Dean Powery: ‘Take a Song with You on the Journey’
In his final (Duke) Chronicle column for the semester, Chapel Dean Luke Powery relays this advice for students and others approaching major life transitions: “Take a song with you on the journey.”
“That phrase still reverberates in my soul,” he says about the words his father told him twenty-three years ago as he was preparing to move to Switzerland to serve as a pastor. “Yes, I grew up in a musical family. Yes, I was a music major as an undergraduate. Yet, the resonance of that statement goes deeper than those things: Song is food for my soul.”
“There is a certain kind of power in song that is not based on the quality of your singing voice but on the fact that you actually sing,” he writes. ‘As the poet Paul Dunbar put it, ‘I sing my song and all is well.’ Even in the early church, they believed this as is implied in an old adage: ‘He who sings prays twice.’”
“So as we come to the end of this academic year, and as you look toward the summer and beyond, take a song with you on the journey,” he says in concluding. “It is a gift for your soul.”