Some time ago I got my first taste of Debra Bonner’s Unity Gospel Choir. And craving another taste, I stopped by the Genesis Group fireside last Sunday, where the choir was setting the tone for the evening.
The Genesis Group, according to its publications, “encourages and supports Black Latter-day Saints, their families and their friends in their discipleship.”
The monthly fireside is a big part of that.
And music is always a big part of the fireside.
What I like about the Unity Gospel Choir is how random it looks, but how unified it sounds. Most of the singers are African American, like the director, but a half-dozen white faces can be found scattered among them. And Debra Bonner tells me the diversity goes way beyond race and religion. She says the choir has people who’ve dealt with drug problems or abuse problems. One singer struggles with homelessness.
But when they sing, they blend. Not only in sound, but in soul.
Listening to the choir, I remembered the time, years ago, when Moses Hogan came to Salt Lake City to lead the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square in a recording of spirituals. I asked him at the time if he could get the right sound out of so many stoic, western, white souls.
“The key,” he told me, “is getting in touch with the words. You have to find the depth and substance in the spiritual.”
He and the Tabernacle Choir did just that. “An American Heritage of Spirituals” remains my favorite Tabernacle Choir CD. And the song “Lord, I Want to Be a Christian,” sung under the guiding hand of Hogan, still brings goosebumps.
Hogan died of a brain tumor not long after working with the choir. But his contribution to religious unity lives on.
And with that in mind, after the Genesis Group fireside, I asked choir director Debra Bonner some of the same questions I’d asked Hogan 25 years before.
She had a bit of a different take.
Instead of talking about “getting in touch with the words” she spoke of getting in touch with deity.
“We’re all human beings with human voices,” she told me. “My job is to train those voices.”
She says when a person sings about Jesus they need to get to know him personally.
“You need to express that love,” she said. “That kind of music can change a life.”
Over the past few days I’ve sifted over her words several times. And I think there’s an even larger lesson to be found in her thoughts, as well as in the thoughts of Moses Hogan.
It’s too easy for all of us, I think, to get caught up in the mechanics of things. To worry about “hitting the right notes” and making the right entrances. To fret about proper decorum and proper procedure.
Sometimes, in our religions, we get so focused on the details of a program we miss the human connections. We miss the heart of it all.
Programs don’t bring us together. Personal relationships do — our relationships with each other, and with deity.
My friend David Rowe, a Protestant pastor, used to tell me, “I was saved by a person, not an institution.”
In other words, it’s not about rules and protocol, it’s about the relationships.
The people who sang for Moses Hogan, and who now sing for Debra Bonner, have to learn that lesson early.
For as Sister Bonner says, it’s a lesson that can change a life.
Email: jerjohn@deseretnews.com