The Fermata Weekly: Acknowledging Death for the Rest of Life

What songs do we sing about death that help us in our living?

Isaiah Collier and the Chosen Few - Leipzig, Germany

Hi everyone,

Greetings from Frankfurt, Germany, where I am playing tonight on tour! It has been going extremely well. You can follow for in-the-moment highlights on my Instagram.

Last night before we played in Brussels the band talked about how we play with urgency because it is life and death. One of the members said that he plays as intensely as he does because when he was growing up he had to duck down in his home on the South Side when the drive-by’s happened on his street. He plays intensely because his classmate from high school was killed and thus won’t grow up and ever get married. This is why he plays as he plays. Hearing him say that made me realize that’s also why I play how I do. Something is always at stake in the sound. Always.

This got me thinking about how Black music has always been a means of enfolding death into life. And as God would have it, that correlated perfectly with a Notes of Rest session on death I had a few weeks ago.

Earlier this month I had the privilege of sharing a Notes of Rest video in Enfleshing Witness, a multi-day virtual gathering of preachers and storytellers hosted by Church Anew. This year’s theme was on grief, longing, and homegoing, a word that talks about the Christian practice of honoring the dead’s transition from this temporal existence into the eternal embrace of God.

I relished the opportunity to participate in this gathering because one of the five focus areas of Notes of Rest is death. Throughout the Old Testament, when kings die, they are described as resting with their ancestors (e.g., 1 Kings 2:10). That scriptural practice of writing about death got me curious about how music is also a means of grieving and enfolding death into life. In this sense, “Notes of Rest” in this sense is about bringing a creative lens to the reality of death, one that is present all around and in us.

This was the intellectual backdrop for my central question for my Enfleshing Witness video: what songs about death that help us in our living?

I posed this question to the participants and then proceeded to play songs from my home tradition of Black Methodism, in which I grew quite familiar with songs about death. One of those songs was the iconic “Goin’ Up Yonder” by the great Walter Hawkins, so I started my Enfleshing Witness video with that. Here are some of the song lyrics:

If anybody asks you

Where I’m going

Where I’m going

Soon

I’m going up yonder! (goin’ up yonder)

I’m going up yonder! (goin’ up yonder)

I’m goin’ up yonder to be with my Lord!

This song is a beautiful depiction of the Black American experience. In this song Hawkins, a Black Gospel writer from the 20th century, takes as a given that Black death looms large. And I would say that it looms in all kinds of ways - physical, emotional, social, political, spiritual. But Hawkins takes the prospect of death as a summons to care and as an invitation to joy. Though Black folk are marked for death, we still can have reason to sing because of where we will end up ultimately: with the Lord.

As a youngster in church, I sometimes wondered about the significance of my singing this song along with the church. I would sing about my impending death as if I were an elder in the hospital even though I was healthy and had my whole life ahead of me. But the theme of this Enfleshing Witness video helped me realize two important elements: first, when I sang this with the congregation, it was never a dirge. My little Black voice joined with my family and the intergenerational community around us in joy. In joy we declared that in faith death was not the end, for Jesus had granted us access to go up yonder to be with Him forever. So death, while sad, was also a moment of celebration. This is how a funeral becomes homegoing.

Second, as a Black adult, I realize now that when I was singing those songs as a youngster, I was marked for death regardless of my age. It didn’t matter that I was 10 or 11, I could still be killed. My parents were so worried about me and my brothers being young Black boys/men in Chicago given the rate at which we are killed by gun violence. In other words, death always faces me.

But I can face that specter with music.

And so even if the “soon” Hawkins talks about does come soon, I’ll know where I’m going. That’s the kind of conviction that grounds my playing. That even though I know neither the day nor the hour, my music is a place that enfolds the reality of death into life. The folk in my church (St. Mark UMC) knew that we were marked for death by the broader society, yet we found joy for the living nevertheless. Our music helped us do that. Our music helps us do that. These are Notes of Rest that I have inherited from my communities of faith to face death well. What Notes of Rest do you sing?

abundantly,

Julian

Upcoming:

Oct 29 - Frankfurt, Germany

Oct 30 - Eindhoven, Netherlands

Nov 1 - London, UK

Nov 2 - Dresden, Germany

Nov 4 - Warschaw, Poland

Nov 5 - Berlin, Germany

Nov 6 - Tempere, Finland

Nov 7 - Wien, Austria

Nov 9 - Amsterdam, Netherlands

Nov 10 - Oslo, Norway

Nov 11 - Dortmund, Germany

Nov 12 - Hamburg, Germany