A LENTEN REFLECTION ~ 26

Today, I offer an image (We Are All in this Together) and a song (Meet Me in the Middle of the Air) in the midst of and in response to a frightening, anxiety-producing, non-discriminating pandemic. Happening in this season of Lent we gain a new perspective on our lives. With its power to enforce the giving up of things that we love, value, enjoy, take for granted, and benefit from, COVID-19 has exposed us to ourselves, sometimes in affirming but other times in rather unflattering ways. It reveals to us where our time and energy go, what we are invested in, those about whom we care most deeply, what we are attached or addicted to, how interconnected and vulnerable we are, both how similar we are when all the false, concocted, assumed, or exaggerated differences of class, economic means, gender, religion, race, sexual orientation, education, country, or continent are stripped away and how different we are based on human made structures and unjust systems that favor some while penalizing innocent others. It also reveals to us the human capacity for kindness, goodness, generosity, hospitality, courage, self-sacrifice, cooperation, deep sympathy, compassion, and love.

We’re All in this Together, Dan Miller March 2020

If you do not know one of Australia’s national treasures — singer-songwriter, performer, and author Paul Kelly — I highly recommend that you make his acquaintance. A good way to play catch up is to start with Paul Kelly | Greatest Hits – Songs from the South 1985-2019 (or to go on Spotify or Pandora). For the past 40 years he has commanded the respect of his countrymen and women the way Dylan and Springsteen have done in the United States over those same decades.

One of his most famous and popular songs is his interpretation of Psalm 23 called “Meet Me in the Middle of the Air.” Sung a cappella, there are not only numerous versions online of Kelly singing it solo, but also many covers of it ranging from a guy at home in in his office to chorale renditions that put a lump in the throat.

The song seems fitting to me during these precarious times in our world. The etymology of the word precarious shows that its meaning is connected to both uncertainty and danger as well as to the plea in prayer. Originally written in the speaking voice of the pray-er with verses 4 and 5 spoken as a second person address to God, Kelly flips it, and sings the famous psalm as first person speech of God (the Divine or Good Shepherd). The lyrics are matched by a melody (and often harmony when sung with others) that manages simultaneously to exude intimacy, pathos, yearning, trust, and hope. In this song, which he often uses to close his concerts, Kelly adds to the psalmist’s words only the title-line as a refrain: “Come and meet me in the middle of the air / I will meet you in the middle of the air.” Even this line is not original to Kelly. In his memoir How to Make Gravy: A to Z, A Mongrel Memoir, Kelly points out that this line and image goes back one hundred years or more in blues, gospel, and spiritual genres. The line has been used by such artists as Blind Willie Johnson, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin.1

Come and meet me in the middle of the air.
I will meet you in the middle of the air.

As a couplet, the refrain becomes a call and response, an invitation and a reply that is a pledged commitment of a future action. It is the dialogical intimacy of the refrain that holds the blessed tension of pathos and hope, yearning and trust. Raised Catholic with a sister who is a Loreto nun, Paul Kelly does not profess to believe in God. Yet, he acknowledges his frequent use of the bible and biblical themes in his songs and tells of the place from which this particular song came. “I was in a tight spot, and like desperate men through the ages I turned to the Bible, specifically to King David. . . .Psalm 23.”

Biblical scholars adept at distinguishing various types of psalms, do not list Psalm 23 as a lament. It is rather, a song of trust. Bernard W. Anderson, the late renowned biblical scholar from whom I had the good fortune of taking four classes at Princeton Theological Seminary, including his course on the psalms, first taught me that of the 150 psalms in the Psalter, nearly one in three is a lament. More importantly, he taught that although a lament usually begins with a complaint, it almost always ends with a profession of hope or trust, sometimes even rejoicing. So, for example, a prayer like Psalm 13 that begins like this—

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? (Psalm 13:1-3, ESV)

—turns a corner and ends like this:

But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me. (Ps. 13:5-6)

Kelly’s solo versions of the song especially resound with a sense of pathos, yearning, and hope. He sings it as a secular prayer of trust that apparently comes from his own taste of “the lonesome valley” and experience of “death’s dark shadow” with which many if not most adult listeners can resonate. Less polished than the studio version or the tight arrangements sung with others, I favor the live version posted below that Kelly sings at Sound Relief to a crowd of 80,000 who gathered in a stadium to raise funds for those affected by the 2009 bushfires that ravaged the Australian state of Victoria. Who knows how many recognized the text?

In this context, there is a sense that the song gives voice to a trust, even a hope, that have just been birthed from suffering and lament. In Kelly’s performance, there is a deep connection between the psalm’s allusion to suffering and the recent suffering, loss, and lamentation of all Australians. And from this connection, the non-believer Kelly, raised in the atmosphere of Catholic ritual, becomes the priest inviting the suddenly hushed crowd to lean into the song as a psalm of trust. He encourages them to “fear not death’s dark shadow.” Lifting his hands, he anoints his congregation, mediates the psalm’s assurance, sings to absent victims and present survivors and fellow Aussies that “every soul shall be restored,” that their “cup will runneth over,” and that they will be blessed by “goodness and mercy.” In their personal and collective grief, in the near-quiet of 80,00 kin, he offers a powerful and extended moment of hope. Perhaps it can be of comfort to us today as well as a source of encouragement.

For Christians, Kelly’s song is heard and sung as an expression of faith. This is due, in part, to the fact that Psalm 23 is the most frequently used scripture passage at Christian Funerals. Here, at the time of loss and grief, and in other moments throughout life, people turn to these familiar words where it is read or sung as a song of trust and meant to offer consolation and hope when facing adversity and suffering or when taunted by despair. I enter into it in this way myself. In addition, a Christological view is understandable in light of the fact that the title-line comes from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians (4:16-17) where he uses a vivid image to offer eschatological reassurance to living Christians that they “will be caught up in the clouds together with [“the dead in Christ”] to meet the Lord in the air . . . [where] they will be with the Lord forever.” Given this biblical reference, some commentators on the song have suggested a Christological interpretation of the meeting in the middle of the air identifying it with the unifying and reconciling act of Jesus on the cross where everything and everyone at cross purposes are made one through the reconciling and healing power of Divine love.

It is unclear who the inviter is for Kelly or what force summons or what presence he mediates or what deep mystery lies in the middle of the air. Whatever the case, I suspect he is actually singing it with the suspension of his own disbelief. Whether viewed from a Christian perspective or from a perspective devoid of any religious content or conviction but filled with human pathos and yearning and hope, the rendezvous point is where uncertainty and hope join hands, where pain and laughter embrace, where routine and rapture greet, and where anguish and joy lie down like the lion and the lamb of the peaceable kingdom.

Perhaps the meeting place is synonymous with Thomas Merton’s le point vierge – the virgin point – which is “a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God… which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will”. Perhaps it is consonant with Rumi’s field where the meeting takes place “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing” where “even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.” Based on Kelly’s own comments about writing the song, it is reasonable to say that it is a place of solidarity, restoration, and hope. And today, that is something for all of us to lean against.

I conclude with a vagabond’s Benediction: Whoever you are, wherever you are from, whatever you believe, I belong to you and you belong to me in the mystery and kinship of our humanity. Whether in brokenness or blessedness, in poverty or richness, sickness or health, fear or trust, suffering or rejoicing, meet me in the middle of the air. I will meet you in the middle of the air. I believe, in and through the Spirit who animates and connects all life forms of the earth community, we need one another, and can build one another up to love and good works. In the immediacy and precarity of this moment, and in the hope of the road that lies ahead, we are all in this together, connected one to another, whether keeping our safe distance now or walking closely together one day down the road toward some tomorrow.

1 For my reflection, I made use of a wonderful article titled “Public Lament” by Elizabeth Boase and Steve Taylor in Spiritual Complaint: The Theology and Practice of Lament.

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LYRICS

Meet Me in the Middle of the Air

I am your true shepherd
I will lead you there
Beside still waters
Come and meet me in the middle of the air
I will meet you in the middle of the air

I will lay you down
In pastures green and fair
Every soul shall be restored
I will meet them in the middle of the air
Come and meet me in the middle of the air

Through the lonesome valley
My rod and staff you’ll bear
Fear not death’s dark shadow
Come and meet me in the middle of the air
I will meet you in the middle of the air

With oil I shall anoint you
A table shall I prepare
Your cup will runneth over
I will meet you in the middle of the air
Come and meet me in the middle of the air

In my house you’ll dwell forever
You shall not want for care
Surely goodness and mercy will follow you
Come and meet me in the middle of the air
I will meet you in the middle of the air
Come and meet me in the middle of the air
Come and meet me in the middle of the air

Note Bene: The first time I saw the video above, knowing nothing about the venue or occasion, I was stunned by what happens at the 54 second mark. I found it quite moving (and hopeful) that a crowd of 80,00 people in what had been up to that point a raucous rock ‘n Roll concert, could so quickly without any prompt or spoken invitation, recognize the depth and mystery and sacredness of the moment.

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Below, for you music lovers, are two other renditions of Kelly’s song. These are just two, as noted above, of the many versions of this song on Youtube. Immediately below, the song is performed by Gondwana Voices, Australia’s internationally renowned children’s choir.

(Below) Paul Kelly and The Stormwater Boys

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♣ Be well, Goodpeople,

~ Dan

* PS – When I was writing this piece I was not aware that this phrase was being used as a PSA featuring CBS “Stars.” Had I known, I probably would not have used it ~ then again, as Yogi Berra might have said, “it does say what it says.”