4/8/2025
Psalm 33:3
There’s a line from Randy Travis’ “Forever and Ever, Amen” that always gets me. It’s in the chorus, where Travis playfully tells his girl that he will love her:
“As long as old men sit and talk about the weather. As long as old women sit and talk about old men.”
Delivered by the molasses-slow candy-sweet carousel of Travis’ voice, the line has a homespun hypnotic charm. It’s so simple and earnest. It encapsulates why I like Randy Travis (and why, long before my return to church, I put “Three Wooden Crosses” on repeat more times than I care to admit.) It paints a specific image.
I’m immediately flung out of the song and its charming folksiness and I’m sitting with a circle of gossiping women. I am holding a pale pink teacup and listening patiently as my friend tells me about her no-good husband of fifty years. It’s such a pleasant daydream I can’t help but smile.
And then I can’t help but think of the eternal talk of my own people. Trans people. What do we gather and gossip about? Lately, perhaps it’s the thundering arrival of Spring, but everyone in my life seems to be starting or joining a band. Virgil has recommitted himself to the bass. Emily is talking about starting a noise project with her friend. V is more seriously pursuing DJing. June is releasing more songs despite a looming deadline for her one-woman show. After a long hiatus from writing poetry, I find myself back and reinvigorated going into National Poetry Writing Month. Whenever I perform lately, the call to add music behind my words continues to swell. We want, it seems, to be making noise right now. More than ever.
For Lent this year I’ve been reading the Psalms every night as part of my penance. The Psalms are reportedly the prayers of Christ as well as the lamentations of King David and the exiled Israelites. It’s been rewarding to root myself in the words of my Savior as I travel with Him in the desert. The lion’s share of the Psalms are attributed to David after he was exiled from Israel by Saul. Despite being a warrior, redeemer, and anointed King, David was first discovered playing his harp for his flock. He is a musician, a poet, and when he is at his lowest, he sings to God.
In Mike Flanagan’s Catholic-soaked supernatural horror miniseries Midnight Mass, a priest on Ash Wednesday offers a sermon:
“Do you know what Psalms are? They’re songs, from the Greek psalmoi. It means music. Songs of prayer. Songs of praise. That’s who we are. That’s who we must be. That’s what it means to have faith. That in the darkness, in the worst of it, in the absence of light and hope, we sing.”
King David sang to the ends of his enemies, to his own rescue, to his own reunion with the full favor of God. It mirrors the other context for the Psalms: the Israelites’ lamentations in the wake of the destruction of their temple by the armies of Babylon. A cursory walk through the Psalms becomes a thicket of tears and despair, of abandonment and longing. I can’t help but feel the heartbeat of my trans kin in these words. We sing. We all want to sing right now.
We want to reverse the fall of Jericho and build up a walled city of sound, mortared by our tears in exile. We want safety and so we sing for it. Lent is a time for community and much as it is for isolation. My Ash Wednesday began with a text from my girlfriend. A screenshot from Tumblr of someone answering the question “Thoughts on Lent?”:
God said he was going out to the desert for a few weeks and I’d hate for him to go alone.
And isn’t that it? Isn’t that what we’re all hoping to do with our noise?
In the documentary Blackfish, a trainer recounts how the park’s executives decided to separate a whale calf from its mother. When the calf was finally removed, the normally quiet whale mother isolated itself to a corner of its pool and cried endlessly, howling in ways the trainers had never heard before. When research scientists came to analyze the cries, they determined that the new cries were specifically long distance cries. The whale was trying to reach beyond its own reality to its calf.
Every noise I make now as an artist feels like a long distance cry. To God, to reason, to the distant clouded kingdom in which my existence is not a talking point. I am reaching out, loudly, to crack the mirrored glass of the world and touch something brighter than myself. I want to touch to play the secret chords and feel the favor of God. I want to find the quiet in my noise that I find in prayer.
The other part of my penance is the anachronistic practice of self-flagellation. I whip myself, one lash for each verse of the night’s psalm. On some days this means five or six lashes. On other days it can mean fifty. I never let myself read ahead. I accept each day’s pain as it comes. Again this is about connection. Connection to the suffering of Christ. Connection to the suffering of my people. Connection to my body as those in power seek to threaten it. I whip myself to offer God my flesh, a prayer of thanksgiving for the moment when I heard His voice. When He told me the truth of my body. When He told me my name. For the truth of my flesh, I offer my flesh. For the truth of my name, I pray in the name of His son.
As my trans friends and lovers tell me about their bands, their practices and projects, I hear the new hymns of my people. As I look at the pictures of my welted back, I feel the calligraphic prayers of His will on my skin. I listen to their new songs. I tell my friends about their bands, share Spotify links and Bandcamps. I look up keyboards for sale online and wonder if today is the day.
I think of David in Psalm 33:3 telling us:
Sing unto him a new song; play skilfully with a loud noise.
More than anything, when I hear the music of my people I turn it up. I scream. I think of the song “Punk” by The Duende Project:
When they looked down on you
and they said in one faint, sweet voice.
“Hey you kids that shit’s too loud!”
And you screamed right backNO
SUCH
THING.
I am loud tonight. I am a king with a harp. I am a walled city. I am a desert of faint music. When my Savior was in the desert and there was no sound but the devil. I bet He sang. I bet He refused to be quiet. I bet to Him, there was no such thing.
When you are naked in the desert, the only thing you carry is your voice.
In the right kind of quiet it can carry for miles.
If you’re loud enough.
Yours with an open mouth
-B
