Co-Curricular
What's Your Story?
On the Senior Retreat last week, during a reflection activity, a question was pulled from the basket that read, ‘What’s your favourite song, and why?’ Thankfully, I wasn’t the one who had to answer.
It sounds simple, but it’s a surprisingly confronting question. How do you choose one song? The answer changes with context – or does it? Is it the tune? The lyrics? The way it makes you feel? Or is it the memories it unlocks – moments, people, events, seasons of life contained in a melody?
“Songs are stories that tell the truth, even when we can’t.” Johnny Cash
Cameron Crowe – writer and director of Almost Famous – once said, ‘That’s my favourite part, how [songs] you love become a souvenir in a diary later. A clue to who you were.’ He never journaled or kept a diary. Instead, he just listened to the records he loved at different points of his life. The music itself became the gateway to his former self; or perhaps a way to better understand himself today.
That likely rings true for most of us. We remember childhood through the songs we heard in the car, through friends and family members making a mess of certain lyrics, or the flash of summer holidays and parties through a chorus we haven’t heard in years.
There is one particular song that invokes powerfully vivid memories of single-digit year-old me roller blading at Skate 2000, where I won a cassette tape in the trivia competition by answering the question, ‘the oldest club to have never won a Rugby League premiership?’: The Cronulla Sharks, of course (2016 was many years away).
Why does music do this?
Because music gets past our defences. It connects emotion, memory, imagination, and spirit in a way nothing else quite manages.
One line I’ve always loved comes from Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah:
“Well I heard there was a secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord.”
What a thought – that God could be pleased with a sound. Or perhaps the ‘chord’ is a metaphor: maybe it wasn’t a note at all, but an attitude of the heart, an offering, a posture of praise. Something in David resonated with something in God.
Scripture understands this deeply. The Bible devotes an entire book to song in the Psalms, because music is one of the oldest ways humans have expressed sorrow, hope, joy, lament, gratitude, faith. We use song to worship, to remember, to encourage, to celebrate. It is like we sing ideas and truth into our hearts before we really understand them with our minds.
So maybe the question on retreat wasn’t really, ‘What’s your favourite song?’
Maybe it was, ‘What story does your heart sing, and why does it matter?’
“He will rejoice over you with singing.” Zephaniah 3:17
Adam Watson
Director of Co-Curricular