Honesty does strange things to people. Apart from being wonderfully cathartic, honesty is contagious. When you sit across from another person and share a moment of honesty that transcends superficial niceties you can’t help but share back. It’s as terrifying as it is transformative.

Some of us may have experienced this type of honesty with a family member, close friend or partner, but who has ever experienced it with a stranger? How about with an entire group of strangers? Yeah, it’s as intense as it sounds. And it’s how I spent the first part of this week – with people who began as strangers and became my friends. More than that, who had enough courage to be honest and to demand nothing short of complete sincerity from me.

It’s terribly difficult to articulate the overall feeling of optimism and peace I took away from my time with fellow State of Formation contributors. So, in an effort to do justice to my experiences I thought I would share a couple of them with you.

Interestingly enough, both of these experiences revolved around music. Being the daughter and spouse of musicians I should not be surprised, but I often am, at the powerful emotional response I have to music. Sharing those moments with others always intensifies the experience for me and before I realize it I am more fully within myself, yet wholly outside my own mind, than at any other time.

As we all sat down to share our stories with one another [we were asked to bring a poem, selection of scripture, piece of art, song, etc. – some text that was important to us – to share] I remember feeling a little exposed and wondering if anyone else shared my sentiment. I think she did because the first in our small group to volunteer asked if we could gather in a more private space so she could share a song with us.

As we stepped into the room I had no idea what to expect but I immediately admired her courage because although I love to sing, I have only done so in public twice and they were terrifying experiences for me. I have certainly never sung a deeply meaningful song in the intimate presence of two strangers. She began by explaining the significance of the song – it was the first one she ever learned as a child and she performed it for her small rural church. She went further and told us that when she moved away from her family to New York she ached with homesickness and that this childhood song – the only one she actually remembered from that early in her life – helped her cope with and express that deep loneliness.

At this point, even before she began singing, I felt a deep connection to her. I moved to Chicago in September to begin graduate work at the University of Chicago and have struggled with that homesickness and longing to be near my family, with whom I am very, very close. In another twist, my spouse – who is genuinely the other half of my mind, soul and being – had to return to my home state of Oklahoma in a completely amazing and selfless effort to financially support my work. So, as she told us how much this song meant to her and why, I felt a powerful personal connection to her story.

Then she sang. And it wasn’t simply the beautiful and melancholy lilt of her voice that reminded me so much of Irish folk music and bluegrass, but also the emotion in every note she sang that had me holding back tears. The words spoke of a feeling of displacement; of knowing that your real home is somewhere else and the deep sense of longing that creates. The words had a theological significance that doesn’t hold true for me – as she said, the song in reality speaks of a heavenly home – but it was also wholly irrelevant to my experience. I didn’t connect to the song, I connected to her through the song. In that moment it didn’t matter at all that she was Christian and I an atheist, that we lead completely different lives and see the world in a very different way – we were connected in a single shared experience.

The next day we all, a larger group of around 20 people, sat in the same room and were led in a different kind of song. This song had no lyrics, and its significance is inherently communal – it was a lyric-less melody with a history in the Hasidic community and is often used in meditative prayer. Again, its history had no bearing on my participation – or anyone else’s – in it. It was a moment of pure shared experience. Each note that we sang out in unison broke down a barrier of compartmentalization and brought us together as a community.

Some of us in that room likely felt closer to the Divine in that act of communal singing. Others were probably brought to a deeper level of introspection. As for me…I felt deeply connected to these people who were in many ways complete strangers [I’d only known them for a day] but were more truly long lost friends and companions on my journey of formation.

This stranded poet felt at home among fellow poets whose voices converged and rang out in one moment of pure harmony, before diverging again with a few added notes that will forever change our individual melodies.

We transformed Me.