Tonight at the Festival of Homiletics....

...I went somewhere I never thought I would go. Tonight's session was a night of music and theology, with Beth Nielsen Chapman, Darrell Scott, and Adrienne Young singing, and Barbara Lundblad, Anna Carter Florence, and Craig Barnes offering theological responses to their songs. The first song played was this - I can't find it on YouTube which is really too bad, because hearing it was what did it to me:

Dancer to the Drum - words and music by Beth Nielsen Chapman
Fast asleep in the dawn of ages
The soul of every child
Has waited to be born a stranger
Underneath the drum of his mothers heart

Lying deep in a dream of darkness
Where fear has never gone
Each spark of a life is started
Blind and pure to the world we come
Blind and pure to the world we come

Each of us a dancer to the drum
Each of us a dancer to the drum
Blind and pure we come

One is born into a life of hunger
One will be a king or a rich man's son
One will kill out of greed or anger
One will give his life for another one

There are smiles in the lies of innocence
There are blooms in the walls of stone
And we will see ourselves
In the eyes of everyone we have ever known
Everyone we have ever known

And the heart, the heart will ever be a witness
And precious time, no treasure is worth
And the child, the child will carry our existence
Through the days that we have on earth

Each of us a dancer to the drum
Each of us a dancer to the drum
Blind and pure we come

Fast asleep in the dawn of ages
The soul of every child
Has waited to be born a stranger
Underneath the drum of his mothers heart


This song, this song...this song spoke to me the words I would imagine my sons speaking to me - the two sons who were born too soon to live outside my womb. This song - my little boys, underneath the drum of my heart, lying in the dream of the darkness of my womb, who knows what they would have become? Thank you, Beth, and Michael and Gabriel, you still live on in my heart.