c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) If I have a regular Lenten discipline, it is the kind of meditation that happens when I’m listening to music. For the last few Lents, there has been one album in particular that has accompanied me through the 40 days before Easter.

Last year, it was Elvis Perkins’ appropriately named “Ash Wednesday.”

This year, it’s been “The Geography of Light,” by Indiana singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer, who, despite her surname, is hardly new on the musical scene. “The Geography of Light” is her 11th album on Rounder Records.

Nevertheless, her uncommonly rich alto voice and deeply, beautifully soulful poetry/lyrics were new to me this liturgical season. The delightful surprise of falling in love with a new musician at a place in my life when that doesn’t happen as often as it once did makes her album all the more magical.

Newcomer weaves faith and spirituality throughout the stories she tells in her songs, writing about finding the sacred in the supposedly profane, of encountering the spirit of God in places some people say God isn’t supposed to be found.

“I’ve spent a lifetime trying to describe in language all those things we experience that have no words,” Newcomer told me, adding, with a laugh: “It’s an odd job description.”

It’s a job Newcomer performs with elegance, eloquence and grace.

“There is a Tree” _ the first song on “The Geography of Light” _ describes a dream Newcomer had about the nearness of God:

“Last night I dreamt you very near

“Though the night was dark beyond the glass.

“I knew you’d left before I woke

“But you’d fogged the window when you passed.”

“I love the idea that the sacred is always as close as our front porch, so much so that the breath of it fogs the window,” she says. “I think I am one of a growing number of voices who are choosing not to put the sacred in such a small box. … The idea of mystery and the presence of mystery.”

Newcomer is a Quaker, a member of one of the historic “peace churches” that believe all facets of our lives are sacred and whose worship services are often marked by complete silence _ “expectant waiting” for the leading of the Spirit of God.

“People will ask me, `You’re a person who makes your life in sound, and you go to a silent worship meeting?’ But it makes a lot of sense to me,” Newcomer says. “A lot of my best words come out of the silence. We talk at God so much, and I think it was important for me to develop a practice of listening, instead. Silence can be experienced as an absence of sound or a fullness of spirit. It’s important to me to develop a practice where I encounter that fullness of spirit.”

My favorite song on “The Geography of Light” is called “Geodes” _ perhaps in part because the one and only poem I’ve ever written was titled “Geode.” (I wrote it in college. It was about a boy.)

Newcomer’s geode poetry is much more profound:

“God walks around in muddy boots, sometimes rags and that’s the truth,

“You can’t always tell, but sometimes you just know.”

Geodes _ a rock cavity with a sparkling crystalized center _ are commonplace in southern Indiana, where Newcomer lives.

“They just look like funky brown/gray rocks,” she says. “But inside, there are these beautiful crystals. I love the metaphor of geodes, that sometimes in the most unexpected places there’s this sparkly center.

“I see life that way. I see the world that way. When I’m paying attention, I start to see miracles everywhere. Even in the rocks, I start to see miracles.”

Another song on my Lenten soundtrack, Newcomer’s “Where You Been,” revisits the theme of the holy mundane: meeting a prophet at the 7-Eleven, or taking a road trip (with the Holy Spirit) to the city.

“That song is pretty tongue-in-cheek in some ways,” Newcomer says. “But where does the sacred show up? In that song, maybe not just riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, but maybe driving to Chicago in an El Camino.”

There is a Quaker adage that says, “Let your life speak.”

Because all of life is sacred. And, to borrow the words of the latter-day prophet Elwood Blues: We’re all on a mission from God.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

KRE/LF END FALSANI

750 words

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