What might a person who can be described as “a spiritual giant” - no, that someone I trust actually describes as “a spiritual giant” — possibly be like?
Last Monday, it seemed worth a call to a Northern California area code to find out.
Kate Munger answered and soon was telling me a story she has told 1,000 times.
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It’s about a terrifying moment she had nearly 30 years ago, when a dear friend Larry was dying of AIDS.
Although she said she had no training, no experience and, really, no interest in working with the dying, his regular care giver was unavailable one day.
And, well, he was her dear friend.
So, she did the routine morning chores at his place anxiously and constantly haunted by what awaited in the afternoon: a cavern of empty hours at his bedside.
“He was comatose and agitated,” Munger said. And she had no idea what to do.
So “I did what I always do when I’m afraid.”
Drawing on the many nights she camped out during her Girl Scout days, “I sang the song that gave me courage.”
“As soon as I starting singing,” she told me, “he calmed down and I calmed down.”
In the course of the next 2½ hours, says her written account, “I felt I’d given generously to my dear friend. I also found that I felt deeply comforted myself, which, in turn, was comforting to him.”
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At this point in the story, it would be possible to wrap up a column with the essentials: That Munger went on to found Threshold Choir International; that she is in Yellow Springs on this fall weekend to teach at the TCI Midwest gathering; and that, worldwide, the organization has more than 150 chapters and 2,500 members.
But there’s more to the story, which Horstman helps to provide.
Hesitant about the quality of her voice, Horstman joined TCI’s Yellow Springs Chapter 10 years ago because “I loved the idea of singing to people who are in transitions.”
By that, she means, dying.
“To just be present is hard,” she said. “I think singing opens up a space to do that that is much easier.”
“Everybody in the room gets settled and feels more present,” she said.
In part that may be because of the songs - songs Horstman likens to lullabies, which I see a parallel to campfire songs and simply composed lines of liturgy echoing in church.
“You don’t have to believe anything,” Horstman hastens to say. “They’re real simple, just two or three or four lines long. And you repeat it. And as you do that it gets deeper and deeper.”
“We have a practice of stopping at the ends of the songs and hearing them in silence - not speaking again until it has played through in your head once.”
At weekly visits to rooms in Springfield Regional Medical Center Horstman has made with three others of the Yellow Springs Chapter, “different things may happen,” she said.
“Sometimes it opens up something to a family and kind of gives voice to something they’ve said or they haven’t been able to say.”
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Harmonizing with Munger, Horstman says that in building a kind of warming campfire at the far end of life, singing provides “an opening to a world that we’re often kind of oblivious to. So, it’s sacred ground.”
In a world that tends to separate the spiritual and the physical, Munger insists that such spiritual things are in our bones.
“I think it’s a mammalian instinct to want to comfort the tiny or the frail or the dying or the damaged or the injured with our voices. I’ve seen foxes by the side of the road lifting their heads to the sky and keening because one of their babies has been run over.”
“It’s a very sacred act.”
That baseline understanding helps to explain her sense that a primary responsibility for Threshold Choir is to sing for people at life’s far threshold “who don’t necessarily have a community of faith around them.”
“I think the churches take care of their people,” Munger said, “but I want to make sure that nobody dies alone.”
To that end, she has sung for the past six years with a group of long-term inmates at San Quentin prison.
“They are, I must say, the most generous, the most kind, the most respectful group of men I have known in a long time.”
But at present, she is focused on entering another threshold firmly located in the land of the living.
“The songs I’m writing are not so much bedside songs as songs for our culture, for our United States, for our broken community” - songs that can connect the thresholds of our homes.
It’s a sentence that makes the words “love thy neighbor” come to mind.
Since everyone who has read this far can by now make a personal list of the characteristics of a spiritual giant on their own, I’ll end with a final anecdote from Munger.
Judy, a special choir friend of hers who lives in Vancouver, is dying of cancer. And while Munger would have liked to fly there to sing to at her bedside, “I couldn’t afford to pay for it,” she said.
So, her friends “concocted a daylong (choir) workshop” for a week ago Saturday “so I could fly up there to do the workshop and sing for Judy.
This, of course, adds two items to any list of the characteristics of a spiritual giant.
1. A spiritual giant must operate within a budget.
2. Sometimes, a spiritual giant’s gotta do what a spiritual giant’s gotta do.
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