Let Go of Being Right

It's Lent --  a season for letting go. This week (as suggested in Unity's downloadable Lenten booklet), I'm letting go of being right. So when Director Scotty Zacher emailed me lyrics Grateful Voices Choir plans to sing Sunday, Spirit graced me with the gift of stubborn certainty.

In Unity, we teach oneness with the divine. We believe we're empowered to shape our lives by awakening to our spiritual identity. I tend to push back hard against depictions that perpetuate us as poor, pitiful sufferers, separate and apart from a God who rescues only those few who check the right boxes.

That's the image evoked by my initial reading of lyrics Scotty emailed: "You are my refuge and my strength. You are my shelter from every storm." 

But in the middle of typing an email asking Scotty for another option, I remembered my intention to let go of being right. So I did some digging and discovered the composition was commissioned to bring "hope and comfort to the over 100,000 public and private high school choir programs throughout the United States who were forced to close and cancel concerts, musical production performances and events due to the Coronavirus outbreak." 

As I watched a YouTube performance featuring dozens of students from five high schools singing alone in their rooms on camera, the lyrics conveyed a deeper truth. They weren't singing to an absent deity. They were singing from the divine gifts expressing through them. They were praising the transcendent power of music to dissolve distance and separation. They were giving thanks for the source of comfort, light and joy that heals and bonds even in the darkest times.
It filled my heart...and I'm grateful I was wrong.