This post was written for the Music That Makes Community blog  on April 13, 2016

“Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.” – The Eleventh Step of Alcoholics Anonymous
They met EVERY Sunday in a beautiful, candlelit room for an hour. Some went out together afterward, some went home, some stayed and chatted over coffee or tea. The gathering was called LifeLine, and it was neither a church service nor a 12-step meeting. Our only purpose was to work the 11th step together, so that we could walk each other through the ways of prayer and meditation, into conscious contact with God. I sang with them two or three times a month for three years, and they were the most intentional spiritual community of which I was a part.

In the early stages of LifeLine, I would begin with something easy to harmonize with, like There is Some Kiss. The text is from Rumi; “there is some kiss we want with our whole lives; the touch of spirit on the body.”

The format went something like this:

Song
Greeting
Serenity prayer
Song
10-15 minute teaching/exercise on meditation
Song
10-15 minute teaching/exercise on prayer
Song
Speaker (how is the 11th step working in your life?)
Song
Serenity prayer in a circle
See ya next week!

As you can see, singing was an integral part of LifeLine; serving to bring us together, to enable each of us to find and raise our voices together, and to remind us of how close God really is. There were people from all walks of life, and they mostly all sang with and for one another. We learned about one new tune a month, repeating them until they flew.

Like every group, they had their favorites, and I encouraged/cajoled them to sing in harmony and improvise at will with varying degrees of success, depending upon who and how many were there. The hands down favorites were John Bell’s Don’t Be Afraid, and my Open My Heart.  You could see how they let the tunes sink in, and take them deep, but they really loved to sing walking tunes with percussion, too; and especially loved to end with Ruth Cunningham’s God Bless Every Step.