Topic: spirituality
Last Sunday, Ron and I visited a church that we sometimes attend, sitting near the back, where we are most comfortable these days. Especially since Ron, with his inability to sit long due to his disabled back, has to get up and move around a lot.
Having been in leadership--both of us--for so many years until 2001, with Ron still getting paid for leading after our "resignation" in 1988, we are becoming more comfortable with sitting in the back and just observing. Being in that position frees us both up to be other things that we have become, in fact.
So there we were, singing a new song--well, not really a new song, but certainly new to me. As many of you know, I am equally interested in the words (the writer in me) as I am with the melodies and harmonic choices of the musical composition (the musician in me). So there I was, trying to figure out where the alto was while examining the musical tracks, along with the lyrics.
That's when it hit me--the humor, as I saw it--in one line of the lyrics. So funny that I laughed out loud. Much louder than I intended! No heads turned, so maybe it wasn't as loud as I feared. Yet loud enough to embarrass Ron, who embarrasses much more easily than I.
The words I found myself singing were: "Our women see visions. Our men clear their eyes."
Now, the way I read it, those words could only be expressions of facetious cyniscism. Words that expressed so well my sentiment. Just couldn't figure out what we were doing singing them out of a hymnbook commonly used in mainline circles.
These were my thoughts until we got home and I started discussing with Ron the reason I'd laughed. He hadn't seen humor, but immense truth in the words. Found them refreshing, though--all because he'd apparently understood one pronoun to refer to the male gender, while I'd seen it referring to the female.
As he explained it: The male author of these lyrics saw that women were able to see what should be and to lead men to open their eyes.
Instead I saw what I believe to be reality most of the time, especially when I'm in a cynical mood. I thought it strange and really a work of art for the thoughts to be woven into a hymn in the way I perceived them to be. Yet, it was the message for the day, for me, anyway.
Women like me often see what they have always believed to be reality, only to learn when men "clear our eyes" that we aren't seeing reality at all; but a vision of what needs to be. When we get our eyes cleared, we start to claim that vision as a fantasy, but also as a dream. We refuse to give up the vision, even though we realize it is only a vision. We have our eyes "cleared" by men who often really see things the way they are and see them as okay being that way, from inside their own system. Yet we continue to embrace the vision, working toward the impossible dream while learning to recognize that it is only an aspiration that we insist men and women alike strive for. All while accepting that it will probably never be.
Kind of goes along with the adage that my friend Olga sent me, on a long list in a forward recently: Love is blind, but marriage is a real eye-opener.
In this case, I needed my eyes "cleared," though. Once again. Though I still like the humorous version that I'll always see if I find myself singing this song again.
Posted by Dee Ann Miller
at 8:36 AM CDT
Updated: Tue 05/13/2008 8:39 AM CDT
