A
MEMOIR: The Day The Women Sang.
Let me just talk about today. Today the world is bright again.
Today I can sit on my cool porch and watch the children play. Their
play dome across the street is clean enough for me to see that there
is a great game of hide and seek going on. Maybe I'll watch all day,
if the clouds don't come in.
It was 30 years ago, I think. Someone else's lifetime ago but not
mine. My life is not quite over yet. My memory spans enough years to
remember a small Southern town learning how to be a racially
integrated city, and now,
today, of teaching my great grand- daughter how to sing the Song of
Blessing from the five different cultures who have homes on this very
street. She hears me sing with my friends when we gather in our
circles. We still dance together, too. Some of those friends
are gone now but some are still here, mostly the women.
I guess I've always known we women had some kind of internal strength,
some kind of tenacity to persist, to demand to be heard.
It was a war that really, as I think about it now, was probably
inevitable. I'm not sure when so many races starting fighting each other,
thousands of years ago, I'm sure. But at that time 30 years ago,
this ethnic fighting seemed to be reaching a critical mass, spilling into
every culture in the world. Why shouldn't we expect to share in this
terror too? The countries,
the continents of the Earth had became an involuntary global community
sometime in the 90's. All of our struggles came together, whether we
were ready for it or not. Many leaders had tried to help us
understand the reality of the world to come. The spiritual leaders
over the whole world had been trying to help us understand this for eons:
that even one person's persecution became the persecution of us all.
But we just couldn't grasp it. Not enough of us could grasp it.
The pain on the face of the Earth that day in September in the early '00
years is almost too great to imagine. I think some leader at the
time, oh yes, I guess it was that mayor, said "...the numbers of dead
would be more than we could bear..." I think it was more than
we could bear. Well, anyway, we didn't bear up well at all, not for
many more years anyway. There were lots of us praying. I remember
going to church that night. Lots of people went to church, all different
kinds of churches. At my church one woman prayed for the Muslims,
one woman prayed a kind of thanksgiving that her niece was late to work,
and one woman reminded us:
"let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me."
We tried-we really tried.
I remembered my dream that same night when I went to church. I sat
there contemplating the idea of saying it out loud, making it a living
thing that night but I didn't do it. I didn't do it then, but later,
finally, I did. This dream had come to me many years before and it seemed
to stay with me, visiting me from time to time, probably just when I was
about to forget all about it. The women in my dream, and now in this
world, had to have a voice. The women's dream had to come to life.
The women had to sing. They were past thinking, past wondering if
the world would accept their voice,
past consideration of the propriety of their place in the world, in all of
the different cultures where they gathered. They just had to speak.
They just had to sing. Their hearts demanded it. They could no
longer hold within their small bodies the power, the strength and energy
of the prayer, the song of healing that lived in their hearts. They
just had to sing-of hope and compassion, and most of all love and peace:
"Now we must speak only of peace, we must sing only of peace.
No more hate, no more war. We must sing only of peace."
And their voices would eventually transform the world. In circles
all over the world they sang, they prayed, and they danced. They
painted and they created the new tapestry of their dream. The women
on that day, that year, gave birth to a vision which would carry the
people of the world into a new reality, a new clarity of what the world
could be. And finally, today, after all these years, what the world
has become. The children are playing again. They laugh and dance and
sing, they imagine and create and build. I think I can rest
now. I can hear the Song of Blessing from the children's voices
across the street. My heart is full. I think it's a good
day to rest.
For the Grace of Her Divine Wisdom, I pray,
Karen Smith, September 12, 2001 |
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