This is My Song
by Greg Field
When I moved back to New England with my family a couple of years back, it
was in large part because I have a very deep, gut-level sense of place in
living here.
It is that love of land that fuels me. It is not, however, an exclusive
sensibility. That love leads me to cry out when others face injustice within
my community, and drives me to speak out when other people and other lands
are scarred by the devastation of war.
I think it is that sensibility that moves me so when I hear the hymn "This
Is My Song," and why I was so deeply touched by a story told by Voices in
the Wilderness founder Kathy Kelly on her visit to Maine a few months ago.
In the gentle voice and unassuming manner that belie her incredible inner
strength, Kelly told us of her experiences in Iraq as the war drew near and
enveloped Baghdad.
Kelly had the chance to hear a group of Iraqi youth sing an Arabic
translation of this hymn. The music is Finlandia, by Sibelius. A relatively
obscure poet named Lloyd Stone composed the lyrics in the years after the
First World War. It was one of the few recordings left after the Baghdad
School of Folk Music and Ballet was ransacked.
Kelly sat listening to the recording with an Iraqi friend, a former director
of the School. In a twist tinged with irony, it was the song she had asked
the children to learn in a previous trip to Iraq in 2002 after hearing it
sung at memorial services for the victims of the September 11th attack.
The song has always moved me, but never more than when Kelly began to sing
it, recounting for us her experience at the Baghdad School. "This is my
song, O God of all the nations," she sang. . .
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;
But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
O hear my song, O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for their land and for mine.
Sense of place roots me in the here and now. But the realization that such
love of land is transcendent informs everything I do.
Back to Peace Talk Index,
Winter, 2003 - 2004