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Saturday Night Meets Sunday Morning Music Emily and Don Saliers Lecture Could the “communion through music” that some people experience belting out a rollicking hymn in church be the same spirit others experience dancing in a smoky bar with friends who would never darken a church doorstep? Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls and Don, her Methodist minister father, address that possibility in a new book and a series of public appearances. In an evening of music and spoken words at the Cathedral, father and daughter together made connections between the secular and the sacred, sharing with the audience the “something else” of music committed not to “immediacy of feeling” but to social justice and to “sustaining people in deep affections over time.” Emily and Don Saliers are respected musicians who have jointly written a new book, A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice. Emily is one-half of the folk-rock duo the Indigo Girls and an out lesbian who has a “lover’s quarrel” with the church. Don is a church musician and professor of theology and worship at Emory University. He has interviewed people and found that hymns like “Amazing Grace” evoke “body memory” – the sound of a grandfather’s voice, the smell of a church supper, the beat of a mother’s heart. |
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