Sometimes I can’t get it out of my head. I go to sleep with it. Wake up with it. Walk the dog with it. It’s been over a month now.

“We are climbing Jacob’s ladder” seems to be begging for my attention. So this morning I surrender. What will come out on the page is a mystery until it’s written.

I ask myself, Why this song?

This stretch of time has been anxious. Unsettling. I’ve been restless, down, bored, and struggling with my own inner demons and the bigger demons of human madness around the world. Jacob’s Ladder has been with me my whole life, like an old friend who shows up when I need her. Like her cousins Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, there’s something about the tune that brings me comfort, placing me in the good company of the slaves whose faith and hope are timeless though they are long gone.

It’s the melody, the music – the language of the soul – that gets me. But it’s also the words. Words like ‘climbing, ‘higher’, ‘soldier’, ‘cross’, ’sinner’, ‘love’, ‘Jesus’, ‘serve’. Words that have stuck in my throat at different times in my life journey as either highly objectionable or as deeply expressive of what I know and feel to be ‘true’. Jacob’s Ladder feels like a summary of where I’ve been, where I am now, and a strange kind of invitation to resolve the contradictions as i move forward in this precarious time.

So this morning and in the days to come I will have a conversation with Jacob’s Ladder, stopping at each stanza and each phrase to dig deeper into what is crying out in my soul.

“Listen to your life,” wrote Frederick Buechner in Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation. “See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”