By Tamara Jaffe-Notier
Issue #204, March/April 2006

(Editor's note: OK, for all those generation X, Y, Z, and XYers out there, Emily Saliers and Amy Ray are the Indigo Girls, internationally acclaimed folk, rock, pop divas who remind the whole world that music with a social conscience should be fun, rockin' and brilliant. Hook up your iPod to some of Indigo Girls CDs in your parents' collection and you'll hear some freakin' beautiful music that'll blow your mind. Or something like that. Then read this interview.)

How do you approach a prolific theologian and musician to discuss a new book that he's co-authored with his famous daughter and not make it look like you're only interested in the famous daughter? Skillaciousness, high suavitivity, articulativeness. That's why we tried to get Teri Gross to do the interview, but she was booked. When we sent our one available reporter to interview Don Saliers and his daughter Emily, she tried hard to shift out of adoring fan mode to focus on the book at hand—A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice. Slightly handicapped by not having read any of Don's other 22 books in print, our reporter finally plunged right in.

THE WITTENBURG DOOR: Emily, how does it feel to be doing the Christian circuit with your dad, after all these years of playing the rock, pop, and folk music circuits?
EMILY SALIERS: Doing any circuit with my dad is great. We've had a wonderful experience carving out time to do the book and getting to know each other better through the topics we've explored. The whole process has been a real blessing. I have mixed feelings about organized faith—whether it's Christian, Jewish, whatever it is—so those are things dad and I have waded through together. But we've picked places to visit that are progressive congregations who embrace the book and the work we try to do in the world, so it's worked out.
DOOR: Don, how has God used Emily's music in your life?
DON SALIERS: Extensively and joyously. I owe a great debt to Emily and Amy (Ray) and to so many of their musical friends for carrying justice in their music. It's energized me, and caused me to look with fresh eyes at the social vision that's in the Christian faith, in Biblical faith, and raise the question, "Why is the church so sluggish in many justice issues?" It's had an impact on my thinking, and on my wanting to point out the prophetic side of our tradition, and put that into music wherever I can.
DOOR: Who provided the historical research for all the details about the history of the church that are in your book? Did you do that together, or split it up somehow?
EMILY: I didn't do any research. Dad is a wealth of knowledge. He knows so much about the church that I said, "Dad, you handle the research end of things."
DON: I've been teaching almost 40 years. Church history is in my bloodstream. I teach courses about a lot of the material in the book. I did specific research when I came across details I wanted to know more about. We also have a wonderful friend who did work on the footnotes.
DOOR: I enjoyed those footnotes.
DON: I'm the one responsible for any bad historical and theological errors in the text.
EMILY: ...and I'm kind of the pop culture person, wouldn't you say?
DON: Yeah, but don't let her get by with saying she didn't do research ... she's doing research all the time.
DOOR: The subtitle of your book is "reflections on music as spiritual practice." In what ways is music a spiritual practice?
DON: Both of us believe that music is a tremendous gift to all humanity—and it can be a profound spiritual discipline. But I would critique some church music as being too superficial to give us a sense of mystery, suffering, death and joy.
DOOR: You wrote, "Spirituality is not an idea, but a disciplined bodily experience that grows deeper with practice." Whose sentence is this, and what does it mean?
DON: If you can't understand it, I'm probably the author. But both of us agree on this issue: spiritual life is not about ideas in the head. A great idea doesn't make you spiritual. For both of us, spirituality has to be physically practiced in our bodily existence—fasting, or restraint, or healthy spiritual practices. Spirituality is the whole person, not just the intellect.

DOOR: Heavy. What is canto hondo or "deep song"?
EMILY: "Gracia a La Vida," by Violeta Parra fits into all the dichotomies of life—light and darkness, life and death. It's an appreciation for all the minutiae and grandiosity of life. The lyrics read like a prayer of gratitude, although it's probably considered "secular." It wasn't written as a sacred text, but it is a song of gratitude for all the mystery and wonder of life—the physicality of life and the spiritual journey of life. It's something that we explored to consider how secular music can speak spiritually—to our souls. That's "deep song." Dad, I didn't know if canto hondo was a particular term that represents something specific?
DOOR: Um, Emily, we're asking the questions here. Don, is canto hondo...
DON: No, it's Spanish for a song that goes someplace deep in the soul.
DOOR: You've both suggested that Native American cultures influence your experience of the sacred. How?
EMILY: Amy and I have done a lot of environmental activist work in partnership with indigenous peoples, and so we've spent a lot of time on reservations and in traditional Indian communities. We've met wise mentors and leaders who have shown us a paradigm for grassroots activism. What I found, overwhelmingly, is that traditional people of faith, of all different kinds—you can't lump all indigenous religions into one group—have a sense of the inner connectedness of all things. It isn't a white man in a beard who's God, but a mother and father Spirit. They honor the four directions—there's accountability, and prayer for future generations to come. It's very holistic and inclusive and respects nature in a very deep and present way. This has brought me closer to a nature spirit in myself that wasn't there before—a very important part of my spirituality. The perseverance that Indian communities show in the struggle against multi-national corporations, or high level nuclear waste dumping—every dump that's proposed is on Indian land, and that's racist—is spiritually energizing. This gives me hope and reminds me of the resilience of the human spirit and how it can be manifest in work on earth. It's a very strong marriage of what is done on earth and what is done in the spirit world.
DOOR: "...what you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven..."
DON: I had the experience while I was teaching for a while in British Columbia of worshipping with some of the Haida and Siska First Nations people. I was privileged to be teaching there when some of the Christians among these tribes invited me to worship with them. They started their worship services with a drumbeat that was like a human heart. We'd come into a circle with the drum heartbeat, they'd smudge the room—purify it with sage—and honor the four directions. So I've had the mediation of some sources of North American Indian spirituality back through Christian worship.
     When Emily was in high school, singing in some state convention, they sang "Now I Walk in Beauty." It turns out that it was an old Navaho song—and it moved Emily and us to tears, it was so beautiful.
EMILY: Also, I used that song as a tag on the end of one of Amy's songs, so that particular sacred text became applied to an Indigo Girls song, and it worked well.
     Native Americans are not icons, or part of the past, or New Age-y spiritualists. It bristles me when people try to co-opt Native American spiritual practices. We need to have a deep respect for authentic native faith. It's nothing to be toyed with.
DOOR: Emily, your song "Galileo" has a lot of beauty, anger and empathy that has helped generations of young Christians face their own religious history with honesty. Did you know it would be a healing song for philosophically minded believers?
EMILY: No. In a way it takes on the Church and what they did—forcing Galileo to recant, and all the abuses of power that happen in any institutionalized gathering—but it's sort of tongue in cheek because it's also an exploration of reincarnation, not a Christian concept, per se. When I wrote it I had been talking to a friend about how a soul might come back as something else, and I was feeling kind of a lighthearted approach to deep things. I wasn't feeling reverent about the song when I was writing it.
DON: But it has had a life of its own.
EMILY: It was surprising to me the way that song caught on. I didn't expect it.
DOOR: Don, as a church musician and a pastor were you ever tempted to steer Emily into CCM?
DON: No. As I think about Emily and her sisters, our house has always been a house of music, joy and pretty truthful straight up stuff. When it came to faith formation, we've had some good experiences in churches. It's been unusual because a lot of my ministry has been in a university chapel context. That's been helpful for my four daughters because we've always been discussing spiritual matters. We would often have pretty heavy theological discussions at the table, and I knew that our table was very different than what my children might get in some of these greenhouse youth groups.
EMILY: I can't tell you what it's like to have a father who's open-minded and progressive, politically and socially ...
DOOR: I can't either...
EMILY: ...but steeped in the rich tradition of the church and its sacraments. We experienced worship with him, and with my mom who sings in the choir, and then we could go home and ask Dad any question we wanted to. I guess, dad, you didn't always have the answers—but you had a lot of answers. We could explore meaning. I can't tell you what a deep blessing that was for our family life. It really enriched us.
DON: Our house was a little seminary, in a strange way, so I guess we did our version of the youth group at home.
DOOR: Don, what do you do to sustain your spiritual life while you're teaching, writing, performing—doing all the things that you do?
DON: You have to learn to be attentive to what's right before you—this hour, this person, this event. For me, that's close to prayer—being present. Now, sometimes it's a whirlwind, and it's difficult to do that, but that's the first thing I'd say. I also try to find something every day that's part of the mystery—part of the beauty. Music, for me, classical, sacred, jazz, is a huge part of it. There are times when I come home and play some Bach on the piano and it's a prayer. So music has been the second thing. The third thing is that I find the community of honest worship tremendously sustaining. We've been through some rough times as a family and if it weren't for our community of faith, it would have been a lot harder.
DOOR: You have a beautiful section about funeral music in your book, and it reminded me of my dad. He had all his funeral music picked out well before the event—he even had the preacher and text lined up. Do you have the music picked out for your funeral, Don?
DON: I sometimes ask my students in a worship course to plan their own funeral. It allows you to think over the most meaningful strands of your life. Obviously, I want some Bach—maybe the concluding chorale from the Saint John Passion—but I'd also like certain hymns that are important to me. There are too many of them. People would be there for several hours. It needs to be both instrumental and choral music. I wouldn't mind if the whole thing were a musical event. I'm going to have to cut out now. I've got an appointment.
DOOR: Simone Weil comes up in that last chapter, with her idea about waiting to be found. What do you do with the tension between waiting for God and searching for God? What does music have to do with that?
EMILY: It's like the double helix. The great mystery of life, to me, is the way opposing things work together. This is a reciprocal relationship between us and the God we seek. We journey toward what we seek. I don't know how to describe the God part of it. Who can describe God?
DOOR: How about explaining the theological statement, "The whole creation does not belong to us, rather it is given as a gift, and music is the sound of this divine giving."
EMILY: We talk a lot about the physicality of music—how it's in our heartbeat, our bloodstream, and all the things that represent tension and release in our bodies—the tempo of the body. We are walking instruments of music, physiologically. There's music in nature—the sound of birds, wind in trees. Music is the mysterious grace and force that ties us all together, and it is a vehicle for searching for whatever it is we're searching for. Humans have an unfortunate bent toward ownership. We're convinced that our singular lives are very, very important, and that we own things—we own our property and our careers—and that we have a lot of control. Ultimately, I believe that we don't—that these are just illusions. When you strip those away in your spiritual search, at least for me, and try to just accept the grace of such a magnificent gift, and how music ties it all together, then you'll get more than you ever could have imagined out of life—as opposed to trying to control things and own things.
DOOR: How does that work?
EMILY: Music transports us in our search for God—it is a vehicle for deepening our lives in a way that nothing else can, except love, in my opinion. Music moves people to their deepest core, whether you play, sing or listen to it. Even though we label music secular or sacred it's the same thing. When I was coming up, playing in bars every night, music held the community together—and it was a motley crew. Drug addicts, novice songwriters, people who played bunches of different instruments, hard luck stories, me, a PK (preacher's kid) who had pretty much a perfect life up to that point, and we shared music as a community. Everybody came, night after night, and it was like a church. The way that music formed our consciousness and made us want to go out into the world was like a benediction.
DOOR: What does Jesus mean to you and your music?
EMILY: Jesus, to me, represents love and diversity. My search in life has been coming to love the diversity of life, and working toward love and benevolence. I don't know if I'm a true Christian. I believe a lot of things—I'm kind of a religious mutt. When I think of the transforming power of love, that's what I think Jesus represents. That's obviously had an effect on my work.