By Martin L. Smith
I learned Abbey Lincoln had died as I was sitting down to write, and all other ideas for this column disappeared like smoke. I was plunged back into the experience of encountering this great African American artist. Encounter is the right word. A friend of mine who had been a jazz singer knew her and persuaded me to come to a concert in the early ’90s when she resumed her singing career in America. After an emotionally shattering, electrifying evening we joined the admirers amassed in the lobby of her hotel. As she paused at the elevator door she looked right at my friend and me and crooked a finger in summons; we were to come up to her room. Running a gantlet of incredulous and envious looks, we obeyed. We stayed very late and the conversation was a privilege never to be forgotten. From then on, no concert was to be missed: we were expected. I would take flowers from the garden to be put in her hotel rooms. Sometimes she dedicated a song to me during a concert. Now it all comes flooding back.
I don’t hesitate to call these encounters religious experiences but of course not overt or intentional ones. Religious experiences can be any encounter that throws our settled state into healthy disarray, tears down curtains drawn over inconvenient experiences, lights the fuse that leads to dreams we are refusing to act on, jolts us into awareness that there are yearnings and sufferings we are refusing to admit are part of the adventure of being fully human. We didn’t go to Abbey’s concerts to be amused or entertained, to be flattered or soothed. We risked being shocked, judged, even mocked. We would be moved, but not by decking ourselves momentarily with borrowed sentiments. All we knew is that things wouldn’t be quite the same with our selves after a concert. Things had moved around and moved on. There had to be changes.
Religious experiences are ones in which we have a direct experience of something authoritative, something greater than ourselves that has the right to claim our—there’s no other word for it—obedience. In religious experience we don’t feel in command, picking and choosing what suits our fancy. We are being spoken to. We must listen; and if we fail to respond, we risk failing and harming our hearts. I can’t help associating Abbey’s singing with the words that record the impact of Jesus on those who encountered him. “They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” (Mark 1:22) In Abbey’s case, she sang as one having authority, and not as the entertainers. She dared to enact—God knows what price she paid for this vulnerability—a range of emotions and experiences that were authoritatively real, and not necessarily convenient or acceptable, and certainly not suitable for the whole family. Sometimes we felt burned and injured by her anger and scorn, and sometimes flooded with a tenderness that we recognized to be quite simply the thing we most long for from God and from one another, and to discover within ourselves.
I really can’t help thinking of her as a clue to what Jesus must have been like. The impression he made on people comes to us through stories whose outlines are blurred in translation from translation. And yet, faded as the colors are, we do get a sense of someone speaking with an authority that is completely different from those who speak to us of God at second and third and fourth hand. We are living through an epoch in which second hand religious authority, ‘the authority of the scribes’ is steadily melting away. Some holders of religious offices may still attempt to command obedience by dint of their rank or accreditation, but these attempts are palpably less effective than they have ever been. We can’t be ordered to believe anything. We have no alternative but to identify the voices that are speaking to us at first hand, with immediacy and freshness from their own struggle with the mystery of God, and these voices won’t necessarily be measured and rated as unoffensive to the general audience. We need voices that are willing to risk scorching people, not just warming them – voices that are unafraid of paining us and opening us right up.
In one of her own songs, “Throw it away,” Abbey invited us to the self-imparting life of openness; “Give your love, live your life, each and every day and keep your hand wide open. Let the sun shine through.” This throwing away is the same as Jesus’ invitation to give ourselves. And like Jesus, she knew that the outcome of this risk is not depletion, but a strange fullness, “ ’cause you can never lose a thing, if it belongs to you.”
Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s, D.C.