Experiment #28: Serving as the Music Minister at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church
This is me putting my thoughts on the M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S. by practicing "S" for "Serve While Connected"
If reading time is hard to come by or you’re interested in a more human experience, there is a “Read-to-You” version of this article.
[Read-to-You Version] Experiment #28: Serving as the Music Minister at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church
If you’re new here, welcome! The “M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S.” part of Monkey Bars for the Monkey Mind is my acronym for the system I use to create and maintain a happy life, which I introduce in Experiment #1.
“S” is for "Serve While Connected," which I introduce in Experiment #11. You can see all of my “S” experiments so far by clicking here.
If you struggle with monkey mind or negative self-talk as I did (or know someone who does), consider subscribing. This stuff works. I’m living proof. Though everyone’s “M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S.” will look a little different, I write this weekly newsletter to show how it CAN look and how this method continues to pour happiness into my life—especially when I need it most.
There is a part of my life that I haven’t talked a lot about here. I rarely post about it on social media. I haven’t quite known how to share this part of my life until recently, and yet, it has been one my life’s longest running threads—spanning nearly four decades.
Here it is:
I have almost always sung in a church choir. Most weekends in my life, I have been in church singing on Sunday.
Sometimes it’s been a Presbyterian Church (where I was raised). Sometimes it’s been in a Catholic one (where I went to college and lived my young adult life). Sometimes it’s been a Methodist one (where a significant other grew up). Sometimes it’s even been a Baptist one.
For the last eight years, I’ve been singing professionally at an Episcopal one—St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Owings Mills, MD.
My Mom—who is one of the best organists I’ve ever heard—got a job about ten years ago as St. Thomas’ Music Minister, where she played the organ and conducted the choir.
She recruited my wife, Rachel (who I write about in Experiment #17) to be their professional alto soloist and section leader. A couple of years later, when their bass soloist left, I was recruited and I’ve been singing there ever since.
You can see me in the choir on the church’s website on their ministries page. My Mom’s in the first row on the left. (Rachel must have been absent that day, but she’s usually right there next to me in the second row.)
I took the soloist job for a number of reasons.
I would be able to spend time with my wife singing, dueting, and cracking jokes as one does in choir practice (especially if you’re a bass).
I also love singing choral music and those opportunities can be few and far between.
Perhaps the biggest reason, though, is that I love making music with my Mom. It’s something we’ve been doing together since I was in middle school, which I write about in Experiment #7: Yearning through Prayer. Doing this together week in and week out has been one of great joys of my life—something I will most certainly look back on long after she’s gone and say, “Man, I’m really grateful we did that.” It’s been so meaningful, I almost don’t know how to describe it.
So despite never identifying as an Episcopalian, St. Thomas’ has become another home for me. I have grown to love the choir members for their warmth and their love of music (for one example, see Exp. #17, Chapter 2: I Am Grateful the Kenyons Wanted to Sing in the Summer).
I have also grown to love the congregation for its focus and efforts on the Episcopalian values of walking in love and being of service. And it’s hard not to feel something spiritual when you are on the grounds of the church’s beautiful campus.
So when my Mom decided to step down as Music Minister this spring, she encouraged me to apply. I did, and after many wonderful talks with the leadership of the church, I was offered the position.
So this week, my first official week on the job, I start a new experiment: Serving as the Music Minister of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church.
Why this experiment (or, seeing the yoga of Jesus Christ)
When I found my spiritual home at Awake Yoga Meditation and became a student of Advaita Vedanta (or nondualism) and Kriya Yoga under Swami Nityananda, I started listening to the services of the Episcopal Church differently—more closely.
I started paying attention to how my Mom was curating the hymns and the anthems around the scripture readings. I started appreciating having those melodies in my head during the week because they reminded me of a spiritually-enriching message.
I started to see the numerous similarities between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of yoga philosophy through Advaita Vedanta. In fact, Swami Yogananda, who is in Swami Nityananda’s line of teachers and is the renown author of the bestseller Autobiography of a Yogi, wrote a 1,600-page, two-volume book called The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You which I read—and absolutely loved!
In this book, Yogananda walks through the most significant passages of the new testament. He highlights the abundance of similarities, harmonies, and resonances between Christianity and yoga philosophy and how they are just using different language to describe the same thing.
As the old yogic adage goes:
“Truth is one, we call it by various names.”
I started considering that religions might have more to offer than what I had previously given them credit for (something I explore in Experiment #6: Engaging with Spiritual Teachings). I opened my mind to the possibility that perhaps my view of spiritual traditions—as dusty, out-of-touch, hypocritical institutions that preached love, but acted in judgmental and often bigoted, unloving ways—was actually too narrow and limiting. Maybe it threw the baby out with the bathwater.
I started to see how religions were carefully stewarded collections of wisdom—or systems—that contain beautiful traditions and time-tested techniques that can help a person increase the love, compassion, generosity, peace, and happiness in their life.
I started being more generous in my understanding of the organizers of these religions, where before I had viewed them as mostly tools of the state or systems of population control. I started opening myself to the idea that these teachings and traditions were codified by humans in good faith and with the highest intentions—that they might be imperfect and might be practiced imperfectly at times (even at the highest levels), but that that might actually be an important part of the process. Maybe it was a feature, not a bug.
As Scott Gunn and Melody Wilson Shobe write in their fabulous book Walk in Love: Episcopal Beliefs & Practices, the Episcopal church has processes that are aimed to preserve traditions but also to accept new information because Episcopalians:
“…do not claim perfection but rather seek to admit and correct error when we find it.”
In a chapter describing the spiritual relevance of recognizing Christian Saints, they go on to say:
“Saints struggle and sin, just as we do. Yet they allow God’s light to shine through their imperfect selves. They allow even their imperfections to be used to serve God in the world… Their imperfections remind us that we too can serve God in amazing and radical ways, as imperfect as we are.”
I really appreciate the spirit of this.
Gunn and Shobe express themselves through the language of Christianity. Other religious traditions might say the same thing using slightly different words.
A yogi might say something like this:
While our souls are in the form of a human body, they experience what human’s understand to be imperfections. But on a soul level, we are always connected to the Source because the soul is the Source. It is eternal. It is the same substance as the Source—as God—and it is within all of us. The light that is God is shining through the window of our human selves. God—the Creator of All—is creating through us in the realm of time and space. Through us, God is expressing himself (or herself or itself—see Experiment #20: Meditating on Whether God is Beyond Gender).
Again, truth is one, we call it by various names.
Over the years, I have become much more accepting of the different words that are used to describe God. I explore this in Experiment #19: Trying to Answer the Question, "What is God?" I have become much less resistant to and much less offended by the different word choices or even pronoun choices used to describe God (again, see Experiment #20).
One of the bigger obstacles for me in the Christian faith was always the Nicene Creed, which is a summary of Christian beliefs said in every Episcopal service. Part of it says:
“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God…”
For the longest time I struggled with saying that there was “one” Lord and that that Lord was Jesus Christ because there are so many other religious traditions and each have their own prophets or messiahs. Choosing one felt like taking sides and I never felt like I had enough information to take a side.
“Lord” was also a word that hit me the wrong way. It is part of why I saw religions as systems of population control.
But the yogic teaching of “Truth is one, we call it by various names,” has helped me see the universality of the Nicene Creed. There’s nondualism in it.
The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “Lord” as:
“Someone or something having power, authority, or influence.”
It’s not a stretch for me to say that Jesus is someone who has spiritual power and influence. And as I explored in Experiment #19, I understand God to be something that has power and influence as an organizing force in the universe.
Okay, so Christians use the word “Lord.”
For me, now, “One Lord, Jesus Christ,” helps me remember that there is one underlying force, or field, that animates everything. Christians call it God and Father and Jesus Christ and Lord and Holy Spirit. Yogis calls it Brahman and Christ consciousness and other things. Other traditions use different language than that.
In her book, Awake: The Yoga of Pure Awareness, Swami Nityananda teaches to let go of spiritual concepts—including terminology:
"Keep meditating, keep going, keep letting go of all the stories, frameworks, terminology... Open to any insights they make possible, and then let go of them, too. Let go of any scaffolding you have ever held onto."
The framework and terminology and scaffolding that has helped me open up spiritually is what I outline in Experiment #1 as the M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S. It might not resonate with you, but for me, it helped me open to the path that Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and so many other wonderful spiritual masters taught—the path to the frequency of love.
Yoga teaches that God is love. Christianity teaches that God is love.
In practicing “E” for “Engage with Spiritual Teachings,” which I introduce in Experiment #6, I have realized that I love the Christian tradition, and in particular the Episcopal tradition—its texts, its music, its rituals, and its reverence for the teachings of Jesus. It is scaffolding that helps me connect with the Source.
But as Swami Nityananda reminds me, I also plan to keep going and keep meditating until it, too, becomes scaffolding that I can let go of.
I am grateful for the insights that yoga philosophy has made possible.
I am grateful for the insights that the Episcopal tradition has made possible.
I am grateful that after nearly forty years, singing at church has become a meaningful spiritual practice for me—a practice that fills me.
Music at the center
I am also grateful to be taking the baton from my Mom, both figuratively and literally.
Years ago, I wrote an article on Medium called Why I left my senior-level office job to pursue music in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis. I explained what led to this painful decision, but at the root of it was a question my therapist had asked me. He asked, “Why do I not seek to fulfill myself through music.”
In the article, I wrote:
“It took me months to answer this question and understand its impact, but simply put, I had somehow let music, which had been the center of my life for most of my life, become the least important thing. It was getting the scraps of my energy and time, but even in those scraps it was abundantly clear how much joy making music gave me. It was a more potent joy generator than almost anything else in my life. I was suppressing it at my own peril.”
I can’t tell you how excited I am to have a job where music is at the center. I am excited that this job blends music with my spiritual practice. I am excited that I get to search for music as part of my job, arrange and write music for a choir, and make music weekly with a choir and for a congregation that cares so deeply about music.
And I’m excited to share aspects of this experiment with you in future updates as I continue to practice Experiment #12: Sharing Things That I Love with Others More Often and Experiment #13: Showing My Work (and Work-in-Progress) More Often. So, hopefully much more to come!
Have you ever reflected on the idea of “Truth is one, we call it by various names?” Have you struggled with frameworks and terminology in certain spiritual traditions? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Thank you for stopping by and I hope you have a very happy day.
With love,
Jonathan