Wood Song

God spoke: “Lights! Come out! Shine in Heaven’s sky! Separate Day from Night. Mark seasons and days and years, Lights in Heaven’s sky to give light to Earth.” And there it was. God made two big lights, the larger to take charge of Day, The smaller to be in charge of Night; and he made the stars. God placed them in the heavenly sky to light up Earth And oversee Day and Night, to separate light and dark. God saw that it was good. It was evening, it was morning – Day Four.  (Genesis 1: 14-19, The Message)

Day Four of the Creation.  Lights shine out in the darkness.  From the moment I first heard the Indigo Girls singing “Closer to Fine” on “The Today Show,” it was a moment of light breaking forth out of darkness.  It was clarity, expansion and resonance.   I’ve always found the Girls’ songs to be expressions of Saturday night spirituality.  God winds a way into the lyrics, sounds, beat, and audience, making the secular experience a holy one, as close to Sunday morning worship as many of us will come.  Emily and her father (my seminary professor) wrote about music and spirituality, as well as the Saturday night/Sunday morning in their book A Song to Sing, a Life to Live.

One of the songs that deeply touches me is “Wood Song.”  It’s the fiddle.   It’s the line about “bruising our brains hard up against change.”  It’s the chorus about tired old wood held down by the weight of love.  It’s the thought of courage necessary to make a crossing, to seek a new path, to ask a hard question, to stare doubt in the face.  I can’t help but hear overtones of Noah’s brave steps to build and embark upon a mysterious vessel of gopher wood.  For you see,

It was the six-hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month that it happened: all the underground springs erupted and all the windows of Heaven were thrown open. (Genesis 7:14, The Message)