Post 1: "I Write The Songs"
“Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.” Mother Teresa
This internet headline stopped me cold:
“Barry Manilow secretly wed last year to his manager, Gary Kief, in a private ceremony.”
Suddenly, nothing else mattered. Not the sermon I was half-writing, or the meeting I was supposed to be at a half-hour ago.
Is this true?
Now I do not have a problem with same gender marriage. For over twenty years I have worked in churches that advocated for marriage equality. I did have a problem with the source of the headline: The National Enquirer, which claimed to hold the “world exclusive” to the story. The National Enquirer is famous for tabloid journalism and for getting its story whatever the price.
However, soon an article appeared with actress Suzanne Somers, a close friend of Barry, confirmed to interviewer Andy Cohen in Huffington Post that Barry Manilow had indeed married his manager in a private ceremony in 2014. Around the same time I discovered that Barry was on a “One Last Time” tour that would end in Brooklyn on June 17, 2015. Just a few months away. In my backyard.
Old memories, long exiled, resurfaced, albeit awkwardly, as if not sure I’d slam the door on them again. Instead I said, “Hello, Old friends, come on in. Do you mind if we chat awhile?”
I put aside the Sunday sermon. I looked at this scripture I was studying. It was about Jesus and his post-resurrection appearance to his frightened disciples (John 20:19-21). It was a perfect text for the moment. This text talks about fear, wounds, doubt, forgiveness and restoration to new life. In the passage, Jesus’ disciples are so scared that they have locked the doors and are huddled in the corner. They’ve got the motion sensors rigged and rolling, the ADT sign is prominently displayed in the window, just in case the neighborhood Pharisee watch group should happen to stroll by. I knew exactly how that feels.
Then, without warning, Jesus appears. Jesus with a simple Shalom Aleichem (or the Aramaic equivalent) breathes the Holy Spirit upon this sorry lot and sends them into the world as ambassadors of forgiveness. Of course there’s always one person who doesn’t get the memo. This guy will go down in history as “Doubting Thomas.”
“I just won’t believe it,” he declares. “Not until I touch the wounds in his hands and the one in his side.” Jesus, being a fairly obliging fellow, appears again and presents his scarred hands and side and says, “See. Touch. Believe.”
So I was lost in these thoughts: these images of Jesus sharing his scars. Jesus breathing fresh life into scared people. Jesus enabling people to forgive and move forward. Then, as I read that information about Barry being married to his manager, I felt the Holy Spirit touch me.
It did.
It slipped through forty years of my own tightly constructed “panic room” and said, “OK, girl, you’re free. It is now time to write.”
It is time to write.
Not the sermon.
Not the weekly devotional or the monthly pastor’s letter.
Not the Facebook status. Not a tweet.
But “the story.”
The story that has been asking for forty years to be heard but, for forty years, I have hid.
Now, when this news shows up on the internet: Barry Manilow is married.
Using whatever logic God uses, God used this moment to say, “Now. Write.”
I asked my husband-the-analyst, “Why? Why now with this news of Barry’s marriage to his manager coming forward?” He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Who Knows? Maybe his ability to become vulnerable is enabling you now to be vulnerable, to take the next step in your journey.”
I thought about this. You know, forty (40) is a significant number in the Bible. I think God is a little obsessive compulsive in this regard. When you see 40 in the Bible you know you’re in for a long haul – but a long haul that ends up with something amazing and important.
· The people of Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, facing temptations and trials before reaching the Promised Land.
· Moses was on Mount Sinai with God for 40 days before returning to the people with the covenant that would give them an identity and relationship and bound them to God.
· Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days and nights, during which he faced temptation and trials, all before he began his public ministry.
Everywhere you turn, 40 is a number of decision, transformation and transition.
So here, at my forty-year benchmark, let me explain how this all came to pass.
It has been forty years since I came to know the music of Barry Manilow. OK, not the “Ark of the Covenant experience,” but it did indeed profoundly change my life. I owe a debt of gratitude that needs to be paid forward. As a clergywoman coming up to 30 years of ministry, writing the truth of my life experience is one of the most terrifying things I have done. God has used the sacred and secular not only to save me and heal me, but to be of service to others. Now in the past two years, in prayer and spiritual direction, I have felt God saying, “Soon you must share your story. Your life story must become an entry-way to a deeper and fuller ministry.”
I have been in training to be a spiritual director. Writing our life journey is part of the process. For some reason I have felt blocked. Why?
Part of the reason is that the music of Barry Manilow and the Fan Club ranks high up there in God’s intervention tool box. I cringe at the thought of becoming another number in the “million Manilow cure.” In big part it’s due to what Ray Stevens parodied in his 1979 hit, “I Need Your Help, Barry Manilow.” With music reminiscent of “I Write the Songs,” an album cover evocative of Tryin’ To Get the Feeling Again, Stevens in his tongue-in-cheek manner captured in satire what we all knew: the music of Barry Manilow touched the hearts of millions.
I need your help, Barry Manilow
I’m miserable and I don’t know what to do
Sing me a song, sing it sad and low
No one knows how to suffer quite like you
“Hello, Mandy? It’s me. I’m here at the Copa.
You know, the Copacabana.
I know I don’t write the songs that make the whole world sing but
I do know one thing, Mandy...
I can’t smile without you... Forget Lola...
Remember that weekend in New England? I thought then that
This could be the magic at last... Now here I am...
Tryin’ to get the feelin’ again!”
This happened despite the complaints of critics, despite their education and experience, they seemed clueless to the power of the connection between musician, the music and audience. Author and playwright Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness,” a turn on the common saying, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” There’s a bit of truth in both interpretations.
The success of Barry Manilow, his ability to connect to and retain the affection of so great a following for forty years should give an impartial music critic reason to pause and seriously reflect on Barry’s remarkable career. If they can’t even begrudgingly acknowledge the gift and contribution Barry has made, well too bad. Sometimes I used to take a fiendish delight in that no one will remember the names of the critics. But Barry Manilow? His place in the American heart and psyche will endure.
So no matter. I am in the lineup, with a number. I was an active Barry Manilow fan and President of the Cleveland Fan Club when I was in high school and very briefly President of the National Fan Club. Not in a million years would many of my closest colleagues over the past thirty years guess that. Very few people know this. I have kept my stories close to my heart. Now it is time to share them.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyr of the Second World War, anti-Nazi resister, and German theologian, remarked: “Music...will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.”
Pastor Bonhoeffer also wrote a few snazzy hymns while in prison awaiting death-by-Nazi for his role in the resistance. Consider this about Bonhoeffer: while a post-doctoral student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1930-31, he explored Harlem. Bonhoeffer visited the black churches and learned all about jazz, the blues and black spirituals. Indeed this experience would become a source of inspiration that gave him strength to stand with the emergent Confessing Church, the part of the German church that defied Hitler, when he returned to Germany in 1932. I wonder, in a six-degree-of-separation kind of way, if Bonhoeffer had heard the Comedian Harmonists (that famous all-male harmony ensemble known throughout Europe between 1928-1934), the group upon whom Barry based his musical Harmony. I would like to think that the Comedian Harmonists also touched Bonhoeffer’s spirit as did the music of the Harlem Renaissance. Music was a source of inspiration and strength to Bonhoeffer, the defiant opponent of Nazism. The Nazis hanged Bonhoeffer on April 8, 1945, just two weeks before the Allies liberated the Flossenberg Concentration Camp and crushed what was left of the Nazi war machine.
The music of Barry Manilow kept a fountain of joy alive in me, in my time of profound sorrow and stayed there, dormant for years, strong and deep. It never diminished even though I had not attended a concert since 1978, had not bought a recording, read his autobiography or even followed his career closely as a real fan should for 30 years. As I read that report about Barry’s marriage, I put aside my sermon. The years dissolved. Suddenly once again I was a captivated 16-year-old, listening to "It’s a Miracle."
It was a miracle, indeed.
So this is how my story, pre-Barry, began.
Notes:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/mothertere121813.html#GXI5WiUtFrjT9S6G.99
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/17/suzanne-somers-barry-manilow-gay_n_7085874.html
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/558084-imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery-that-mediocrity-can
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/37834-music-will-help-dissolve-your-perplexities-and-purify-your-character
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessing_Church
Give the gift of music to the next generation through donations to:
The Manilow Music Project
8295 South La Cienega Boulevard
Inglewood, CA 90301
info@manilowmusicproject.org
Click here to go to the next post or click here to return to the first page.
This internet headline stopped me cold:
“Barry Manilow secretly wed last year to his manager, Gary Kief, in a private ceremony.”
Suddenly, nothing else mattered. Not the sermon I was half-writing, or the meeting I was supposed to be at a half-hour ago.
Is this true?
Now I do not have a problem with same gender marriage. For over twenty years I have worked in churches that advocated for marriage equality. I did have a problem with the source of the headline: The National Enquirer, which claimed to hold the “world exclusive” to the story. The National Enquirer is famous for tabloid journalism and for getting its story whatever the price.
However, soon an article appeared with actress Suzanne Somers, a close friend of Barry, confirmed to interviewer Andy Cohen in Huffington Post that Barry Manilow had indeed married his manager in a private ceremony in 2014. Around the same time I discovered that Barry was on a “One Last Time” tour that would end in Brooklyn on June 17, 2015. Just a few months away. In my backyard.
Old memories, long exiled, resurfaced, albeit awkwardly, as if not sure I’d slam the door on them again. Instead I said, “Hello, Old friends, come on in. Do you mind if we chat awhile?”
I put aside the Sunday sermon. I looked at this scripture I was studying. It was about Jesus and his post-resurrection appearance to his frightened disciples (John 20:19-21). It was a perfect text for the moment. This text talks about fear, wounds, doubt, forgiveness and restoration to new life. In the passage, Jesus’ disciples are so scared that they have locked the doors and are huddled in the corner. They’ve got the motion sensors rigged and rolling, the ADT sign is prominently displayed in the window, just in case the neighborhood Pharisee watch group should happen to stroll by. I knew exactly how that feels.
Then, without warning, Jesus appears. Jesus with a simple Shalom Aleichem (or the Aramaic equivalent) breathes the Holy Spirit upon this sorry lot and sends them into the world as ambassadors of forgiveness. Of course there’s always one person who doesn’t get the memo. This guy will go down in history as “Doubting Thomas.”
“I just won’t believe it,” he declares. “Not until I touch the wounds in his hands and the one in his side.” Jesus, being a fairly obliging fellow, appears again and presents his scarred hands and side and says, “See. Touch. Believe.”
So I was lost in these thoughts: these images of Jesus sharing his scars. Jesus breathing fresh life into scared people. Jesus enabling people to forgive and move forward. Then, as I read that information about Barry being married to his manager, I felt the Holy Spirit touch me.
It did.
It slipped through forty years of my own tightly constructed “panic room” and said, “OK, girl, you’re free. It is now time to write.”
It is time to write.
Not the sermon.
Not the weekly devotional or the monthly pastor’s letter.
Not the Facebook status. Not a tweet.
But “the story.”
The story that has been asking for forty years to be heard but, for forty years, I have hid.
Now, when this news shows up on the internet: Barry Manilow is married.
Using whatever logic God uses, God used this moment to say, “Now. Write.”
I asked my husband-the-analyst, “Why? Why now with this news of Barry’s marriage to his manager coming forward?” He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Who Knows? Maybe his ability to become vulnerable is enabling you now to be vulnerable, to take the next step in your journey.”
I thought about this. You know, forty (40) is a significant number in the Bible. I think God is a little obsessive compulsive in this regard. When you see 40 in the Bible you know you’re in for a long haul – but a long haul that ends up with something amazing and important.
· The people of Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, facing temptations and trials before reaching the Promised Land.
· Moses was on Mount Sinai with God for 40 days before returning to the people with the covenant that would give them an identity and relationship and bound them to God.
· Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days and nights, during which he faced temptation and trials, all before he began his public ministry.
Everywhere you turn, 40 is a number of decision, transformation and transition.
So here, at my forty-year benchmark, let me explain how this all came to pass.
It has been forty years since I came to know the music of Barry Manilow. OK, not the “Ark of the Covenant experience,” but it did indeed profoundly change my life. I owe a debt of gratitude that needs to be paid forward. As a clergywoman coming up to 30 years of ministry, writing the truth of my life experience is one of the most terrifying things I have done. God has used the sacred and secular not only to save me and heal me, but to be of service to others. Now in the past two years, in prayer and spiritual direction, I have felt God saying, “Soon you must share your story. Your life story must become an entry-way to a deeper and fuller ministry.”
I have been in training to be a spiritual director. Writing our life journey is part of the process. For some reason I have felt blocked. Why?
Part of the reason is that the music of Barry Manilow and the Fan Club ranks high up there in God’s intervention tool box. I cringe at the thought of becoming another number in the “million Manilow cure.” In big part it’s due to what Ray Stevens parodied in his 1979 hit, “I Need Your Help, Barry Manilow.” With music reminiscent of “I Write the Songs,” an album cover evocative of Tryin’ To Get the Feeling Again, Stevens in his tongue-in-cheek manner captured in satire what we all knew: the music of Barry Manilow touched the hearts of millions.
I need your help, Barry Manilow
I’m miserable and I don’t know what to do
Sing me a song, sing it sad and low
No one knows how to suffer quite like you
“Hello, Mandy? It’s me. I’m here at the Copa.
You know, the Copacabana.
I know I don’t write the songs that make the whole world sing but
I do know one thing, Mandy...
I can’t smile without you... Forget Lola...
Remember that weekend in New England? I thought then that
This could be the magic at last... Now here I am...
Tryin’ to get the feelin’ again!”
This happened despite the complaints of critics, despite their education and experience, they seemed clueless to the power of the connection between musician, the music and audience. Author and playwright Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness,” a turn on the common saying, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” There’s a bit of truth in both interpretations.
The success of Barry Manilow, his ability to connect to and retain the affection of so great a following for forty years should give an impartial music critic reason to pause and seriously reflect on Barry’s remarkable career. If they can’t even begrudgingly acknowledge the gift and contribution Barry has made, well too bad. Sometimes I used to take a fiendish delight in that no one will remember the names of the critics. But Barry Manilow? His place in the American heart and psyche will endure.
So no matter. I am in the lineup, with a number. I was an active Barry Manilow fan and President of the Cleveland Fan Club when I was in high school and very briefly President of the National Fan Club. Not in a million years would many of my closest colleagues over the past thirty years guess that. Very few people know this. I have kept my stories close to my heart. Now it is time to share them.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyr of the Second World War, anti-Nazi resister, and German theologian, remarked: “Music...will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.”
Pastor Bonhoeffer also wrote a few snazzy hymns while in prison awaiting death-by-Nazi for his role in the resistance. Consider this about Bonhoeffer: while a post-doctoral student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1930-31, he explored Harlem. Bonhoeffer visited the black churches and learned all about jazz, the blues and black spirituals. Indeed this experience would become a source of inspiration that gave him strength to stand with the emergent Confessing Church, the part of the German church that defied Hitler, when he returned to Germany in 1932. I wonder, in a six-degree-of-separation kind of way, if Bonhoeffer had heard the Comedian Harmonists (that famous all-male harmony ensemble known throughout Europe between 1928-1934), the group upon whom Barry based his musical Harmony. I would like to think that the Comedian Harmonists also touched Bonhoeffer’s spirit as did the music of the Harlem Renaissance. Music was a source of inspiration and strength to Bonhoeffer, the defiant opponent of Nazism. The Nazis hanged Bonhoeffer on April 8, 1945, just two weeks before the Allies liberated the Flossenberg Concentration Camp and crushed what was left of the Nazi war machine.
The music of Barry Manilow kept a fountain of joy alive in me, in my time of profound sorrow and stayed there, dormant for years, strong and deep. It never diminished even though I had not attended a concert since 1978, had not bought a recording, read his autobiography or even followed his career closely as a real fan should for 30 years. As I read that report about Barry’s marriage, I put aside my sermon. The years dissolved. Suddenly once again I was a captivated 16-year-old, listening to "It’s a Miracle."
It was a miracle, indeed.
So this is how my story, pre-Barry, began.
Notes:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/mothertere121813.html#GXI5WiUtFrjT9S6G.99
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/17/suzanne-somers-barry-manilow-gay_n_7085874.html
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/558084-imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery-that-mediocrity-can
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/37834-music-will-help-dissolve-your-perplexities-and-purify-your-character
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessing_Church
Give the gift of music to the next generation through donations to:
The Manilow Music Project
8295 South La Cienega Boulevard
Inglewood, CA 90301
info@manilowmusicproject.org
Click here to go to the next post or click here to return to the first page.