The Energy in the Room

Having not been feeling all that well these past few days — no, it wasn’t viral, and certainly not that one — I thought I would re-post, here, a comment of mine in another blog, on 3/3/23, that I managed to squeak out during that time in spite of going on to sleep for most of the rest of two days. I recommend reading the original post and watching the videos first (2 videos, three links) to understand the context. It is short, as these things go.

In my sleepy stupor I did not make any mention of the song that is the subject of the videos. It is a familiar one to me, and has been playing in my head ever since. I can’t remember if my previous choir performed it. I especially like the Francis cover. These are great choices for the subject at hand.

Fighting the spiritual battle on the spiritual plane

That "energy in the room" feeling is something I first experienced in the mid-1980s, as a seeking, confused 34-year-old attending one of the "Tent Meeting" conferences hosted by the Tarrytown Group, in Tarrytown, NY. The group, founded by Margaret Mead and Robert Schwartz, held these meetings in a big tent on the grounds of their Tarrytown Conference Center in New York state. I think I might have attended three of them altogether.

I found one surviving article about it here, written a few years before I first ventured there: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/31/nyregion/tarrytown-center-expanding-its-scope.html. There was a second article that turned up in a search result but then vanished when I clicked on it. :-)

My memories of that time have faded, but I can remember a few of the speakers' names. Norman Lear, Joseph Campbell, and Barbara Marx Hubbard (who was a candidate for US president at the time) come to mind. The conferences each had a theme relating to what to do about the world, which was quite a mess even then.

A feature of the tent meetings was an evening get-together in a basement bar there on the grounds, where the conference speakers and attendees mingled together. I was extremely shy back then, and I never did actually walk up and talk with any of the speakers, but at the end of one conference I shared a porch with Joseph Campbell, under an awning (it was raining), waiting for our buses to take us back to the airport in NYC. We talked about the weather.

But oh, the feeling of energy in that tent! It gave me hope in a time of life when I had rejected my religious upbringing and was looking for something else more real to pursue. I had never experienced anything approaching that feeling before.

Jumping forward 36 years or so -- half a lifetime -- to this morning, before reading this post, I read an essay recently posted on a different blog by someone else engaged in analyzing the globalist nightmare in which we find ourselves. He cast a different light on some of the people I so admired back then. In particular, he took a close look at Barbara Marx Hubbard, the former presidential candidate, exposing a side that I never imagined, and connecting her with other people whose work I encountered and valued later on. Some of the other readers here may have seen this post as well.

I am in no way still attached to the people I was listening to so many years ago, and I am not shocked to learn that some of them may have been involved in advancing the earlier stages of the global conspiracy. I was severely off course at the time, and leaning rather hard to the left. But this does highlight for me that the "energy in the room" arises from the others present of like mind, and not necessarily from the speakers and leaders and their sometimes-hidden agendas. I therefore urge caution.

I have returned to my religious roots, although with major adjustments. Having experimented with a variety of different spiritual paths, God is now (again) at the center of my life and my walk is with Jesus. It is a personal relationship that has no intermediary. Specifically, it does not involve a church or denomination. I do belong to a church, a conservative Presbyterian one, and I participate and volunteer there. I agree with most of but not everything they teach, and that is mutually OK. We agree about the "essentials". As for Reformed theology, maybe not as much.

One of the ways I participate with my church is as a choir member. I'm not a particularly good singer, but I know the technical side and, for church choirs, it doesn't matter as much. I took private lessons for a few years at first, and that helps. I have been in choirs on and off for the past 30 years -- 21 seasons -- across the six churches I have belonged to as an adult. Much of the music has been "classic", but I've done contemporary as well. I'm a "classic" person myself.

Choral music, and well-written choral anthems in particular, stimulate an "energy in the room" that can be intense but that is also controlled. The music points to truth. It is a different feeling being in the choir, that is hard to describe, but I think we tend to lose ourselves for those few minutes in what we are doing, and the response afterward can be surprising to us. I can't become too emotionally involved or I won't be able to continue to sing!

This walk, this Way, is my only defense against the ways of this world. It is not simple, and it is not convenient. It does not guarantee that nothing terrible will happen to me in this life. That is not what it is about, nor is it about "gaining a reward in heaven". It is about committing to guided change, and sharing truth with others, as I am able, sometimes making corrections as I learn new things and am myself corrected. There is a promise in it of a future free of the present evils, but the details are largely unknown.

I see more and worse trouble ahead in this world, and I don't think I need to go into details about that with the readers here. We all see what is coming, and would like to stop it. Many are convinced that it can be stopped, and if you feel like that and see where you can help, I am not here to stand in your way. Go for it. Stop it.

If, however, the present global menace is somehow stopped, we will still be living as broken people in a broken world, repeating the same errors again and again. We will still have no way to mend the brokenness. The various spiritual paths offer their solutions to this problem, but most of the solutions depend upon self-effort to work, and I for one do not see that that has ever worked.

An effective solution will recognize that we didn't just somehow accidentally come into existence, that we were engineered and created, that there is a problem -- our nature -- to be overcome, and that the Creator is still here, working with those that accept that they are not such hot stuff and are willing to humble themselves, forsake worldly things, learn and apply what there is to be learned, overcome not of their own means, and share what they have experienced with others.

I know of no other way. Every human effort to solve the problem that is us fails. But help is available.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."

Related: Ask, Seek, Knock.