Openhearted prayer
When folk singers Suzzy and Maggie Roche began collecting prayers and putting them to music, they had no idea that a national disaster would highlight the poignancy of the songs. Suzzy Roche, whose previous CDs include Songs from an Unmarried Housewife and Mother, Greenwich Village, USA, and Holy Smokes, decided to pursue the prayer project after participating in a forum at Harvard University's Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, in which artists explored issues of race, identity and community. Suzzy asked friends and strangers to share a poem, prayer or meditation that she could put to music. She taped copies to her apartment window and spent time "living with" the prayers, saying each one aloud and then (with sister Maggie) composing music. They recorded 18 of the songs, and named the CD after the address of the building where institute participants met.
The CD includes "New York City," which Suzzy wrote after September 11 for a memorial service at a Brooklyn fire station. It complements the collection of personal prayers by gathering up the individual voices into a communal supplication (with a quote from Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem "Renascence"): "May our voices rise to 'split the sky . . . And let the face of God shine through.' / Can we push the clouds of fear apart? And rest our sadness on Thy heart?"
The CD opens with Ysaye Barnwell of the a cappella group "Sweet Honey in the Rock" singing the traditional spiritual "Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray." Her rich, deep voice seems to plead, not only for the presence of prayer in a difficult time, but for a God who will be available to respond to prayer.
