When I first began to attend Quaker meeting, it was the music in Central Finger Lakes Meeting that kept bringing me back again and again.
Music has sustained me throughout my prison ministry. Going into penitentiaries where everyone looks like you and meeting worship members as they come out of solitary confinement necessitates strength. Raised AME (African Methodist Episcopal) I knew how to manifest strength through song.
I started singing with Peter and Annie Blood-Patterson (co-creators of Rise Up Singing and Rise Again) at Friends General Conference in 1989. In 1991 — as a response to the first Iraq War — I began joining them in their home once a month for a community sing as an artistic response to war. Since then I have led such sing-along sessions in many places, including NYYM’s Summer Sessions.
