2022 Response to Berry Street Essay: Jen Hayman

Jen Hayman, Director of Music and Arts at All Souls Unitarian (DC)
Response to Berry Street Essay, Rev. Mykal Slack, 2022

Hello friends. It is so good to be with you all in spirit today, and many, many thanks to Rev. Mykal Slack for embodying the commitment to collaboration and relationship in the very way you are presenting this essay. I am honored and humbled to be in the number!

Some of the things that resonated with me in this Berry Street essay focus around how white supremacy culture has made me a “people pleaser” in ways that haven’t always felt right for me, and in ways that were important for me to unlearn. In 2016, I was invited to lead music for Ministry Days and the Service of the Living Tradition. At that time, I was relatively new to my current position and still moving past a superficial understanding of Unitarian Universalist values. A board member from my first UU church job told me that I would “do just fine so long as we sang lots of songs about trees and never sang the word Lord in worship.” I still abide by her wisdom about the tree songs. In fact, this spring my choir sang an entire program about trees at the National Arboretum! But something in the latter part of her advice stuck to me, too. My gut told me no, but the people-pleaser, the bi-racial girl always trying to achieve respect and love in predominantly white space, told me to maintain the status quo. This motivated me to adapt lyrics to a song in ways that were harmful and colonialist. And folks spoke up in ways that were both challenging and incredibly helpful once I got out of my own way. It made me examine the ways I wanted to approach my work going forward, building trusting relationships where folks in my community felt they could share openly, where we knew and *saw* each other more fully, and could “cry power” together when need be.

Which brings me to my prideful moment of sharing. Perhaps some of you have seen my choir’s rendition of the Hozier song “Nina Cried Power.” I’ll confess: Sometimes, when I’m having a bad day, I scroll through the YouTube comments on this video for a little pick-me-up. And yes, the performance is FIRE, but what lifted the roof from the rafters that day (at least for me) was not just the singing, but “the heaven of the human spirit ringing”, as Hozier puts it. The embodied spirit. The invitation from the choir to express in whatever ways felt real and good, the sentiments of the song. There is something to the choir literally singing “power” again and again, that seeped into our bones. In preparation for performing this piece, our choir listserv flooded with articles about the artists Hozier names for their willingness to cry power into the face of institutionalized power. Folks shared personal stories for why certain lyrics resonated. They learned about the activists featured in the official video for the song. And so when it came time to sing: “And I could cry power, power has been cried by those stronger than me straight into the face that tells you ‘rattle your chains if you love being free’?” I knew they knew exactly what we were singing about and what was being asked of them. We cried “power” for everyone who needed church that day, and everyone who had been wounded by church. We cried power for the man in the 4th row battling brain cancer, and for the mother of Richard Collins III, also among the congregation in this video, as she battled for justice for her son, a black student from UMD who was stabbed to death in a hate crime on campus while waiting for an Uber the year before. We cried power with the COO of the National Women’s Law Center, who sang with us through tears over the Brett Kavanaugh supreme court hearings the previous spring. But most importantly, we cried power together. Justice and accountability and power was happening right there, among us and within us. And when everyone is on a journey like that together, It doesn’t matter who is clapping on 2 and 4 or swaying the opposite direction because we are together in the ways that really matter.

(“Nina Cried Power” video excerpt plays)

This fall, in honor of All Souls bicentennial, we will premiere a new choral work based on a sermon by the late A Powell Davies. In it he says, “I must feel again the love I owe to others. I must not only hear about it but feel it. In church, I do. I am brought toward my best, in every way toward my best.” May we allow ourselves to be brought toward our best. May we listen to what needs to be heard. May we feel what needs to be felt. And may we all cry power as boldly and beautifully as is required of our work and our faith. Thank you.