Making Music in the Tension

Tension is an essential part of human life. This is the case whether we appreciate it or try to avoid it at all costs. I recently heard Nick Rea, of Preemptive Love Coalition, illustrate the importance of tension in life using the analogy of instrument strings. Too much tension, and the string breaks. Too little, just a thunk or twang. Just the right amount, and one can make music.

I sometimes experience the tension of life as being pulled between what seem to be conflicting values. Other times, it feels like a tug of war between who I have been told I need to be, and who I sense myself becoming.

The last couple of weeks, I’ve received multiple invitations to lean in to the push and pull. I’ve leaned back in my seat and let the tears flow as I have listened to people’s stories and experiences on multiple sides of the war. I’ve felt my brow tighten and later relax as I have sat with groups reflecting on the resilience and gifts and innovation and also the difficulties and failures and disappointments of our parents and grandparents. These conversations, along with my experiences reflecting on scripture with my students this term, have highlighted the navigation of tensions as a silver thread weaving humanity together across lines of gender, place, time, socio-political identity.  

Yolanda Pierce dedicates her book In My Grandmother’s House to “the remnant, living in the tension between the contradictions and the beauty of their faith.” In the preface to her book, Pierce introduces grandmother theology, which she describes as “rooted in generational wisdom, in the way that time and age and maturity provide an alternative lens through which to know and understand God.”[1] In the front flap of the book, one finds this description: “A grandmother’s theology carries wisdom strong enough for future generations. The Divine has been showing up at the kitchen tables of Black women for a long time. It’s time to get to know that God.”

Throughout the book, Pierce models living in the tension, grappling with the beautiful and contradictory in our journeys as we weave a life at the intersection of our family lines, our past, and our community histories and the hopes, longings, and dreams that pull us forward.

A year ago this week, my paternal grandmother passed away. There is a song—For a Dancer by Jackson Browne—that is linked in my mind to her passing. One particular lyric from that song has played over and over in my mind as I reflect on tensions in human life. “Just do the steps that you’ve been shown by everyone you’ve ever known, until the dance becomes your very own.”

This morning, I read the opening line of Andrew Solomon’s book Far From the Tree.  “There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production.” Perhaps it is the same in the journey of faith—there is no such thing as reproduction. But there is production, forging new life that is neither an exact replica of what came before nor a totally new formulation. Life "sings" when we navigate, in community with others, the tensions between where we came from and where we're going, between our histories and our unfolding stories, between who we have been told we should be and who we are becoming.

Many of the writers of the biblical text navigated tensions: between an understanding of God as tied to the temple hill in Jerusalem and a God who goes with the people into exile; between a clear-cut "this leads to blessings, this leads to curses" thinking and an acknowledgement of the nuance and complexity of life; between holding on to the faith of the fathers and engaging in innovative ways with the challenges in front of them. We have the opportunity to join this great cloud of witnesses by acknowledging and leaning in to the tensions in our own lives, in our communities, and in our families (both given and chosen). Let's make music together!

Written by Jody Washburn 

[1] Pierce, In My Grandmother’s House: Black Women, Faith, and the Stories We Inherit (Broadleaf Books, 2021) xvii.