How Beautiful

As should be obvious from the blog title, if nothing else, I'm a Jew.

So why do I still love Christian music so much?

Songs that I have missed, and that I sang today:

1. Of the Father's Love Begotten
2. O G-d, You Search Me and You Know Me (dash not in original title) -- by Bernadette Farrell, who is a nun, for crying out loud.
3. How Beautiful, by Twila Paris ("how beautiful the heart that bled/that took all my sin/and bore it instead")-- and I cried, for real, while listening to it.
4. Angels We Have Heard on High (sing with me, now: "Gloooo-ooooo-oooo-oooo-ooo-ooo-ria! in excelsis Deo!")
5. Jesus Christ Is Risen Today (need I say more?)
6. I'll Fly Away
7. By and By
8. Abide With Me ("hold thou thy cross before my failing eyes/shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies")
9. Write Your Blessed Name
10. Were You There When They Crucified My Lord
11. Ave Verum Corpus Natum (ooo! Latin dead-Jesus imagery!)
12. Give Me Jesus
13. Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
14. Lift Every Voice and Sing
15. You Never Let Go
16. like everything Yolanda Adams ever recorded.
17. Wayfaring Stranger
and the list goes on.

Is it because when I start feeling stuck or shut off, I revert to familiar ways of feeling . . . well, feeling anything about Hashem? Am I drawn to the drama of my former Christianity? Or is it the sound more than the words, what I'm used to, what has emotion associated with it, a history?

I know my brother char beautiful, marked mortal on his forehead, and I know my father jumpy-broke in the back pews, all his candles in the box in the back of his closet, his black-bead rosary glossy dark, his statues all with the hands snapped off, and I know my mother kneeling, skeptical, hair going gray, then white, without change, decision for belief or un-. I know a beautiful woman whose baby in her belly kicked at the sound of my singing from the choir loft above, who made me wise and made me worry and made me her wife, who's never been inside my shul and who raised that baby, our son, unbaptized but in my Church and my church, till we left-- churches, each other, our senses, briefly. I made promises to her and to trees and to G-d and to Jesus, and never stood under a chupah.

I don't know tallitot, really, the same way I know albs, and Aleinu's familiar but foreign, a learned quantity that maybe comes from my blood but wasn't taught. The first time I heard Shema, I fell on my face-- first time I heard Our Father, I was fetal. What's real to me? What I know from reason, revelation, or what's intuitive by now, invisible, what I'm used to, what still stirs me up, pushes buttons the other doesn't even know about? I feel known inside my Catholicness, and strange, sometimes, in what I've chosen for myself. I am, after all, a ger, in Torah's own words-- a newcomer, stranger, sojourner. I can still go back . . .

And other days I'm convinced I'll flip out Chasidish-style, go straight, shake off my girlfriend, marry some beautiful man named Yossi and have fourteen babies.

Extremes, is it maybe, the pull of the outsides and the fringes?

I can see why tzitzit go where they do.