Here's a pale reflection of the rich ramble my mind's been on this last half-hour or so.

I was watching the Marty Stuart Show. Mighta been the first episode; an early one at any rate, and I'd missed it. Featured guest: Earl Scruggs. The icon and the old, old man.

And I got to thinking about a ride I took one day with our then-new Bishop; I'd taken along a car-CD our band was using to learn from some source-songs. It was the usual, wacky, eclectic mix our band plays, in gospel sub-genres that have mixed and flowed apart and back together through many concert halls, radio programs, and jam sessions. All vintage.

And, not surprisingly, my new African-American bishop of wide cosmopolitan experience responded viscerally to the old "negro spirituals" and to the Iris Dement adaptation of a song she'd learned at her mother's knee, sung purdy hill-like, Appalachianish.

We started a friendship that day, my Bishop and I, in the commonality of what we both perceived as truth... expressed through many cultures. And yes, we did sing along as we hurtled though the mountains and valleys that cannot be avoided here, going anywhere at all. It was a great hour.

Well, I was savoring that ("anamnesis") and remembering some of Stuart's other musically-multicultural leanings, and seeing old Scruggs be Scruggs, and the show wandered on through a heckuva musical journey.... and my mind was not far behind though a tad far afield.

I'd been mulling the Rene' Marie music I'd heard yesterday, earlier this morning.

All that was in my mind-- a grand soup, simmering.


And at the very end of the show Marty turned to Scruggs and cued "the National Anthem," and they rolled right into a jamming, sparkling Foggy Mountain Breakdown-- the national anthem of the nation of which they claim citizenship.

And I thought, we all have a national anthem that speaks to us, cried out to us, uplifts us, challenges us-- and there is no intrinsic conflict bewtween them really. They are just part of the soup.

And they are meant to be shared, and to be celebrated. All of them.


I'm GLAD Rene' Marie stirs her soup. I been known to stir a soup myself, and this particular week that soup is so hot I'm feeling a need for a few ice cubes-- cuz I'm IN it this time. Hopped right in like an ignorant lobster.


But multicultural competence (a recently learned term) requires that we jump in, stir it, serve it up, let it soften us sometimes, let it burn us a little as it cooks. In the end [shrug], IT'S ALL GOOD.


Abrazos,

~Susan