On Thursday nights, I facilitate a Christian spirituality small group on Dreams (thanks Seabury and Dan!). It is a pretty good group and we are enjoying the time together. As a part of that group, I lead a short meditation about halfway through each meeting, immediately preceding the focused dream exploration time. It is a meditation that has as its goal to say what comes next is different. Each week it is different. Last week, as I was pondering what I would do for the meditation, I reflected that the prior weeks' meditations had been very focused on words, verbage. I wanted to do something that transcended words in a way, that touched the soul but without so much rhetoric.

I settled on music, and specifically a song by the popular Israeli group, The Idan Raichel Project. I think I've written about them on here before, about when I went to their concert and met them. Oh yes, here it is. Anyway, I picked their song, "Out of the Depths" (Mi'maamaqim). Now, it's got words in it, but they're in Hebrew so no one in the class would understand them. I picked the song for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of its sound, the emotions it evokes, and (yeah, I couldn't get away from words after all) what the lyrics mean.

One of the class members was really touched by the song and asked about the band afterwards. I told her about them, as much as I knew anyway. She asked how she might get one of their CD's and I wasn't very helpful there (I bought mine at the concert). Then, on Sunday, she came up to me and said she had been at a dinner party the night before and, it seemed, a majority of the other guests were Jewish. So, being the quick thinker she is, she thought she'd ask if any of them had heard of the band and if they had, how can she get a CD. Apparently, several of her friends were a bit shocked she had even heard of Idan Raichel and inquired incredulously, "How do you know about that band?!"

She replied proudly, "Because I'm an Episcopalian!"

I love it!!

-R