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Since beginning the Journey Center Association’s Spiritual Director Formation Program in 2017 and then graduating and starting my own practice as a spiritual director in 2019, my life has been increasingly formed by the contemplative path. It might seem out of character for people who know me personally, because I’m such an extrovert, such a verbal processor, such a classic enneagram 7. I’m always getting obsessed with something else: a new stand up comic, the next live theater production I’m buying tickets for, the most recent season of RuPaul’s Drag Race I’m currently catching up on, a new album or artist. And let’s talk about silence. Get it? Y’all, I am a TALKER. I don’t just live my life, I narrate my life. I am a verbal processor, and I’m pretty sure social media was created for people like me. When Alejandro finally comes to live with me at the end of the month, he’s gonna have to get used to my endless stream-of-consciousness ramblings, poor thing.
All this to say, when people think of contemplatives, they typically imagine people like Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault or Thomas Merton – people who seem centered, grounded, quiet, peaceful, deeply calm. Matt Nightingale is not your stereotypical contemplative.
But contemplative spirituality has been deeply meaningful for me in many ways, especially as I have worked to let go of my fundamentalist evangelical beliefs, and I’ve learned that one doesn’t have to be an introvert or an ascetic to be a contemplative, because as I remind my clients all the time, the contemplative life is simply about noticing, doing our best to open ourselves up to the presence of the God who is always with us, always in us, always surrounding us in love and light. And since founding my nonprofit organization, Common Sanctuary, in 2021, I’ve been so grateful for the many opportunities I’ve had to introduce LGBTQIA+ people to the healing to be found by experiencing God on this contemplative path.
I lead contemplative spirituality groups every Monday night for queer people and our allies that have helped hundreds of people experience God and Christian community in new ways. (Register here or here.) I speak on how contemplative spirituality can be particularly helpful for LGBTQ+ people who have been harmed by the church. (Watch my talk for the 2021 Q Christian Fellowship Conference here.) And as a spiritual director, I have the opportunity to sit with 30+ clients every month. We explore life together in the light of God’s presence, and it’s often a profoundly meaningful experience. (Curious about spiritual direction? Read more here. Email me to set up a free consultation.)
And yesterday I discovered, to my surprise and delight, that I’ve apparently been a contemplative for a lot longer than I realized. I parked my car near the water and some old song lyrics of mine came into my head. “I was walking down by the river. I was contemplating the sky.” Wait… What was that word? “Contemplating.” I wrote that song when I was 25 years old. I wasn’t doing a lot of contemplating back then, at least not in the way I would define that word these days.
Anyway, it got me thinking about this song and about the seeds of contemplative spirituality that were, apparently, planted long ago.
Back in 2005, twenty long years ago now, I released my one and only full-length album. It’s called Still Standing, and you can still stream it on Apple Music, Spotify, and all of the other streaming platforms. This album contains a song called “Always Entertaining Me (The La-La Song),” whose origins go back to 1996 or 1997 and which has had quite an interesting life.
I was working for Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana, directing their traveling music/recruitment group, Sound Investment when I wrote this song. I remember I had the verses and the bridge completed, but I didn’t have a chorus. And I was stuck.
Enter Sarah Jahn. I had fallen in love with her one and only album “Sparkle.” (It remains an amazing album, and I wish she had continued to release music!) I saw her perform at the Grace College student union, and she sang a song that consisted of only wordless vocalizing throughout the chorus. I remembering thinking to myself “Oh… You don’t need words to sing.” And later that week, in my living room with a guitarist from Sound Investment named Jeremiah Olson playing the chorus chords over and over, I came up with the “La La” chorus for “Always Entertaining Me.”
I began to sing the song at Sound Investment concerts, and it was always received well. I even performed it with Jeremiah at Brethren National Youth Conference in 1998.
We ended up recording a hidden track (remember those?) on Sound Investment’s 1998 CD, “This Is the Stuff” with Jeremiah on guitar and me on multiple vocal tracks.
The story gets more interesting here, because unbeknownst to me, local Christian radio station WFRN somehow got ahold of this hidden track and started playing it. By then, my family and I had moved across the country to Lancaster, California, and I was teaching choir, Bible and English at Desert Christian High School and starting my church music ministry career at First Baptist Church of Palmdale. Friends and family started calling me to tell me that my “La La Song” was on the radio in northern Indiana and that it was moving up the charts! Eventually I even got the chance to call in and do a live interview on the morning show. I was a Christian music celebrity for a month or so, and then things faded away.
Eventually we moved to Redwood City, California, and I started my first full-time music ministry job. While there, I was given the opportunity to record my album. “Always Entertaining Me (The La-La Song)” was given a spot on the album with a full band (The legendary 77s were my rhythm section!) and professional production.
It was 2005, the early days of the internet, and I submitted the song to a website called IndieHeaven. They were having a contest where people could vote for their favorite songs, and whichever songs ended up in the Top Ten at the end of the contest would be on a compilation DC and distributed throughout the country. Once again, my song ended up doing well and finding its way to a broader audience.
I played my music live wherever I could, even getting a band together for a father-daughter weekend at Hume Lake in 2007.
Later that year I was contacted by a company in Korea that wanted to license my music for distribution throughout Asia. I signed an agreement and then in 2010 discovered that my “La-La Song” had been used in a pivotal romantic scene in the Korean drama Iris. (Alas, when Iris found its permanent streaming home on Netflix, my song was replaced by a slower, more romantic one.) As of 2010, it seemed that my little song had traveled about as far as it could go.
Isn’t it strange, then, that those lyrics came into my mind yesterday morning? Not only did it cause me to revisit the story of this song, but perhaps more fascinating to me, it made me revisit the lyrics. Because for all of those years, I wasn’t really paying that much attention to the lyrics, and they are all about the contemplative path.
Three decades ago, long before I had any language for these sorts of mystical, contemplative experiences, as a deeply closeted, fervent evangelical, I was writing lyrics like this:
La La La La…
ALWAYS ENTERTAINING ME (THE LA-LA SONG) music and lyrics matt nightingale © 2005 a little nightingale music
I was walking down by the river
I was contemplating the sky
I was thinking about forever and the sweet old by and by
Then I got the funny feeling
That it was nearer than I thought
That if I took another step closer I would see the face of God
La La La La…
And I wondered if I would do it
And I wondered if I would die
And I wondered if I told someone, would they think I was telling a lie?
And I wondered what He would look like
And I wondered: Would I be scared?
And I think that I wondered a little too long ’cause I looked up and He wasn’t there
La La La La…
Oh Holy River, carry me away
Bathe me in Your water on this ordinary day
Open up these blinded eyes, so that I can see
The angels that are always entertaining me
La La La La…
That song is all about experiencing God in the everyday stuff of life, about opening ourselves up to the Holy, about not getting so caught up in the intellectual that we miss the experiential. It’s about noticing, about acknowledging that God is always with us. I practice this stuff every day. I invite clients into these experiences regularly.
I definitely love my full-circle moments. They strengthen my faith and remind me that God has always been with me. I love that 1996 Matt Nightingale was writing about mystical, contemplative experiences with God nearly three decades before his whole life would be dedicated to helping people experience God in these ways. I guess you don’t have to be like Richard Rohr to be a contemplative after all. Apparently it’s possible to be a contemplative and not even know it.
