CityView Magazine

10 | March /April 2019 O F A I T H "God is within her, she will not fail" BY DR. KIMBERLY HARDY O n most days of the week people experience music as an artistic expression and use it either for entertainment or ambience. However, there are moments when a song speaks to us in a special way – almost as if the songwriter has peered through a window and watched as we either celebrated new love, grieved a loss or faced down self- doubt. In those moments, I believe that music becomes for us a soundtrack of our lives. As we experience a mood or emotion, we gravitate toward a particular genre of music to help draw out the pain or ignite the joy. In the Black Church tradition, music is such a significant part of the worship experience that the choir directors are almost as important as the preachers themselves. e rise and fall of the sermon is punctuated by an increasing crescendo of organ chords, folks in the pews keep the song going even aer the choir is done until the music starts back up, and who can truly catch the Holy Ghost without the fierce beat of the drums and tambourine? From plantations to congregations, truly it has been gospel music, spirituals and hymns that have been among the most significant aspects of the faith lives of African-Americans. Music is no less significant in the lives of other religious traditions. e Muslim call to prayer is done through song and contemporary Christian is as robust a musical genre as pop music. Yet even during biblical times music was vitally important for telling stories and delivering messages of hope, pain and joy as evidenced by the 150 Psalms in the Bible. As I contemplated what message I wanted to share with my fellow sisters of faith for this Women's Issue of CityView, all I could hear in my head was Psalm 46:5: "God is within her, she will not fail." Although that is among my most favorite verses in the Bible, I did not initially realize that I was being drawn to it for this column because I was hearing the message of strength and empowerment through a few other songs I found myself playing on heavy rotation. "Run the World" by Beyoncé and "Scars to Your Beautiful" by Alessia Cara have been my go-to songs for the past several weeks. Yet I never made the connection between these songs and Psalm 45, instead seeing them instead as unrelated. Secular music and the Bible don't go together, right? Beyoncé's girl-power anthem may seem an unlikely source of inspiration for a column about faith but it is actually a song that celebrates the strength and power of women around the world. Everyone from Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist fighting for girls' education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate, to Nancy Pelosi, who now holds the distinction of being both the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives (now for the second time) and the highest- ranking elected woman in United States history. In the song, Beyoncé proclaims that "my persuasion can build a nation" and she honors women as "smart enough to make these millions, strong enough to bear the children, then get back to business." Alessia Cara's song "Scars to Your Beautiful" is about the torture that girls and women subject themselves to – starvation and cosmetic surgery – in the name of trying to be perfect and beautiful because they are not able to see how beautiful they already are, inside and out. Her song tells these women "there's a hope that's waiting for you in the dark, you should know you're beautiful just the way you are, and you don't have to change a thing, the world could change its heart. No scars to your beautiful, we're stars and we're beautiful." As I listened to these songs and started thinking

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