I and Thou

I’m a singer. No, let me qualify that statement. I am an amateur, “amateur” in the best sense of the word, which is, I am a lover of singing. I have been singing since childhood; in choirs, in choruses, in home-grown musical theater, and, of course, in the shower. In our choir we often warm up with this phrase, “I love to sing”, moving up and down the scales. Not only do I love to sing, but I also love the way it makes me feel, the way it lifts my spirits. I am more alive, filled with more energy, I am more “me.” One of our choir members put it this way: “It’s my weekly therapy.”

Since before Covid, I had been taking voice lessons from a teacher whom I met through my granddaughter. When Alex was a young girl, six or seven years old, I took her often to her piano and voice lessons; to her “Miss Lilly.” As I sat and listened, I was impressed with Miss Lilly’s approach to teaching a young, shy girl. It was so unlike my memory of my long-ago teacher, the kind who, I feared, although it never did happen, would rap my knuckles with a ruler when I messed up a scale, which was most of the time. I was tense, ashamed and always afraid.

Not Miss Lilly. She couldn’t have been more encouraging. Never did a cross word pass her lips, never did I hear her use the words “mistake” or “wrong”.  When I discovered that she also taught adults, I took a leap and decided to pick up voice lessons that I had abandoned many years earlier.

Then Covid hit. We continued our lessons on Facetime, making the best of it. I could still feel the energy of our connection across the miles and still looked forward to that hour every week.

And yet, it wasn’t until last Thursday, over five years later, when I went to her house for our first post-Covid lesson, that I realized what had been missing. I am tempted to say it was miraculous: to be there together in the same space. There was space to spread my arms (dare I say “wings”), to move my body and sing to the trees outside, to all the space in the room with full voice, as I had not sung in years. Not so freely, never so joyfully as in any of our Facetime lessons.  I think even Miss Lilly would agree! The sense of a delightful and foolish fancy that the next day I could walk onto a Broadway stage!

Ridiculous, of course, for this eighty-plus woman to imagine. But then, what is life all about, anyway, if not, as Mary Oliver has written, “wild and precious”? Which is what singing is for me.

Yet, that’s not all. Being together in the same room made all the difference. Happily, in the intervening years since Covid shut us all down, we had the advantage of Facetime so that we could continue my lessons. Access to the internet and its many uses managed to keep all our small and large connections in place. We could work, learn and socialize from home. It kept me connected to Lilly, which allowed lessons to continue.

With also, I began to realize, an enormous loss: the absence of shared space, of seeing the same trees out the windows, and of breathing in the room together. Now we could notice subtle shifts that aren’t visible on camera and feel each other’s energy. When at one point I struggled with a challenging situation, her gentle touch comforted me. In sum, I knew that the five years on Facetime had deprived me of the power in simply being together, in the same space at the same time.

Companionship, community, togetherness; these are the basic building blocks of a meaningful life. Martin Buber, a 20^th century Austrian religious thinker and political activist, introduced the concept of God, not as a remote Being, but as One that exists in relationship with us. Buber called it the “I-Thou” relationship and, by extension, that all human life finds meaning in our relationships. All of us share the same space in our sacred cosmos.

We are born in and for relationship. We are molded not only by our birth and heritage but by who we become in relationship with other people. Being together, as I rediscovered last Thursday, is life-giving in a way that no Facetime, Zoom, Instagram or all the many social media choices can ever imitate or supplant.

Thanks be that we are put on this earth to share life with one another.