the best ways they knew how – in singing. They sang during the storm, so to speak. These songs were concocted while they were chained together, sweating in the fields under the hot sun, bent over in agony, and exhausted from exerting themselves. Paul did the same thing while locked up in the foulest prison, bereft of any comfort whatsoever. From within the squalor of his rat-infested prison cell he said, “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice!” He wrote this from the pit of hell, living in squalor none of us can even imagine, starving and naked.

Modern conception of life is that we can simply eliminate negative – get rid of the storm in a manner of speaking. We have more creature comforts than we can imagine, yet we’ve never been more uncomfortable. “With a hung down head and an aching heart, oh give me little time to pray,” as we hear in the music. You can’t eliminate the negative. Positive and negative are inextricably joined; but the slaves taught us to sing in the storm.

An electrical current is complete by hooking up the positive and the negative terminal. This alternating current creates a storm. Ups and downs are a vibration of aliveness. You can’t have one without the other, and spiritual enlightenment sees the complete circuit of Truth. Paul rejoiced in prison. The slaves sang in the fields. What do we do? We complain.

“Everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it,” quipped Mark Twain. But we indeed do something about the weather. When it rains, we use umbrellas. When it’s cold, we wear coats. When a hurricane comes, we evacuate. And when we get caught in the storm, we surrender, we accept, and we pray. You’ve got time to pray. Pray in the storm. Don’t say “One day, when the sky is clear I will.” The time is now, and no matter what, you’ve got time to pray and rejoice – yes, especially during the storm. Soli Deo Gloria!