During my recent interview with singer-songwriter Tori Harris about her new album “Sweet Dolor,” the 25-year-old conveyed a good-humored, infectiously joyful personality that doesn’t suggest she could ever have a stony heart. And in the Scrooge-like sense of the term that I was thinking of, she definitely doesn’t. Yet Harris admitted that she has struggled with opening her heart to God’s will in her life - and that her struggle led to the autobiographical song “Hearts Once Stone,” which integrates poetic, theologically-rich lyrics with the musical influences of Mumford and Sons and Phillip Phillips.
Harris recalled that before she decided to quit her “safe job and radically pursue music,” she went to an Adoration Chapel to pray for guidance. She said, “I’d ask myself in prayer, ‘Tori, what are your heart’s deepest desires?’ I couldn’t think of a single answer of what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. That was an instance where my heart was stony and I was unable to peer into it, and to know what God was placing on it. So I was crying in the Adoration Chapel and I said, ‘Jesus, please, in Your tender mercy, unveil a piece of my own heart to me so that I know what Your will for my life is.’”
Jesus responded to that humble petition, moving Harris toward pursuing a music career. A few months later, she was on a flight reading a poem by Sister Genevieve Glen, OSB, in Magnificat, which included the line “Hearts once stone, but now made flesh.” She realized that her own heart had been transformed, so she used that refrain in her song.
Transforming hearts is a part of Harris’s larger musical mission as well, especially when it comes to young people. She relishes her encounters with teens and the way they respond to her music both in-person at conferences and performances - and in emails and Facebook posts. She’s had a few experiences when a girl came up to her after an event and said, “I was here for a guy because I thought he was cute, but I experienced something here that was real and powerful and I want to know more of what that is.”
In an age when more and more young people describe themselves as “nones,” as following no particular religion, getting them interested in Christianity is vital. For Harris, there’s one common denominator: “What’s universal to all of them is the desire to be accepted and feel loved. When they have those two things, then they desire to search for what is true and what is right and what is wrong when it comes to their faith and when it comes to God.”
Harris realizes, though, that all she can do is plant seeds and leave it up to God to grow them over time.
She said, “My mission as a musician is not directly to change hearts or souls because that’s impossible; only the Holy Spirit can do that. My mission as a musician is to cooperate and participate with the Holy Spirit, to facilitate an openness and receptivity to the Holy Spirit…My hope for the people who listen to ‘Sweet Dolor’ is that they pray - and that they get really serious with God and ask, ‘Lord, why did You make me? Why am I here? Reveal to me the desires of my heart, how You want me to serve the Kingdom.’ And my prayer is that they be filled with the courage and the conviction to recklessly step into whatever that is.”
(This essay is a recent “Light One Candle” column, written by Tony Rossi, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment