Songs for Creation
John Pitney
We Resist. We Build. We Rise. (Words & music by John Pitney)
I composed this song for the 2nd People’s Climate March in Washington DC, April 29, 2017. Its title was the March theme. The March date was our current Administration’s 100th day. Walking the route past the Capitol, the Washington and Lincoln Monuments and the White House, with 200,000 resistors, I was surrounded by people of faith from across our good country, including close friends from our church in Eugene, Oregon. As I read the signs of our partners in the struggle I was filled with new courage. The signs read: I Stand With Jesus/A Brown-skinned Radical Who Condemned Greed And Taught Unconditional Love, Love Your Neighbor As Yourself, Presbyterians for Creation, Evangelicals for Climate, Catholics 4 Solar! A woman near me had a sign painted with Noah’s Ark and a quote from Noah’s neighbor: “Sea level rise is a hoax!” I took a photo of a woman standing with our nation’s capital building in the background. She’s holding a sign reading: If You Love the Creator, Take Care of Creation! Marching in resistance together, we always make new friends and receive new messages.
Psalm 104: Will Earth be satisfied? (Words & music by John Pitney)
Reflections on Psalm 104: Water Song
I created this song for the national Presbyterians for Earth Care conference in the Rockies a few summers back (“Too Big to Fail?”). We were drawing our liturgical life from Psalm 104. Actress-dancer-prophet Tevyn East and I were asked to take the water references in the psalm and create morning worship, which we led one wondrous morning as the turning of the earth made the sun appear from beneath the plains to illumine the watersheds of the majestic Rockies to the rear of our open-sky sanctuary.
In biblical truth and physical reality, we are water, beginning to end to beginning. In one creation story it all begins with Wind-Spirit moving on the waters; in the other, the theologians tell us, the breath that enlivens humanity from our source in humus is a moistened aspiration. Is it any wonder the ancients knew earth was satisfied (vs. 13)?
Songs emerge from mystery and the collaboration of community. As Tevyn and I, strangers at the time, e-talked and planned worship across the miles, she asked me to consider changing my original lyrics. At the time, the final chorus line was “Earth is satisfied, Earth is satisfied.” Given the status of water in our world, she was asking, is that line really true? Witness the Cochabamba campesino, rising in protest at the privatization of their Bolivian waters so that they, living on the margins, would now be forced to pay for what is Earth’s gift. Witness the greed of lawns and golf courses, the weeping of Himalayan glaciers and the thirsting of Bangladeshi masses downstream. Witness the dry bed of the mighty Yangtze and Somali mothers raped and murdered on their way home from the well, carrying a precious few drops for their babies. Witness the lyrical change for yourselves.
This song is for the parched masses: endangered creatures who have no voice and human beings with deserts in their throats. And it is for those who speak for them. Orthodox priests and their Alaska Native congregants carve crosses in the ice of Bristol Bay and say mass for the salmon. Google it and learn. Bill McKibben and friends of the 350 movement are arrested in D.C. in protest of tar sand exploits. The U.N. tries to make watercourse treaties with no teeth, bound only by conscience. Gathered with PEC in Colorado was our friend Carolyn Raffensperger, director of theScience and Environmental Health Network, who reminded us it’s not enough to project our caring seven generations to the future. The half-life of the nuclear waste we would hide in the salt mines beneath the desert Southwest would suggest it will take 10,000 generations for us to really care.
Last summer, backlit by the setting sun sinking behind the Pacific, my wife Debbie and I witnessed a humpback whale breaching. As we watched her elegant, gargantuan body flee the deep not once, but again and again, each time body-slamming the watery surface of Earth with seeming delight, I thought, “This is ‘Leviathan at play (vs. 26).’” It will forever remind me that one of the fundamental yearnings of Earth is to rejoice! So what will our vocations be? How will we live? Let us stand together, up to our armpits in the cool deep waters of resistance. Willearth be satisfied?
My partners in this song are Chelsea Young with her haunting voice parts and Keenan Hansen with his wicked bass! Thanks friends.
John is a U. Methodist minister, songwriter & teacher, working in retirement to energize churches for Climate Justice. His song, We Resist,We Build,We Rise, was composed for the Climate March in Wash. DC, this spring. He & wife, Debbie, live in a Net Zero home in W. Oregon. He vows not to be one who has to explain to his grandchildren why he didn’t do everything he could to respond to climate injustice while there was time. Follow his music at johnpitney.org and blog Our Net Zero Life.
John is a U. Methodist minister, songwriter & teacher, working in retirement to energize churches for Climate Justice. His song, We Resist,We Build,We Rise, was composed for the Climate March in Wash. DC, this spring. He & wife, Debbie, live in a Net Zero home in W. Oregon. He vows not to be one who has to explain to his grandchildren why he didn’t do everything he could to respond to climate injustice while there was time. Follow his music at johnpitney.org and blog Our Net Zero Life.
We know that the Divine trinity “spoke” the world into being – but I wonder sometimes if this glorious world wasn’t really sung into existence. The way it all works together, the melodies and harmonies and counter-melodies and counterpoint of our natural world all seem the work of a glorious musical composer, as much as great poetry and prose almost sing off the page.
Bourgeault walks Christians – even Presbyterians – through a simple process to integrate chanting the psalms into our regular prayer life. As I have begun this practice, I have been amazed how her words have come to life for me. She relates a story where monks mysteriously fell ill after the Gregorian chanting was scrapped in their monastery. When the chanting was restored so were the monks, a result of the chapel as “a perfectly tuned reverberating bowl, allowing the monks to receive energy – actual physical sustenance – directly from the vibrations of the chant. (p. 30)” I do not have a fancy chapel in which to practice, but I have sensed the healing energy from the vibrations of my very simple chanting.
There are probably other books on chanting out there, but I have not yet needed to move beyond Chanting the Psalms. The included CD helps even beginning singers begin chanting immediately with simple monotone chanting and singing more complicated chants “by ear.” No complicated notation needed. Now even sitting in my hotel room in the storm I can feel the vibrancy of creation with my simple chanting of Psalm 104: “From your lofty abode you water the mountains; the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.”
Her business, Openings: Let the Spirit In, helps individuals and groups touch their spiritual center with retreats, workshops and one-on-one spiritual guidance. She is a participant in the Shalem Institute’s Nurturing the Presence program and member of Spiritual Directors International.
Charles Pettee is a talented singer, instrumentalist, arranger, and songwriter who began his career with traditional flat picking and folksinging on guitar and mandolin in his childhood in Asheville, NC. Charles Pettee & FolkPsalm, founded in 2004, brings the 3,000 year old sacred poems of the Hebrews—the Psalms—into fresh contemporary performances that blend traditional bluegrass with original compositions. Charles has hosted workshops on guitar and mandolin technique at some of the most prestigious music festivals in the US and Europe. Either solo or with groups he’s helped found, he has performed over 5,000 shows in his 32 years as a professional musician.
