Como la cigarra

Tantas veces me mataron,
tantas veces me morí,
sin embargo estoy aquí
resucitando.
Gracias doy a la desgracia
y a la mano con puñal,
porque me mató tan mal,
y seguí cantando.
Cantando al sol,
como la cigarra,
después de un año
bajo la tierra,
igual que el sobreviviente
que vuelve de la guerra.

Tantas veces me borraron,
tantas desaparecí,
a mi propio entierro fui,
sola y llorando.
Hice un nudo del pañuelo,
pero me olvidé después
que no era la única vez
y seguí cantando.
Cantando al sol,
como la cigarra,
después de un año
bajo la tierra,
igual que el sobreviviente
que vuelve de la guerra.

Tantas veces te mataron,
tantas resucitarás
cuántas noches pasarás
desesperando.
Y a la hora del naufragio
y a la de la oscuridad
alguien te rescatará,
para ir cantando.
Cantando al sol,
como la cigarra,
después de un año
bajo la tierra,
igual que el sobreviviente
que vuelve de la guerra.

I wake up to this song this morning, which was on my mind, and lips, much yesterday. Somehow in the last week , unsolicited, it has insinuated itself into my daily walk. It is essentially a song about active grace--that resurrecting power, which is open to us at every moment of our lives, to redeem and create purpose from all the minor or not so minor deaths that inevitably befall us each day (too often, inflicted by our own hand--la mano con puñal). This is the essence, the most important thing, in so much of what I've been thinking through lately. No surprise, and no novelty: if Hans Kung is right, it is the essence of the Christian message.

What the song leaves unexplained is how one finds the voice to sing through death--save in the last verse, where it is tellingly at the rescuing hands of another. The voice is found, I believe, in the moment one chooses to open oneself to grace: to let go of whatever it is you are clinging to that keeps you in the place of death. This action can and must be quite concrete, literally embodied; leaving it vague and metaphorical serves only as an excuse to sentimentally hold a pious idea that translates into nothing, which may be the beginning of all bad (and mythological) theology. What one must let go of may be the tightness of your body or the shallowness of your breath, the habitual words of self-denunciation resounding with vindication in your mind, the rage or despair trying to make a nest in your heart that some part of you so much wants to abandon itself to. (Open will, open mind, open heart). The letting go is, however, only one side of the action; accompanying it, enabling it, is the act of faith, the trust that in fact, at the bottom of your "fall," beneath all the hooks trying to catch you which you refuse to catch, grace is waiting.

The "fall" or "drop"--still the most convenient language I've found to describe the "depth" implied (going deeper into self)--is at once the fall into your self, into the world, and into God. Yet even it remains inadequate, because really the action has two directions of opening: it is at once both a sinking deeper within oneself, and an opening more fully and broadly to the world, as the song calls "cantando al sol" (here, it has been my teacher). In my experience, there can even be a sense of broadening and sudden slip into clarity of one's visual field when one makes the choice to open. It is as if one becomes at once more transparent, to the full complexity and plurality of one's states, and to the incredible kaleidoscope of the world that has up to the moment drifted through the doors of the senses relatively unnoticed, and certainly unappreciated. Again, the language of grace must be tethered to real experience, which means: tethered to the body and the heart.

The faith I spoke of that grace waits at the bottom, I feel must be said, is not a blind faith, not the romanticized leap into the absolute dark. It is the faith that has encountered grace before, that can trust to find it there both because it is promised (by Christ, by one's community, by the inchoate prophetic intuition buried within each of our beings) and because it has somehow experienced the truth of that promise in the past. Yet it is also always blind to some extent, and so always requires a certain upsurge of courage, for it may be the case that grace proves evasive, or inadequate (in our opinion), or incapable of holding us in its embrace before we reach back to our hooks. Of course, all of that may be appearance, may be because we have not fully opened ourselves after all--but how hard, how impossible to know! On the other hand, perhaps it is all too adequate, but requires letting go of something--a cherished idol of one's self-image, or a seemingly essential desire--that is so hard to be wrenched away from the experience is crucifying as well as redeeming. The Christian proclamation, writ in the wounds of Jesus's resurrected body, is, alas, all too unambiguous here.

I will pick up that thread before too long. But now, to return to the song. For me, "Como La Cigarra" is not pure metaphor, but in one respect quite literal. Somehow, it has been given to me that grace solicits my choice to open and find redemption through an invitation to sing. As I have discovered, at moments, over the last two months, singing is a distinctive way for me of opening myself, and simultaneously finding and expressing what it is I encounter when I do. It is my embodied act of affirming the breadth of the world. This song in particular, which even yesterday had the remarkable power to redeem bitterness, boredom, and resignation, and make of them gratitude. Yo, como la cigarra, lo tengo como parte de mi naturaleza, cantando al sol.