"Boundless Realms of Joy"

A Saturday-long symposium on "Exploring the Neurological, Therapeutic and Social Benefits of Community Singing."  The first beautiful spring day of the year, and inside Lowell Lecture Hall, my mind was being blown.

The Red line agonizingly late, then slow. The actual venue hard to locate in the welter of Harvard buildings.. But I arrived in time to hear two passionate evangelists for choral singing, then to participate in a sing-along with chorus of people young and old with 'cognitive disabilities', such as Down's syndrome, from New Jersey: Joyful Noise. Then after lunch outside in the glorious sun, I heard three professionals, a doctor, a researcher and a music therapist, on the power of music to change lives. The finale, a composer and flautist, on turning her cerebral palsy into music. Category after category of otherness was claimed to be, shown to be, susceptible to community through the power of music. This symposium was a an exploration of new frontiers of hospitality.

So many powerful images: the older parents of Joyful Noise chorus members so proud of their children; the young woman in the wheel chair swinging her head and barking as she controlled a computer that expressed in a clear artificial voice funny and insightful remarks on her novel  'Opening the Cover'; the flautist showing off the gait that forms the fundamental structure of a concerto written for her; the music therapist telling how music has provided a work-around for the aphasics, and has eased and smoothed the breathing of the terminally ill. I don't know about the 50 or so other people, mostly older women, in the hall, but I felt confronted: "Does the affect of this person in front of you mean that conversation is not possible or profitable? Let me prove you wrong, mister." Only it wasn't a confrontational gathering but a celebratory one.

At times I was almost moved to tears (I tear up easily), at times I was fascinated and dazzled. By the end I was replete. My mind could barely 'chew' what it had taken in; even now, I realize that I have much to reflect on. The barriers against conversation seems to fall one by one through the day. A wide open vista for possibilities open up with those whose humanity is easily, sometimes persuasively, ignorable.

Of course, I personally had direct encounters only with the professional people. Also, beyond these showcase situations, there's the the taxing and perplexing responsibility of caregivers. But if in recent posts, I have longed for more palpability in the presence of God-in-love, I got it in spades yesterday.