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Last week I saw the amazing documentary, Twenty Feet From Stardom. It’s about  backup singers, focusing mostly on three women who have helped make amazing music while remaining largely unknown. We know their music, like the songs of Merry Clayton, who was one of the key voices behind Phil Spector’s famous Wall of Sound, and the voice paired with Mick Jagger’s on the Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter” which is one of the most electrifying moments in rock and roll history. But for a variety of reasons, we don’t know them, the singers. Some of them despaired of the life on the road and found other work. Some were tricked and abused to keep them under the thumb of the people who control the “star-making machinery behind the popular song.” (Bonus points if you can identify the source of that quote.)

Some of them decided they did not have the temperament or the ambition to be the star, and preferred the backup work that let them have a life. As the singers and some of their famous cohorts discuss the choices they made or didn’t get to make, a narrative thread emerges about how becoming a star, finding solo success, requires some combination of narcissism and ruthlessness that these women did not quite possess.

There is something to that, and yet I wonder if that, too is a misreading of these artists and the process of turning into ourselves (as a great friend of mine puts it.)What my friend is talking about, I think, is what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “selving” the incarnational dance of finding the essence of what we were put on the planet to do or be or express. For some of us, finding that is just as natural as breathing, while for others, it’s a long hard slog. Some of us get told there is no category for who or what our soul cries out to be, and therefore no recognition, no reward. Some of us have to cobble together little bits and pieces of work and family life and volunteer work and side projects and wander in the wilderness for many years before someone else can see the pattern emerge of what we were really about, put a name to it. And having someone else see, and name, who we are and what our gift is can be the validation that makes us realize it really is a gift, and that the world might need it.

The process of selving is messy and painful, it’s kind of like being born. The single-mindedness it takes to peck open one’s shell might look narcissistic from the outside, or ruthless or cruel or ambitious, but from the inside it is about the divine leading, the call, which starts with the call to inhabit our own skin with as much particularity and authenticity as possible.

At one point in the film, Merry Clayton asks a question, something like, “If you have a gift, aren’t you really obligated to give it?” I would say we are; it’s a spiritual imperative. And the needful thing is to give, to announce our selving and add our voice to the song. Maybe only God sees the little tributaries, the branching off that kept a river from reaching the sea, and yet which brought water to a dry and thirsty place.

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Photo credit: copyright Adam Greig,  Eyjafjardarsysla, Iceland.