We Shall Overcome

On Sunday morning I was at church and had one of those moments where you just feel...something. There are different kinds of "somethings" you can experience during moments like this and I do have these moments fairly regularly, but they don't usually take me by surprise as much as this one did on Sunday. The service was our Martin Luther King Jr. service because our music director is going to be in New York City next Sunday when we would normally hold that service and the choir singing for this service is very important. The service itself was good but not especially moving, didn't have anything extra special about it. Sunday was our accompanist's weekend off so the music director, Jeannie, (who usually doesn't play the piano, too, although she's a really good pianist) was also the accompanist for all the hymns and other music. Since the service was in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. she chose hymns from that time to use for the prelude, offertory, and postlude.

When we came to the postlude - We Shall Overcome - Jeannie asked the congregation to join her and sing along. So we started singing, and then slowly we all stood up. I'm not sure who initiated it but everyone in the congregation started holding hands and swaying back and forth. Now this might all sound kind of corny, but I assure you it wasn't as corny as it sounds. And bear with me, I'm getting to that "something" moment. So we were all standing there, holding hands, singing this song that was written during a time when so many people were being persecuted, discriminated against, and fighting for equality and freedom. I wasn't unmoved by all this, but it was when we got to the third verse and I really thought about what I was singing that it hit me.

We shall all be free
We shall all be free
We shall all be free someday
I don't want this to be taken wrong. The original meaning behind the song is very powerful and the social rights movement was a very important part of history that I think we all need to remember and still work towards the ideal world MLK had in mind. With all that said, when we were singing the song and got to this verse about being free, all I could think about was how this song could be applied to my life and the lives of everyone else fighting illness, fighting to be free from the prison that their own bodies have become, fighting to live normal lives.

We are not afraid
We are not afraid
We are not afraid someday
We are fighting invisible (or at least microscopic or unseen) enemies that are within our own bodies. We feel betrayed by the very thing that is supposed to nourish and sustain us. Our lives have been turned upside down. And just when we've attached suction cups to everything and learned to live on the ceiling, everything gets turned over again and the world goes topsy turvy leaving us to figure out what to try next. We try humor. We try indifference. We try pushing through until our bodies scream out that it just can't take anymore.

We are not alone
We are not alone
We are not alone someday
But in the end, we just keep going on with our lives. We do what we have to do - take days (or weekends, or weeks, or months) to rest in bed; spend hours and hours hooked up to IVs; travel hundreds of miles every month to various doctors; take handfulls of pills that help us function and may or may not keep working. Our friends may wonder what has happened to us when we seem to drop off the face of the earth for months only to pop up looking like we're doing fine, but they didn't see us during those months when we didn't leave the house. And they don't see the screaming headache or the cloud hanging over our heads - these things are just invisible.

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome someday
So all this was going through my head at church as I was standing there singing this song. And the heaviness of everything hit me. I'm a master at repressing things, but every once in a while everything comes up in waves and the reality hits me. Sometimes I can predict when it will happen, and sometimes I can't. I certainly wasn't expecting this hymn at church to be a trigger.

Deep in our hearts
We still believe
That we shall overcome someday

Yours,
Penguini