“I’ve read of a tribe in Africa who lived their entire lives in the presence of their own deep song." Suzin Green

    Imagine your life as a song. What pitch and tone and notes make up its verses? How do you discover your song?

   In the tribe to which Ms. Green refers, there is a ritual. When a mother believes she is ready for motherhood, "She goes into the bush to listen," Green reports. The prospective mother then waits to hear "the song of her unborn child."

   This gorgeous ritual presumes that we all have "a life song" that lives in the air even before our birth. Our mother can wait to sense this song and, as she hears it, she recognizes the holy vibration of life on the verge of arriving on this earth.

   Next, she honors what she hears by sharing this music with her husband. "Making love, they sing together welcoming the new soul to their home."

   If we ever wonder about ways to weave spiritual value around new life, it is rituals like these that, when discovered and applied in our culture, can prove a precious welcome that precedes baptism. Such a ritual can be adapted to any faith tradition – praying over a pregnancy as a way of honoring the formation of a new being.

   As Kahlil Gibran wrote a century ago, "Our children are not our children…" This tribal ritual affirms recognizing that each being has its own song. We raise our children as ours. Yet, the wise parent appreciates the unique soul that lives apart from parents.

   Who, besides ourselves, sings our song? The tribal ritual continues as the parents now teach the song of the newborn to the village and "all join together singing as the child is born."

   This sense of community reinforces the communal nature of the best kind of child rearing. We are all children of God and this tribal ceremony reinforces our role as each other's "keepers."

    "Throughout each person’s life their song is sung at every passage and finally, too, their passage into death," Green reports.

   I can only wonder how some aspects of this ritual might further enhance the meaning of our time with the sick. For, in our culture, caregivers are often the first ones present at birth and the last present as the final life song is sung.

-Rev. Erie Chapman

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Photograph – Mother & Baby Nursing – copyright Erie Chapman 2010