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​Process Theology Folk Songs

Meet Emily Melcher, minister and singer-songwriter

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Emily Melcher Website

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In solidarity with people
at the edge of life
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A Sermon by Emily Melcher

"You see, for people who live with that “anywhere but here” experience, especially for people whose life circumstances take them to the very edge of what a human being can tolerate, the hope of something better, somewhere beyond here, is a not an empty comfort; it’s a lifesaver.  For a human being who has no safety, or even comfort, the experience — not the thought, but the lived experience – of a transcendent source of love and comfort is not superstition or ignorant foolishness; it’s a lifeline so powerful that to be cut off from it is to be cut off from all that is sustaining and hopeful, from the very strength one needs not only to survive, but to overcome."

-- Emily Melcher from the sermon)

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My Grandmother Lives in Me

An essential teaching in process theology is that our grandmothers live in us, along with our grandfathers, our family and friends, all the circumstances of our past, and for that matter, the whole past actual world.  Whitehead, the philosophical mentor for process theologians, said that the whole purpose of his philosophy was to help people understand how actual entities can be "present in" one another even as they are unique and distinct,  His perspective is mirrored and deepened by the phrase of Thich Nhat Hanh, who speaks of the universe as a vast web of inter-being or inter-becoming.  Whitehead's more abstract way of making the point is to say that past actual entities (the lived experiences of departed grandmothers, for example) are objectively immortal in the present, even as their immediacy has perished, and some of them in wonderfully intimate ways.  Emily's "My Grandmother Lives in Me" makes the same point, musically. ​(Jay McDaniel)

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God as Companion
​to Grieving and Leaving

Even as God is in the world as a healing spirit, helping us reconnect the parts of our lives that are forgotten or neglected, God is also feeling our feelings in an empathic way, sharing in our joys and sufferings. The sufferings that God shares includes those times when we lose someone we love, or lose our own lives, and feel like we are on the precipice of a canyon trying to find our way. We grieve the loss, we fall into our sorrow, and we may wonder if somehow the universe feels our goodbye, our leaving. Can God walk with us on the precipice and, when it is time, allow is to fall in, carrying us in the falling? Process theologians answer "yes." God is, in Whitehead's words, a fellow-sufferer who understands. ​(Jay McDaniel)

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God's Prayer:
May you Grow in Gratitude and Love

For those of us who believe in a God of love, we may well wonder how God feels, from the inside, as God feels our own feelings and seeks our own well-being, like a loving Amma or Abba.  And when we consider the fact that we ourselves are always seeking wholeness, always seeking that reconnection of which Emily sings in "The Whole of Me," we may wonder if, in God's own way, God prays.  After all, God knows that the future is open, that it is not pre-decided, and God hopes that we ourselves will grow into the best selves we can be.  It is not we alone who seek peace, it is God as well.  And sometimes we can join God in the divine prayer.  We can co-pray with God.  Emily Melcher's "Your Gifts" is one way we might imagine that prayer. (Jay McDaniel)

Meet Emily Melcher, Musical Minister

by Jay McDaniel (9/8/2018)

Some people, when they feel things very deeply, need to sing them. Not just sing about the feeling, but sing them. Emily Melcher is among them. She was a student of mine in a class I taught in Claremont, California, in the summer of 2018 on Process Theology and Popular Music.

She is not a music minister but rather a musical minister who writes and sings songs even as she fulfills the many other responsibilities of a minister: giving sermons, visiting the sick, and managing a congregation. She has a powerfully prophetic side to her ministry, as you will hear in her sermon Always a Voice Rises (included on this page) and also a powerfully priestly and pastoral side, as you will hear in the song "The Whole of Me."

As I listen to "The Whole of Me," I cannot help but listen with process ears. Her lyrics - reconnect the parts of me, reconnect the heart of me, reconnect the soul of me, reconnect the whole of me -- speak to me and the harmonies do as well. I, too, seek integration. I, too, want my soul recollected and reconnected. This desire for wholeness is part of our humanity: as essential as our desire to eat and drink and enjoy our short time in life in companionship with others.

Is the universe on our side? Is it friendly? We process theologians say "yes." We believe that the universe carries within it a universal healing spirit who loves us and works with us, in each and every moment, to reconnect the whole of us. This spirit is God, the very Soul of the universe. Imagine that the universe is an evolving embryo within a womb. We are cells in the embryo, say process theologians, and God is the nourishing womb -- the cosmic Life -- in whose very life the cells live and move and have their being.

However, we process thinkers further suggest that we misinterpret this God as a king on a throne or a bully in the sky. We might better call her cosmic healer or the divine weaver. Emily Melcher's "The Whole of Me" reconnects me with the image of divine Weaver.

The good news is that the divine weaver is everywhere present, and beautiful and wonderful, but she cannot do it alone. Yes, the healing power at work in the universe – the Weaver and her weaving -- is powerful and forever working within us and around us to reconnect the dismembered parts of our lives. The parts that have somehow lost their way or been neglected: our capacities for passion, wonder, kindness, courage, imagination, play, justice, and friendship. Indeed, she is at work in our lives helping us reconnect the shadows from which we hide: the aspects of our lives that we project onto others without recognizing them in ourselves. The Weaver is powerful indeed. But she needs our cooperation for the fulfillment of process. Not just our cooperation in times of sorrow and trial, but our cooperation inwardly and outwardly, as a daily habit of co-weaving. A habit of discernment.

Each of us can cooperate with her weaving in our own unique ways, relative to the situations of our lives. The divine weaver is forever adapting to each new situation, offering a lure for feeling, a lure for weaving, for connection and reconnection. We feel these inwardly felt lures as callings within our hearts and minds, quiet and beckoning whispers.

There is a universal calling that we all feel, regardless of who we are. It is a calling to love our neighbors and ourselves. Our neighbors include friends and family, of course, but also the forgotten and the forsaken. Indeed, our neighbors include the more than human world, our kindred spirits in the web of life: the plants, the animals, the hills, the rivers, the trees, the stars. In its own way it is a calling to ministry: that is, some way of living in which we add kindness and beauty to the world and the lives of others even as we seek wholeness ourselves.

But the weaver provides us with specific callings, too, relative to who we are and to our gifts and proclivities. And for some of us, those who love music, the calling may well be to write and sing songs, which themselves become callings. Our hope is that some of the songs we write and sing might function as callings, as invitations, in the lives of others, such that they might find their own unique forms of weaving. We know that no weaver is an island, neither human nor divine. We know that we can connect and reconnect our lives, moment by moment, out of countless influences from our past and present. We know that each person feels the presence, not only of these influences but also of the divine weaver and her spirit. Still we hope that our songs might also be seeds for healing and wholeness, for love and justice-making, for passion and wonder. For connection. We have a special kind of ministry – call it ordained ministry – and it includes among its expressions our own singing and songwriting. Meet Emily Melcher.

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Emily Melcher in her own words

​I am a Unitarian Universalist minister and a singer and songwriter.  I was born and raised in Redlands, CA, where I participated in a youth circus, choirs, and musical theater. I was a high school exchange student in Sweden, and went on to earn both the B.A. and M.A. degrees in Scandinavian Languages and Literature. My translations and renditions of songs by the Swedish troubadour, Evert Taube, have earned acclaim from academics and audiences alike.

Some years ago, I began writing my own songs.  I write from my experiences at the intersection of creativity, psychology and spirituality. For me, singing and songwriting are contemplative and creative practices that foster and inspire wholeness and a deepening connection to the spirit of life and love.  My call to ministry came, and was nourished, in my home congregation, First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin. I earned the Master of Divinity degree at Andover-Newton Theological School in Massachusetts, and was ordained to the UU ministry in 2009. I found my first ministry position, and what was to be my calling for several years, in intentional interim ministry. I have served as interim minister with congregations in Vermont, Connecticut, and most recently, the Olympia, WA UU Congregation.  I am now serving in a contract position at the UU Congregation of Whidbey Island.

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​​I’ve been singing since I was a small child. Singing has given me access to an experience of transcendence, and enabled me to share it with others. It connects me inwardly and with others, and enables me to access and share my deepest longings and my experience of love.

I began writing my own songs when I was in my mid-thirties. I say “writing my own songs,” but it would be more accurate to say that I began welcoming and giving voice to the songs I heard. I was in a period of intense introspection and psychological growth, and listened for what I most needed to hear. Sometimes, in response to my question, “What am I not seeing?”, posed to the universe at the beginning of a long walk, I’d begin to hear words and a melody playing gently in the back of my mind. As I turned my attention toward what I was hearing, and let if flow through my voice and my body, it evolved into the song I needed to hear. I began sharing my own songs, and found they moved others, as well.

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Not Pity but Compassion for Self and Others

Compassion for oneself can be powerfully healing. It is also the starting place that enables us to feel compassion for others, for it is only when we are willing to experience our own feelings that we can truly feel with others. I think this is the essence of Jesus’ commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. For indeed, in order to love others, we must love ourselves.
When we pity another individual, or a group of people, instead of feeling with them, we see ourselves as separate, superior. Pity ensures that we aren’t at risk of being disturbed by their feelings, or our own, including our fears that we might one day find ourselves in their situation. If, instead of feeling sorry for others, we can allow ourselves to feel with them, we have a chance of truly knowing them, of truly being with them. In our interpersonal relationships, and in our relationships with our neighbors — near and far –, compassion enables us to trust the agency of others, and to make common cause with people we’ve imagined are unlike ourselves, partnering with them in bringing about a more compassionate world. Rather than imagining ourselves “helping” others who “need us, poor things!,” we actually allow ourselves to be open to others – allowing their lives and experiences to touch and move us, even as ours touch and move them. (Emily Melcher)

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Does Faith have a Future?

​I don't know if faith will survive our times.  So much violence and rage is inflicted on the world in the name of faith: faith in "America" and "faith in capitalism" and "faith in the uniqueness of  Christianity" and "faith in an almighty, mean-spirited God."   All are false gods.  All are substitutes for the kind of faith that Emily Melcher invites us to embrace.  All are painful not only to the tender soul but also to the divine Soul.  If there is any wisdom in the idea that we ought to avoid idolatries, it is the wisdom that in our time, the most pernicious idolatries are not statues on the ground but rather ideas in the mind: Nationalism, Christianism, Authoritarianism.  I don't know if faith will survive.  What I do know is that, with music such as hers and with people that live simply, humbly, courageously and lovingly, there is hope for faith.  This song speaks to that hope, and gives me hope, too.  (Jay McDaniel)

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