The following is a recommendation letter I had the honor of writing for my mother, Cynthia Blomquist Gustavson — she’s the best! Read on…

Had I not grown up steeped in the rich brown sun-tea-poems of my mother’s careful pen-stroked emotions, only slightly sweetened with a bit of mint and honey-tongued words, thrown into the air with a mix of spit and green…

Had I not wallowed in the sopping wine-colored piles of simple words my mother collected in quart-sized berry pails out past the Red Wheelbarrow’s place next door, on the bushes hidden from tourists’ raspberry-thorn cut fingers…

Had she not been my first memory…

Had she not taught me to love others and myself…

…then maybe I could give you an impartial recommendation, or paint with true colors…

But of course I’m not perfect, so here goes… a fully partial recommendation!

I will list my impressions of her in my life first as I stumbled over them; each of them is a found agate-rock in the dusty stretch of road up the hill from my grandmother’s house in Minnesota, where my mother had walked tar-footed as a kid:

(Aside: One of the most amusing stories my mother tells is of her tar-feet. She didn’t know until sitting on the bed of her dorm room at Boston University in the mid-sixties that her feet were supposed to be white on the bottom. Hers were, as they always had been, black as a bear’s behind…)

1) She is my mother. The best mother anyone could hope for.
2) She is my friend. She sat through hours upon hours of colic, and yet she still loved me, still sat with me, still walked with me, and still does…
3) She is my teacher. She taught me to see, not to copy. She taught me to listen, not to speak. She taught me to cry instead of scream…
4) She is my guide. We all use her to find a steady keel in the water. Somehow she always knows where the even center is, and tells us how much to trim the sails and turn the rudder.
5) She is my catalyst. She wrote a poem for me when I left home in high school called ‘Clawing at the Lower Bark.’ I left my cicada shell behind… She gave me the organs of a poet and the lungs of a sparrow. Now I breathe, sing and write.

And now I see my mother in a different way, as we tend to do as we add years like inches to our belts. She has become my friend and my collaborator, and at times, just as she teaches me, she is my student… I realize now that my mother is the reason I’m alive today in so many capacities. Her once troubled child has now blossomed into a professional musician, author, publisher, PhD composer and more…

She gave me a voice to shout with… though it didn’t come through my lungs. She showed me a way to pull that shout out through my fingers… Through her I found poetry, music and art. She gave that to me, but not just me. It is her method of working. It is now as much a part of her as the spleen, toes and heart she was born with…

She sees the world through her pen, blindly stumbling through its cheap rolled ink into the bliss of understanding. And she uses that blind stumble in her therapy on a daily basis. Her plentiful poetry books are all lovingly dog-eared and beautifully beaten from sharing them with clients over 25 years, and making smashed-into-the-laser-beam photocopies…

Though I wasn’t her client, I had the privilege of receiving many of those poems, with notes hastily scrawled on the side or back… Many of those poems are still tacked on my office and bedroom walls… My favorite is the hand-typed version of Robert Bly’s poem “People Like Us” – I feel like my mom sent it to me because we are a unique breed; we who give freely of our love.

My mother gives love all the time… and what’s best, there seems to be no end to it. Believe me, I’ve tried to test its limits! But there is a trick to it. When she was a child, she could sit in any grassy field and find dozens of four-leafed clovers. If you ask her, she’ll tell you about the 8, 7, 6, and 5-leaf clovers she found, too. She searches until she finds the lucky clover in the grass. That’s the same way she searched until she found the heart of a boy (me) who did nothing but cry and scream for a year, no matter how much love she showed.

And today, she gently folds back the parched southern grass in rural Oklahoma and finds the hearts of the Oaks Mission Indian (they prefer that term to Native American) children, and the many other little ones that come into her practice in Tulsa.

My mother is married to a physician – they live in a nice house, surrounded by nice things, and pleasant people. Her own life today is very far from the stories of the children she takes care of every day – girls pregnant before their teens, mothers who aren’t there for their children, kids in trouble with the law, children that have been abused into silence. But there is a hunger inside of her for healing, and to give these kids a chance for escape. She gives that to them with her whispered and woven words, and with the gift of the pen. She gives these red-dirt kids a chance…

Cynthia Blomquist grew up a tar-footed kid, dirty-cheeked and happy, until she realized her own poverty. She saw the kids on the other side of the fence, tourists from the big city, and she dreamed her way out… Like me, and like the kids my mother teaches and counsels every day, my mother got lucky. She found her pen, and her little leather book of poetry that she still carries embedded just behind her left shoulder blade. The wound doesn’t bleed anymore, and now the poetry is just part of her…

Cynthia Blomquist Gustavson devotes nearly all of her professional time to finding the smiles of small Oaks children, just as poetry found her own dirty, mischievous sand-hills grin, while she was hunting for agates as a corn-silk-haired little girl, boldly reciting Casey at the Bat and Halfway Down the Stairs…

There could be no better recipient for an award of love for children through active therapy. She has worked with children for 25 years using the medium of poetry, and has written the only two existing poetry workbooks that I know about for working with children in therapy using specifically poetry.

And I know from personal experience that her love and her words can heal, and bring new life. She is indeed a great poetry therapist, and I hope she can receive this small reward for her long, passionate and caring service to children within this field.

I just want to make a nod to three good friends who are writing great entries in cyberspace.

Prof. Gil Waldkoenig is starting a great discussion site about guitar in worship called Guitar Graces — Check out http://guitargraces.blogspot.com

Matthew Avanzino, a good buddy, is in a stage of life where he has some great, meaningful musings on the meaning of life, etc. — worth perusing on a rainy afternoon, if it happens to be one, and you happen to be reading this!…
http://www.trytheavanzino06.blogspot.com

Jeremy Blythe, another good friend, is in the middle of Guyana on a great adventure with his fantastic wife Miriam — they are working with a church there, and he has TONS of great stories to tell…
http://blythlywayinguyana.blogspot.com

Check out Light into the World in use in a congregation below!
Thanks to Ascension Lutheran Church in Austin, Texas for this footage!

In responding to a statement from a theologian that, “Freedom was known in relief against the structure,” in jazz (in comparing jazz to the flexibility and improvisation within worship), I wrote the following:

I wonder what happens when we take that analogy and stretch it to its logical ends?… Both Parker and Gillespie, as well as Coltrane were strung out most of the time in their early years. They went all night long, and they DID stick to the ‘structures’ all the time, if you listen carefully. They all played within the scale. The bebop scale — an 8 note scale, instead of a 7 note scale.

That’s a simple trick that’s been employed by many composers over the last few hundred years, but these guys, starting with Parker, took it to a whole new level. They were able to play faster, more notes, more rhythms…

But, when you think about it — Parker died before he could change, Gillespie stuck with the same stuff, because he made a fortune at it, and Coltrane changed dramatically (I’ll say something about that in a second)… These were kids pushing the limits.

This is the movement I’m asking for. This is the movement that I would love to see in the church — of pushing the boundaries — a young elite rising up and challenging the body of the church with a blend of traditionalism and modernity that works!

Bebop became the style that everyone played, within a few years. Aggressive change could really make a churchwide revival of good liturgy possible!

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But what I’m coming around to, or trying to, is that John Coltrane was different. If you listen to his early records, he imitated Charlie Parker, he pushed Parker’s limits in terms of speed, and he had a tone that was all his own, which is why he got picked up by Miles Davis…

And at some point, Coltrane quit drugs. He quit the road. He quit the high life. And he started to pray, and changed his life completely. The records that were truly transcendent, and what turn this jazz analogy into the perfect metaphor for our discussion about the liturgy, are the late records Coltrane did.

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He brought jazz back to its roots, though he never lost sight of where he came from. He stood in front of an audience with his quartet, and they simply played from the heart. Nothing prepared, nothing planned. If anything, a few phrases… And they played muses. Emotions. Scriptural references…

If we can get to that level — take the traditional jazz we learn in seminary (for me in my music PhD program), and internalize it so much that, when called upon to sing with emotion, to pray with fervor, to shout with the angels, to suffer with the afflicted… We will push it out, and it will be good:)

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2 stories come to mind. The Velveteen Rabbit, and a Zen story that I learned in college. The Velveteen Rabbit, of course, is a story about a stuffed rabbit that is loved very much, and then discarded and forgotten… But it was so loved, and so ragged, that it became ‘real’… That is the way it is with our worship. We should never lose sight of ragged Paul, ragged Christ — people that suffer, people starving around the world, and in our own communities…

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The other story is a Zen story on the same lines. A boy learned to play the flute from a master teacher from a very young age. He studied with the old master for all of his life, until he turned 15. Then he was impatient. He said, “Master, when will I be able to play the flute like you? Like a master?” The master had never allowed him to play the melodies he wanted. Every time he had a lesson, he had to play one song over and over and over again…

Finally the boy gave up, and he went into manual labor. He got married, had a child. He worked every day, and his flute was sitting on a back shelf somewhere — he never played once since he was a boy…

And one day, a great tragedy ensued, and took the life of his wife and child. He turned to drinking, and slept in the streets, until one day, a man came to him and offered him a bite to eat, and place to sleep. The man told him he would help him.

The man said thank you, and didn’t know how to repay his friend, the Good Samaritan… (amusing cross-reference:)… One day, they were having dinner in the evening with many friends, and, in the corner was a small child playing the flute — a similar one to the flute this man had played as a boy.

The man crossed the room, and asked the child if he could play a tune or two on it. The boy, delighted, agreed, and asked the man if he was a master flute player — as he was very old and wrinkled in the face… “No,” the man replied… “I was once very good, but never a master…”

The man picked up the flute, and played the same melody he had played over and over all those years ago, and when it came through his fingers, everyone in the room stopped talking and turned to listen.

When he was finished, there was a hushed silence across the room, and the eldest man in the room finally said, “He is a master flute player…”

So are we in our faith, I think, and as pastors, as musicians, as vocational human beings… But we can’t lose sight of that flute… We have to keep an eye out for it when it crosses our path again.

Both liturgical and classical music come alive through interpretation. Each musician takes and breathes their breath into the shell that the composer has created.

I have my training in classical composition, and have dealt with the issue of the ‘performer’ many times, and in many different ways. In the academic circle, I tend to create music that forces the performer to step outside their ‘comfortable’ zone, and put a great deal of themselves into the piece. The music I create for the church is the opposite, and attempts, at all costs, to be ‘performable.’

I have often been pegged as (only) a bluegrass/folk musician, when my training is classical, and my composition style quite varied. I am now recording a ‘pop’ album in the city with some incredible musicians… I played and wrote mostly jazz/funk in college. I have been in a dozen rock and roll bands. I have studied Arabic music in Jerusalem…

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The road for any new liturgy or music to be adopted by a congregation is rocky at best. My goal is to create music that is easy to play by any variety of musicians, and easy to sing for the congregation. The reason I choose folk as the medium for much of my liturgical music is because it is accessible by both old and young church-goers.

We need to search for the commonness between us — to worship together as one people of God. Tell me — when did we last see children worshipping on a regular basis with the elderly among us? We segregate our young from our old. How could that be good?

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More important than the genre for me is the community of faith. I welcome all music that works to try to unite us! To take worship out of the hands of the few, and bring it to all of us, so that we can pray and sing together. There’s no band up front making loud music that half of us don’t like, and the remaining half simply listen or dance to. There’s no staid organist droning the bars while we sing the songs that our grandparents sang. (Though I enjoy both praise and traditional music myself — I’m just being a devil’s advocate here!) There are liturgies that both old and young can embrace together.

I love Mozart. He pushed the limits. As did most classical composers we know and love today. But we don’t use Mozart’s music the way it was intended for use. People of his time interacted with the musicians, shouted for them to repeat a movement if it was especially daring and incredible… Now we have become afraid to interact with our music, to try new things, to reward innovation.

I challenge every church to ask its banjo players, its accordion and tuba players, violin and oboe players, and so on, to step forth and join in this psalm-like chorus of instruments and voices!

I have always encouraged congregations, my publisher, and everyone else to market my music as something besides ‘just’ bluegrass, and, unfortunately, it wasn’t altogether too successful!…

I would love to have people of faith worship with Mountain Vespers or Light into the World using all varieties of instruments! I think the problem is the label ‘bluegrass.’ The service is about the melodies and the texts for me, not the ’style.’ If I was concerned about ’style,’ I probably wouldn’t have chosen folk. I chose folk so that the most congregations could easily use the service…

I have never asserted that there is a ‘correct’ playing style for my music, which has gotten my music into some fantastically strange, interesting and wonderful locations!…