Finding my religion
A playlist of the secular sacred
When the subject of religion comes up, I often say that I’m a cultural Catholic. Sometimes I say I’m a recovering Catholic, depending upon who I’m talking with. That’s me up there, front and center, dressed like a little bride. Well, sort of.
Somehow, my mom didn’t get the memo that I needed a white dress for my first communion, or maybe she did but just didn’t have the capacity to work on procuring one until the day before the big day, which is how we found ourselves on a late Saturday afternoon in the only local store that sold clothing, looking for a white dress that would do.
We found nothing. It was 1973, a rather colorful time in so many ways, and decades before Amazon would make this kind of problem a thing of the past.
When we found no white dresses in the little girls’ section, we went to the big girls’ section, where we also found no white dresses. What we did find was a white, thickly polyester smock with a big red strawberry appliqued to a front pocket.
I hated it. It wasn’t a real dress, and that strawberry! It wasn’t at all right—no matter how many times my mother said it was just fine—something confirmed when almost every other girl showing up for First Communion did so in a pure white, frilly, pretty dress. (Don’t even get me started on their veils.)
Adding insult to injury, I was put in the middle of the front row for our photo. I tried to arrange my hands over the offending fruit, but I was told to hold them up in prayer.
As you might surmise, the true point of communion had been rather lost on me. That is not the only reason I’m no longer a practicing Catholic, but I think I can trace the beginning of my falling out with the church to this event.
Still, there are aspects of Catholicism I miss: the ritual, the poetry of mass, the belonging. I like that I can still recite the apostle’s creed, even all these years later, words said and heard so many times they became part of me. That I find so much meaning and comfort in poetry can be traced, in part, to my early experiences in church.
If I go to mass now, even though I no longer believe, I still feel something sacred. What can be more sacred than people coming together in hope and faith, looking for comfort, guidance, and ways of being a better version of themselves? I have often felt the same thing in schools. Once I almost cried at a middle school talent show, overcome by the earnest courage and joy of an awkward girl dancing in front of her peers as if no one was watching, and the kindness with which they held her. I feel it often in libraries, those monuments to so many kinds of faith.
Perhaps this is why I so appreciated a recent thread on
on the topic of sacred secular songs. Reading through more than 1,000 comments about non-religious music that people regard as sacred, I realized that there are great variations in how we might define what makes a song sacred.I started trying to parse it out, thinking about such things as subject, sound, and emotion. I thought I would write about that here, but the more I tried to pin the sacred down, the more I felt like one of the students Billy Collins writes about in “Introduction to Poetry,” and I was afraid I was in danger of killing a truth by trying to get to it.
What I have, instead, is an offering, a playlist: “Finding My Religion”
I did end up with some criteria I could name, but I’ll just say that in the end, a song that made the list had to have a quality I’ll call transcendence. Something about the combination of the words and sounds makes it more than the sum of any parsed parts.
These are songs that give me faith in the people and things of this world. They give me hope, solace, and assurance that I am not alone in my joys, my sorrows, my suffering, my love. They show me what humans are capable of being when we are at our best. I don’t get those things from the religion I was raised in or any others that I’ve sampled. I just don’t have that kind of faith, much as I once longed to. I think I might have known that way back in second grade, even if I didn’t know it fully or have words to explain what was missing. Some part of me knew that strawberry was a marker of difference when all I wanted was to fit in and belong.
When I listen to this music, I belong. I feel seen, and I feel faith in something beyond the concrete, material world, something beyond myself. I feel love from and for other humans, and the desire be a good person as I live my life among them. In this particular moment in the history of the place in which I have lived and likely always will, I think it’s important to say that the sacred can be found in the secular, too—that true religion isn’t found in buildings or hierarchies or laws, but in love, and it can take a multitude of forms. All of these songs are high expressions of love. For me, the sacred is about figuring out how to be a good human, here, right now, to everyone. These songs help me do that.
If they might do that for you, please accept this as a little gift from me. Or, as a starting place. The process of listening to song after song after song, thinking and feeling about what is sacred to you, compiling something specific to what speaks to you, is an exercise I’d recommend for everyone. It consumed me, in the best way.
(A little housekeeping: I’ve realized that I cannot just copy and paste the buttons below from older posts, but must put new ones in each time. If you’ve been frustrated by them in the past because they took you to the wrong place, I think I’ve fixed that. So much thanks to readers who let me know they weren’t working as I intended.)
If my thoughts spark some of your own, please share them in the comments. I would love to know which songs would make your list of the secular sacred, or your thoughts about whatever it is that connects you to what is sacred for you. I like to think of these writings as an invitation to a conversation.
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After our chat on writing in the dark, I came over here and found your great posts. I was drawn to this one and love the story about your first communion dress. And then I found a playlist that went along. Listening now. I love how Jeannine's community introduces me to other writers and kindred spirits. I look forward to reading your posts here.
I adore the group photo. Not growing up Catholic I've never seen one like it, but do feel it's a little wacko for little girls to dress up like little brides. However not my place to opine on that I suppose.
I know that when we got married in a Lutheran church we could only have music that was considered sacred, as in traditional from the hymnals, none of that stuff like you're talking about here. Times change as do we, so I'm with you if a song seems sacred to you, regardless of the source, it is sacred.