This summer marks the turn of the Spirit Movement into the task of the next twenty years. If it can be said that an army moves on its stomach, it can also be said that a movement moves on its symbols. One of the key symbols for any movement is its music; it is the singing that genuinely becomes the prayer upon which the movement forges ahead. When a movement quits singing it is dead; it will not long endure. As the Spirit Movement turns into the next twenty years, it will live on its singing. During the last twenty years the breakloose of the spirit has been sober and awesome. The movement marched. Now the time has come to ground and deepen the spirit upon which the movement is built.

SPIRIT AWAKENING	Since the dawn of consciousness, the spirit of man has been punctuated and nurtured by the rhythm and language of musical form. With the breakloose of consciousness came the awareness of both freedom and aweful nothingness. Music has served as a chief enabler of the spirit throughout the journey of man, giving him a way to articulate and express the intensity and radical tension that life is. When life begins to go deep into man's interior, he learns to sing and make music. Music touches deep within him eliciting a response beyond the emotional.
ONTOLOGICAL DEPTHS	As man gained lucidity, pain cut deeply into him. Music has given him a roadmap into the non-rational which no mere rehearsal of objectivity satisfies. The poetic ground of human expression lies beneath and beyond the rational and objective. It comes out of the ontological depths. "Musical feeling" is rather something `wholly` other,' which, while it affords analogies and here and there will run parallel to the ordinary emotions of life, cannot be made to coincide with them by a detailed point-to-point correspondence. IT is, of course, from those places where the correspondence holds that the spell of a composed song arises by a blending of verbal and musical expression." (Otto)
HISTORICAL REFLECTION	As groups of people in community have built the movements that have carried and propelled history, music has played a key role. The Hebrew history reflected in the Old Testament reveals time and again the songs, both sacred and profane which nurtured them. Plato wrote of the power of music and song, and in our own time and century it has been crucial to the glue of various movements from the singing of the armies of the world wars to the labor and youth movements of history. It is said that Mao remarked you can tell the state of a revolution by the pitch of its music.
CENTURY TWENTY	The music and singing of the 20th Century has exemplified the incredible alteration of consciousness and society's expression of it in musical form. In the past fifty years we have seen emerge the style of music which has helped man through the chaos of our age. The introduction of jazz in this century as an experimental mode proved to be an enduring expression for the masses of people of our time. Similarly, the writers of more classical music broke all barriers of form and harmony to produce the sounds of discord in their works. Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" created wild reaction in Paris in 1912 when people literally rioted in the streets in protest. It is as though the times have called for discordant music, as they have called forth this response in all the arts. And yet amid the discord has been music of harmony, as though expressing man's hope that the world will come back together again. And strangely too, the discord of one age becomes the harmony of another.
SINGING AS ART FORM	The putting together of words and music creates a distinct and unique art form in singing. Singing itself holds three dynamics in tension:; the melodic line together with poetry, the tempo and beat, and the pause or silence within the song. These crucial elements must work together in the blending of voices to produce singing that is singing from the deeps of the spirit. Not any one of these elements can tyrannize the other. In singing, music can be made which bursts the universe. The actual sound of the notes produces the experience of the pre-image which already exists in the imagination.
SINGING AS EXPRESSION	In bursting the universe with singing there comes the awareness that singing is not about notes but more about words, held in tension with the music. The singer makes the words work for him, wringing the meaning out of every word. As the words tumble out, the disciplined singer treats each one with the expression that comes from both the meaning he intends to convey and the invention of the word as a carrier of its meaning. The word "up" is very different from the word "down" for example, and no word in a song is more crucial than any other. The singer who releases his passion in song is the one who recalls that each word invented is an artform in itself.
INDIVIDUAL REHEARSAL	The release of individual freedom is nowhere more apparent than in the singing of songs. The singer is beckoned by the words and melody of a song to express a life force that is uniquely human. It is the opportunity to release the passion for life wherein the singer can pour his being into every word. It is in this passion that one is aware that he sings not from the throat but from his toes, with his whole body. In this expression of the vitality of life, the whole interior is expanded, as though you were turned inside out, touching your own deepest "truth-bone" and projecting the sate of being the song is eliciting.
GROUP COMMONNESS	In group singing, there is the opportunity for a community to commonize the power of poetry put to music. When one is sensitive to the voices with which he is blending, he is able to experience a sensitivity to life and all that is around him. Back in the 30's and 40's when we were in the trough, harmony was a joke. Now we're back into the crest. Harmony today is necessary to make it over the crest of the wave. The issue is how to get harmony in group singing without being a choir - or no revolution will happen.
THE WORSHIP	Because of the power of music in the church, perhaps a malaise would first affect the musical dynamic of the church's life. She sang hymns in ignorance of the meaning of both the music and the poetry, until she could barely endure her own singing. Church renewal has required that the church bracket singing until she learned anew its meaning and experienced afresh the spirit deeps out of which authentic singing flows. Recovery of singing requires the reappropriation of both the music and the poetry's meaning. This is a slow and dangerous process. The hymn, which tends to articulate the external reflection of the church, and the gospel song, which is a reflection of her interior state of being, are the two broad forms of singing. The latter begins to focus toward the recovery which moves of necessity into a recovery of the great hymn poems. With this comes the recovery of the deep worship experience of the church.
THE MOVEMENT	Music seen as a powerful tool in the life of any man and any community was an early experiment in the Spirit movement. At different times in its history the Church has written its own words to tunes which spoke to the spirit of the man on the street, to melodies he found himself humming. In the early 50's one of the first experiments of the Movement was to take the tune Waltzing Matilda which everyone knew from the movie "On the Beach" and add the words of the Lord's Prayer. This part of the experiment has continued, using popular music, folk songs, and more classical tunes with the classical language of the church. In 1965 as the Movement turned to work in 5th City a new dimension of music burst forth in the writing of the new secular words for current and popular tunes. Combining the words of the four RS-I papers to popular tunes produced some of our most popular songs. In 1968 the music began to speak of the religious deeps that man was experiencing, moving from a secular articulation of the Word to an articulation of aspects of the life style of man on a spirit journey.
THE WORLD	In creating the symbolic framework of a group the selection of the song is of utmost importance. In choosing songs both the indicative and the imperative are present with the primary beat upon the indicative. For as man grasps life the indicative is prior to the imperative. In thinking through the mood of a group and what songs to choose, the question is raised: "What is it that is moving in on the group?" not any "ought" about the situation. The two fundamental guidelines for choosing songs are the capturing of the mood by sensing the state of being of the group and the tone or mood you want to create for the task before the group. This takes brooding that goes on in the middle of the night, with a willingness to change your mind at the last minute. And a guru with sensitivity to a group will choose the songs to be sung with deep seriousness and be willing to say no to a suggestion from the group that is not on target.
THE DRAMA	Everyday of our lives we have the opportunity to encounter music and singing in countless ways. We are programmed by society to listen to Muzak or other forms of canned music. The disc jockeys of radio literally decide which songs will be popular with the youth by playing their choices over and over. In the turn toward the future the question must be one of discerning the new mood of intentionality and of creating a climate for music that will endure and be helpful for the times in which we live, creating a new screen for people to hear the music and songs that will sustain and nurture the spirit deeps. For example, the songs that are played on an elevator or in an airport could be ones that do this.
THE WALTZ	Richard Wagner wrote of Strauss music: "These irresistible waltzes that first catch the ear and then curl around the heart until all of a sudden they invade and will have the legs." The waltz is that music that has the pulse and verve of gaiety plus the nostalgia and sensuous longing that comes of knowing the tragedy of life. It's as though the waltz sees the abyss on either side and dares live in it. Picture the ledge on a high building with a waltzing couple whirling around it. You waltz or you will fall into the abyss while at the same time you are deeply entrenched in this world. The waltz holds the female principle which says "this situation can be saved." She knows there is no hope, but she goes ahead, waltzing over nothing. You waltz to make it in the irrationality and unreality of it all. You start out gingerly, delicately abut as the volume increase you are whirled into an arduous pace. The three-quarter time can be exhausting. The one who waltzes paces himself to endure to the end.
THE MARCH	The march has long been associated with those who make war; however, it goes much deeper than this particular manifestation, and in fact is related to humanness itself. It represents what has been known in any age or group as hard ground discipline - or the acting out of a decision in 4/4 time to the best of "I said I'll do it - I will!" It probably is best described in terms of the masculine principle, or the pour soi - or the bursting forth. When you look at men singing, it is immediately apparent whether they are tired troops marching or fresh troops. Fresh troops sing out of the external - old troops have no choice but to get in step. When you are marching, there's a decision to sing or if you have 20 miles ahead of you to march and the troops are tired - you might as well sing. The decision to sing is the decision to stay in step.
THE FOLK	The folk song has been a part of societal expression since man first discovered the importance of having a story that he rehearsed to himself. The folk song as we know it emerged from the Middle Ages when the troubadours of royalty sang at court and minstrels wandered over the land telling the tales of past glories and carrying the news of the people from place to place. The folk song tells us who we are and rehearses the reason for why we do what we do. They hold the mystery and depth of life and show the celebration of people in the greatness of life. In our time folk music has particularly recovered and refined the singing of words; it honors the poetry for that is what the story is. Authentic folk music recaptures the interior deeps of the poetry. We have also seen how the folk singer has given back to the Church some of its great songs like Amazing Grace.
THE POPULAR	The popular song, so called because it is the music that catches the heart of the man on the street, has always been the mode of expressing best man's dreams, hopes, and fantasies about life. The popular song that comes from the depths of life is the one that sees through the brutality of life to the wonder that life holds. These are the songs that fete the fates. In the midst of the awareness of the tragedy, the music lyrics of popular songs have seen through this tragedy to the depth of man's dreams. It must be said in our time particularly that there is always present the tendency to allow a surface expression of music to slip into stoicism or romanticism, both of which are indications of man's struggle to live with life the way it is. The soldier who sat and sang of home and his sweetheart was no romantic. He sang over against the exposure to raw death.

Summer '72 is caught in the midst of the struggle of 4/4 and ¾ time. In the last twenty years the music of the Spirit Movement has been that of maintaining strength. The next twenty will combine the march and the waltz into the harmony of the future. We sense we are on a long march. There are sharp cliffs along the way, punctuated with the cries of suffering humanity. Into the distant future the waltzing and marching will swirl into a new song for a new world. This relationship between radical abandonment and emotional recovery will have a foundational impact upon the recovery of the symbolic for all mankind.