Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: I’m On My Way

Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

(Sung) “There’s a land that I see where the children are free, and I say it ain’t far to this land from where we are.” Those were the opening lines of the first song on Free to Be … You and Me, an album I received for a very early birthday. I wore a few needles out on that disk of vinyl. Maybe at first I took the words literally. I was only 5 or 6, after all, and maybe I imagined that there was another wondrous land out there somewhere, where the horses and the rivers and the children ran free, and where everyone grew to be his own man or her own woman. But long before I left childhood, I understood that the land the singer could see “bright and clear” was right here within our borders — that nothing lay between the land of my birth and that one except frontiers of the mind and heart.

“I’m on my way” sings of that land too. “I’m on my way to the freedom land. ” It’s a spiritual, which probably means that the “freedom land” is meant to be the North, or heaven, or both. To get to the North or Canada, you had to brave the dogs and the master’s trackers, walk by night, hide by day, and with a lot of luck and maybe some help from abolitionists, arrive at last at freedom. To get to heaven, you had to practice mercy and justice, and trust in God.

The freedom land I imagine when we sing this hymn isn’t another country, or another world. It’s this land right here transformed by freedom. And we get from where we are to that land bright and clear in the same way people who were enslaved did, and people who were denied their rights under Jim Crow did, and people whose lives are chained and burdened by suffering do: through courage, justice, mercy, faith, and the help of others.

It’s quite an individualistic song … and yet it’s not.

When we sing it, we say, “I asked my sister, come and go with me. ” Then we ask our brother. And then we say, “If they say no, I’ll go anyhow. ” A brave and lonely stance. And it does take that kind of determination, sometimes, to walk into the new land. It takes speaking up against unjust laws that almost everyone else seems to think are just fine.

And nothing gives me power to act like witnessing the determination of other people who will not be turned back by their opponents’ hostility or their friends’ indifference. So when I sing these words, I don’t feel lonely. I look around at everyone here, each determined to get to freedom, each bound to go no matter what, and I know that if I can just work up that courage and love of freedom, I won’t have to travel alone.

That meaning is even there in the way the song is structured: call and response, then the last lines splitting and intertwining. One group leads, another follows, then they change places, like bicyclists on a long haul, trading off the leader spot so that everyone will stay strong and they’ll get where they’re going together. When we sing it, let’s do it that way, each just taking whichever part we like, or switching around from verse to verse. No leader, no followers. All companions.

The freedom land isn’t far at all. It can be right here under our feet. We sing it into being by our own celebration and determination.

 

Other Hymn Reflections:

Meanings in Our Music
We Laugh, We Cry
Spirit of Life
The Fire of Commitment
Raghupati
We’ll Build a Land