What is the cost of true connection?
You will be required to
cast aside your yoga mat,
burn your prayer shawl,
break the string of you mala
and let the beads scatter across the floor.
Come,
come with your naked skin.
Come with your rounded belly,
your scarred hands
and textured thighs.
God is not impressed with your vocal intonation.
The Beloved doesn’t care if you sing in tune.
Your imperfections are the sweetest of prayers.
Your devotion is the wine in the goblet from which the Beloved drinks.
And the crack,
the crack in your voice is holy.
You, singing, is not a performance;
It is an offering on the altar of the divine.
© Sabrina Santa Clara, 2020
The story behind the poem
For most of my life I carried so much shame about my voice. Singing made me shrink — I’d make myself small, and all that self-consciousness went straight into my throat as tension, which only made the singing worse. It was a closed loop: ashamed, so I tightened; tight, so I sounded strained; strained, so I felt more ashamed.
What began to loosen it was a kirtan circle I was in when I was living in Las Vegas, led by Joei Belovin — unlike any singing circle I’d ever been in: no shame, all voices, all love, every expression welcome. It was here that I finally started to practice actually singing — not just moving my lips and whisper-singing, but letting my voice out loud enough for others to hear me. Then, just before the pandemic, I sparticipated in a harmonium workshop with Sean Johnson, and that was the straw that broke the shame’s back. This poem simply arrived, channeled through me more than written by me. It said the thing I most needed to hear: that the Beloved isn’t grading my pitch, that my imperfections are the prayer, that the crack in my voice is the holy part, not the flaw. Something in me let go, and never fully clenched again. I keep this poem because it’s the one that changed everything — the moment my voice stopped being a performance I could fail and became an offering I couldn’t.