A Parable of Grace from YouTube: Susan Boyle sings

A Parable of Grace
By Allan Roy Andrews

If you're among the seeming minority who has not yet viewed the seven-minute YouTube clip of the April 2009 audition of Scottish singer Susan Boyle on the "Britain's Got Talent" show, by all means view that video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY before you read further.

Today (Nov. 23, 2009), seven months after her audition (and after her 48th birthday), Boyle's debut album goes on sale.  Pre-order sales at Amazon.com are at the highest for any pre-order of the year.  Incidentally, Boyle's performance on YouTube has been watched over 100 million times, setting her clips as an online record (the clip to which I've referred above has been viewed over 79 million times as of this writing).

Back in April, I used the clip of Boyle's audition for an exercise in a Composition 101 class I was teaching at a local community college.  I stopped the clip after Boyle introduced herself to the skeptical judges and audience and asked students to write their naive impressions of this woman who was about to sing.  Almost to a person, they described her as dumpy, dowdy, and not likely to impress anyone.

I stopped the clip after Boyle finished her rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream," from the musical Les Miserables, and asked the students to write a second reaction to the video.  Again, there was almost universal shock and surprise at the power and quality of this singer's voice.  The most frequent expression of these freshman writers was how the clip underscored the truth of the old aphorism:  "You can't judge a book by its cover."


This, of course, was part of the writing and literature lesson I hoped to impress upon the students, and I asked them to write a third response after they heard what the astonished judges had to say after Boyle had sung. Most of them saw what I saw:  three judges confessing their biases and repenting of their prejudicial expectations.


The three judges, Simon Cowell (best known to American TV-audiences as the seemingly harsh and abrupt judge of "American Idol"); British actress Amanda Holden; and Piers Morgan, the author and editor turned talent scout and judge; each responded to Boyle's performance with honest surprise and repentance.  Holden called the performance the "biggest wake-up call ever" to the cynical negativism she and the audience displayed and told Boyle she felt it a "complete privilege" to have heard her sing, and Morgan, the first to vote on Boyle's audition, said he was in "total shock" and gave her the "biggest yes" he's ever given anyone on the talent show. 


Similarly, the audience, many of whom rolled eyes and snickered at Boyle's introduction, spent most of the time of her performance on its feet in a rousing ovation to her talent.


For me, the seven-minute clip was a parable of the triumph of grace.


For the record, Boyle did not win the competition; she placed second to an acrobatic and precision team dance act called "Diversity."  The Great Britain audience that watched the final competition of "Britain's Got Talent" was a record-setting 17.4 million viewers.  But one might say that "winning" is a matter of interpretation, as is demonstrated in the dynamic of many of the parables of Jesus.  The Good Samaritan and the widow who gave her mite, along with many others, turn out to be the "winners" of the scriptural stories.  In the parable of "Britain's Got Talent," Susan Boyle emerges a winner.

Briefly hospitalized for treatment of exhaustion after her highly publicized performances on the British talent show, Boyle has put together her first album, a mixture of well-known songs and Christian hymns, including renditions of "Amazing Grace,"  "How Great Thou Art," and the Christmas carol, "Silent Night."

A reprise of her attention-grabbing first audition singing of "I Dreamed a Dream" is on the album as well.  Two cuts I find surprisingly attractive are calm and thoughtful renditions of the Mick Jagger song, "Wild Horses," and another of the John Stewart (one-time member of The Kingston Trio) number made popular by The Monkees, "Daydream Believer."

Excerpts of the album are available at http://www.susanboylemusic.com/gb/music/


I concur with the advice Simon Cowell gave Susan Boyle at the end of her audition, "You can go back to the village with your head held high . . . ."

Conversing with a five-year-old

By Allan Roy Andrews
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This essay is an expansion and rewrite of a column I published during my tenure as editor of Pacific Stars and Stripes in Japan. That column, originally titled “A Ride Home from the Airplane Base” was published in 1996.
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My middle son, now in his twenties, was one year old on the day my wife, our oldest son, and I took him on a Boeing 747 and flew for about 17 hours to Tokyo, where I became a civilian editor with the Department of the Army working for Pacific Stars and Stripes, the U.S. government’s daily newspaper for overseas military personnel stationed in the Far East.

The newspaper’s offices were located in downtown Tokyo on a tiny U.S. installation known as Hardy Barracks, and most personnel with the paper—both military and civilian—were housed at the larger military base, Yokota Air Base, about 50 kilometers west of Tokyo. Civilians were granted base privileges comparable to military personnel, and the Department of the Army paid most of us who worked as civilian editors the salaries we’d be paid if we were serving as colonels or captains in the armed services.

My wife was no stranger to Tokyo, she is the daughter of American missionaries, and had been born at a hospital near Tokyo and had lived most of her life in a western suburb on the Seibu-Ikebukuro train line before going stateside to attend college. For that reason, we did not choose to live on base, but instead rented a house “on the economy” in the neighborhood in which my wife had been raised. Our Japanese home was about 30 kilometers outside Tokyo and about 20 kilometers east of Yokota.

In the eight years plus that I held the job with Stripes, I learned to drive around the Kanto Plain in a series of automobiles we purchased during our tenure. All of them used, all of them Japanese-made cars—Hondas, Nissans, and Toyotas—all of them with steering on the right, and most with standard-shift that required me to learn to shift gears with my left hand. Because Stripes was an evening newspaper, editors began work around 5 a.m. Tokyo’s commuter trains did not begin running until closer to 6 a.m. Thus, I became an adept morning commuter and fairly competent at reading Japanese road signs.

At that time, gasoline was sold on base for about half of what it cost at a neighborhood Japanese service station. As a result, we made frequent trips from our home to Yokota Air Base, not only for gasoline, but for inexpensive shopping, entertainment, and, despite our growing love for Japanese food, a welcomed taste of America.

On one particular occasion I was driving home from the base with my five-year-old son as a passenger beside me. It was dusk when we left the base, and I could see that he was on the verge of falling asleep. I recall that it was this son who insisted we should call the place we’d just left “the airplane base,” not the air base, which makes good sense if one thinks about it.

“The best thing you could do,” I said to him, “is lie back and go to sleep.” We’d already eaten supper. Neither of us was hungry, and we were both somewhat eager to get back to the comfort of home.

“Go to sleep?” he said, a bit astonished. “Go to sleep without any diaper pants?”

“You don't need diaper pants,” I said, trying to be an encouraging father and strong male who shared grown-up mastery of the sphincters.

“What if I pee all over the seat?”

“You're the one who knows if you're going to pee,” I said.

“Well, Dad, let me know if you think I'm going to pee.”

“You're the one who knows if you have to pee.”

“Yeah,” he replied, “but let me know if you think I'm going to pee.”

Seeking to stop this circular talk, I said, “Well, you shouldn't have to pee, because we went to the bathroom just before we left the air base.”

“You mean the airplane base,” he said. O.K., I thought, we’re off that topic.

“You know what, Dad?”

“What?”

“Sometimes just after I pee I feel like I still have to pee again.”

Sometimes a father can do nothing or say nothing more. I've discovered that some conversations are best unfinished; or rather, they're best finished by the child rather than the adult. Children know when such conversations are supposed to end; adults don't.

Several minutes later, he picked up our conversation. “How long before we get home, Daddy?”

“About a half an hour.”

“A half an hour and how many minutes?” he asked.

“A half hour is 30 minutes, so about 30 minutes,” I said.

“No, Daddy, a half hour and how many minutes?”

“A half hour is 30 minutes.”

“But Daddy, a half hour and how many minutes.”

At that point, I realized again that adults often don't know when such conversations are finished, so I figured I'd better invent an answer just to keep us from going around in what I perceived to be endless circles.

“A half hour and two minutes,” I said, grabbing a number from the air and wondering what I'd say if he replied, “That's thirty-two minutes.”

He didn't say this, and I was happy; I don't appreciate precocious mathematicians. He seemed to understand (even if I didn't).

“Oh, is that what you meant?” he said as he glanced out the window at a truck we were passing.

“Yes, a half hour and two minutes,” I repeated, happy to have worked my way out of that conversation.

“Well, you said a half hour. I must have been confusing you,” he concluded.

Children also have a way of making adults feel small and foolish, especially when we attempt to be too rational and meaningful. After a few more minutes passed, my son turned theological:

“Can I ask you some Bible questions, Daddy?”

“Sure.”

“These are going to be really, really, really hard questions,'' he said in a tone meant to reassure me that I shouldn't feel too bad if I couldn’t answer them. To drive this home, he added, “I’m not sure I even know the answers myself.”

“O. K.”

“What day did Jesus die on the cross?” he asked.

I recall that this conversation took place shortly after Easter, so I assumed he was recalling something he picked up in Sunday School.

“You mean what day of the week?” I asked.

“Yeah, what day of the week?”

“It was Good Friday,” I answered.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, that's what the Bible tells us. Then it says that on Sunday -- Easter Sunday -- he rose again.” I'm really not trying to sound like a proselytizer, I just figured I'm repeating what he's learned.

“Is that when he went up to heaven?”

For me the conversation had subtly shifted. “Yes, I guess so,” I said, pondering exactly when Jesus went to heaven.

“When he died on the cross he was already in heaven,” my son pronounced with the aplomb of a dogmatic theologian.

I remained silent. The mystery of this conversation had already gone beyond me.

“Here's another really hard question,” he continued.

“On what day did David begin to play his harp?”

“I don't know. Was it a Monday?”

“I don't know.”

End of discussion.

I loved those drives; they provided conversations that kept my mind turning long after the wheels of our car had come to rest at home.

A Journalist Learns from Singing in the Choir

by Allan Roy Andrews

"All God's critters got a place in the choir." So begins a bouncy folk tune written and recorded several decades ago by New England singer and songwriter Bill Staines. I've sung in church choirs off and on for most of my life, but I'm still attempting to figure out what draws me to it.

In many ways, a church choir is the ultimate community of cooperation. Many voices attempting to sound as one. E pluribus unum, and all that. In many other ways, a church choir is the hotbed of petty jealousies and competing egos, as well as the deep harbor of catty criticisms of the institutional church.
Almost every choir I've belonged to harbors a cadre of heretics who to some degree choose to sing in the choir so they don't have to sit under the convicting gaze of the preacher or so they can slip in and out of services through a choir door (mea culpa on both counts).
Church choir directors, even those who rely on hiring professional soloists, don't require a test of faith; I've known some vocally talented agnostics who sang on Saturdays in the local synagogue, on Sunday mornings at the Episcopal Church and on Sunday nights at a downtown pub.
When one wants to find the rebels of a church congregation, one needs look no farther than this week's row of contraltos or basso profundos (or tenors or sopranos). Not so oddly, this all sounds like the world of a daily newsroom, where often a righteous muckraker by day becomes a profane cynic at night.
Despite petty problems, I'm convinced there's a lesson for democracy, not to mention lessons in theology, hiding under those choir cassocks and albs that have known more wearers than a starched hospital gown.
But why does anyone give up several hours of his or her week to sit in uncomfortable chairs and rifle through sheaves of indecipherable code, much of it in a foreign language? All of this while sitting beside someone who either smokes too much or often is in need of a bath or a breath mint.
I believe singing in the choir may be one of those hidden graces that God uses to evangelize the soft of tone but hard of heart (or the heavy of tone but soft of faith).
I was one of those boyhood sopranos, a treble as they're known in chorister circles. I probably should have gone to a cathedral school and become a trained chorister, but there were too many baseball dreams in my blood. When my mother offered to pay for singing lessons, I rejected them because of the time they would demand, taking me from ballgames in the neighborhood. I was enlisted as a 10-year-old to sing two solo selections at my older sister’s wedding, but that was enough of a vocal career for me.
As if getting what I deserved, my three sons, all now young adults and fair singers, totally rejected my suggestions that they join the youth choir at church. I never tried to push it, remembering the angst I went through as a teen turning away from church singing opportunities.
When, as an adult, I had strayed for several years from attending church, it was joining a choir that drew me back into the fold, and now, several years and several choirs later, I’ve learned some of the mysteries of sacred song.
Among those who pay attention to the ancient Rule of St. Benedict, some discover a way of reading called lectio divina. As I understand it, such reading, primarily of the Bible, involves reading with more than the eyes and the mind; it engages the heart and the whole person. Lectio divina is a slow, contemplative process that demands frequent pauses and a peaceful "listening" to the text.
Without necessarily being aware of it, church choirs are doing something like this every Sunday. They take a tiny text, perhaps little more than a sentence or a phrase, and mold it into a four-part anthem that speaks of the deepest recesses of being to listeners in the congregation.
The English writer C.S. Lewis once suggested Christians should begin each day with reading both the Bible and a daily newspaper--would that we journalists and our readers could apply a kind of lectio divina to our consumption of the daily news.

And perhaps Lewis didn’t go far enough; maybe we need to take some time to sing a meaningful text to ourselves more frequently. All God’s creatures, including homo sapiens, have a place in the choir.

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This slightly updated essay is an adaptation of a column published online for The American Reporter in March of 1999.

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Poetry survives in a prose-prone world, but evangelicals (and many others) remain phobic

By Allan Roy Andrews

In the past month, the Academy of American Poets launched a new page on its Web site devoted to poetry and teenagers. The page, labeled “Poetry Resources for Teens,” is quickly reached by visiting poets.org and pulling down the menu “For Educators.” The resources on the new page include “reading recommendations, writing help, spotlight audio and video recordings, as well as new ways to get involved in grassroots poetry projects,” according to an Academy press release.

Describing the motivation for producing the page, the Academy’s press release sounds much like what could be written by any American church or religious organization. The Academy acted, in its own words, in response to a recent survey they conducted, which showed that over 75% of the people who use poets.org share one characteristic:  they first developed an interest in poetry before their eighteenth birthday. With young people spending a reported average of 16.7 hours a week online, it seemed clear that in the long term, the best opportunity to reach new readers and writers of poetry is in their early years.

In pondering this news from the Academy, I thought again of the importance of poetry and the contrary disdain it experiences in American life and letters, especially among religious movers and shakers, and in particular amidst the evangelical subculture.

I guess my real problem with this push to give teens access to poetry is that it further distinguishes adulthood as a time for generally disdaining and disregarding poetry as unimportant to faith and life in the twenty-first century.

We need more people like John Keating (the fictional English teacher played by Robin Williams in the film, “Dead Poet’s Society”), who told his adolescent charges:

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for . . . .

(Alas, I use a movie to make a point about poetry!)

My wife asked me a trick question last week: “What language is spoken in heaven?”

“Probably Aramaic,” I quipped.

If I had taken, as she did, any course in college offered by Dr. Thomas Howard (author of Christ the Tiger and subsequent others—see http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/authors/thomashoward.asp), she informed me I would have hastily answered, “Poetry!”

If that be so, it’s clear to me that the heavenly language fights for a public voice in today’s prose-dominated world. Oh, to be sure, poetry is available to any who hunt for it, but such a suggestion is a bit like telling sushi lovers in the Dakotas they can find their favorite food if they just search long and hard enough. Sorry, folks, but Fargo ain’t Tokyo!

If poetry is the language of heaven, it still gets short shrift on earth, even among those who claim to be diligent advocates for life beyond our numbered days.

Case in point: Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of Christianity Today International, a moderately evangelical organization that counts as one of its founders the evangelist Billy Graham, recently ran a poll to determine if its readers still counted themselves as “supporters of the arts” in these disturbing economic times. I’m less interested in the results of the poll (Weekly newsletter, Jun 23, 2009) than in the way the question was framed:

Are you cutting back on spending money on the arts (music, painting, movies)?

Please note the limiting listing of the arts: “music, painting, movies.” Poetry flies under the radar in Christianity Today’s perception. In fairness, the survey accompanies a compelling argument by Canadian singer-songwriter Carolyn Arends on why the arts are important; although, she seems to limit poetry’s influence to its aid in worship, comparable to icons.

In other contexts, I’ve chided Christianity Today and other popular evangelical publications for not regularly publishing first-rate contemporary poetry. One can look to Christian Century, Commonweal, First Things, and Sojourners to find a smattering of poets in religion journals, but one must look long and hard to find poets being published in the largest circulation religious magazine, familiarly referred to as CT. Among the magazines I’ve listed here, Christianity Today alone is without a poetry editor.

Almost a decade ago, an English professor at Houston Baptist University, Louis Markos, in a Christianity Today column of open commentary, called evangelicals “poetry phobic.” In the ensuing years, the magazine has done little or nothing to address and attack this phobia. Even Books and Culture, Christianity Today International’s intelligent and erudite collection of book reviews, does not have a designated poetry editor other than editor John Wilson, who often shows his personal appreciation of poetry but does not push for any regular publication of poems.

Let me be clear: I welcome poets.org’s effort to expand the exposure of teenagers to poetry. What I’d like to see is religious publications, who often target teenagers as an audience to be addressed and assessed, spend more time exposing their adult readers to the rising cadre of fine poets addressing questions of faith and the dilemmas of life and theology.

If it is true that evangelicals (and perhaps other religious subsets) are poetry phobic, much of the fault can be laid at the feet of the journalists, essayists, commentators, and preachers whose words fill the monthly magazines and who too often show a disdain for the poetic voice.

Note: Anyone interested in fine contemporary poetry from a Christian faith perspective should visit the Journal of Christianity and Literature hosted by Pepperdine University at http://www.pepperdine.edu/sponsored/ccl/journal/. Another excellent source of such poetry is Image: A Journal of Art, Faith, Mystery at http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/. Image is closely tied to the Graduate Writing Program at Seattle Pacific University and to the Glen Writing Workshop in New Mexico.

Youth on mission to Honduras working through tensions of coup

I share with all this news just released by the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland:

June 29, 2009

A Message from the Honduran Missioners Working in Talanga, Honduras

In the news today (Monday, June 29) are reports of a non-violent military coup in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, on Sunday, June 28. The Diocese of Maryland is in the midst of its annual high school youth mission trips to the country, serving El Hogar de Amore y Esperanza, an Episcopal orphanage in Tegucigalpa, and the orphanage's agricultural and technical training school in Talanga, located north of the capital city. We are pleased to report that the 13 youth missioners currently working at the training school in Talanga and their adult chaperones are safe, having arrived in the country on Friday morning, June 26, prior to the changing political situation. The group destined for the orphanage on Saturday, June 27, returned to Baltimore after reaching Miami, the first leg of the trip. A phone conversation yesterday with the Rev. Wes Wubbenhorst, youth missioner for the diocese and on-site leader of the mission trips, confirmed the group's safety, upbeat spirit and willingness to stay undeterred. "Everyone here is fine, the city is quiet and we will be in touch with reports as we find out more," Wubbenhorst said. He added that this is the third time in his 20-plus years organizing these trips that something of this magnitude has happened and each time the groups have been safe. Wubbenhorst had been in touch with diocesan point-of-contact the Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool by Sunday afternoon, who in turn contacted the parents and spouses of those on the trip. Many of the parents were unaware of the political situation and all were glad to have been informed. There are three overlapping mission trips to Honduras. The first group arrived in Talanga on June 19 and returned to Baltimore on the 26th. The second group, also in Talanga, arrived June 26 and will return on July 3. The group headed for the orphanage would have arrived June 27 and returned July 4. To learn more about these and other mission opportunities for youth in the Diocese of Maryland, visit http://youth.ang-md.org/index.php/missions.

===================== A quick way to keep up with what's happening in Honduras is to visit http://news.yahoo.com/world A note: Wubbenhorst, the diocese of Maryland's youth missioner, is a former Peace Corps worker in Honduras.