This week’s concert is a celebration and co-production with our long standing venue the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. The event is both a concert and a party, officially launching the church’s newest initiative the Community Gardens and Urban Farm.

While the Resonance Collective is not a religious organization, our mission is the opposite side of the same coin with First Church. The Resonance Collective is an arts organization exploring how we define sacred and spiritual music. First Church is a spiritual organization with a major focus on the arts. Both, however, see the arts as a vehicle for accessing the sublime, connecting to one another, and doing good in the world.

We know the line between what is art and what is sacred is already very thin, for some of us perhaps non-existent. If you crumple a piece of paper to use as a fire starter, for example, there’s no problem. If, however, you take some of that same paper, cover it in ink, and bind it together, suddenly you’re burning a book - an act of sacrilege. Declaring something to be art raises its status, making it precious, worth considering, and treating with reverence.

Walking into a temple or a concert hall is nearly the same experience, one of respect, requiring specific decorum, a way to dress, speaking in hushed tones, a certain expectation of personal uplift, or maybe even transformation. Similarly, the experience of prayer or meditation and that of attentive listening are not so dissimilar, they are both ways of opening the aperture, expanding our hearts and minds, and raising consciousness. Making this connection between art and the sacred is why the Resonance Collective exists, and why the arts infuse nearly every aspect of the religious services at First Church.

And now we’ve added this Community Gardens and Urban Farm into the mix, another example of sacred elevation, turning dirt into soil and a collection of plants into a garden. Since the inception of the Community Gardens and Urban Farm we have been making connections between this new initiative and the music program at FCCLA, and while it might not seem as obvious a connection at first, there is a spiritual logic that binds these activities together.

All three of these things, the arts, spiritual practice, and organic regenerative gardening, have the potential to connect us with vastness. We connect to the vastness of mystery through prayer, the vastness of nature through physically working within earth’s microorganisms, and the intangible vastness within and between us through singing together.

These are more than just activities for personal development. Like any complete spiritual practice, these programs are also about engaging with the world beyond ourselves as individuals and embracing the interconnection and interdependence that exists between all living things: plants, animals, the earth itself, and one another. There’s a name for the work we do to unveil the inherent value in each of us and move towards a community of mutual belonging: we call it social justice.

The Community Gardens and Urban Farm isn’t just about growing things, it’s about providing food for those in need, and empowering their sense of independence and agency. The act of choral singing, too, is a vehicle for us to directly experience and practice an understanding of our larger corporate identity. The garden’s are a way of taking care of one another as a large community in the same way we support and lift one another up through song. In both instances, it is not ‘the work’ that is the primary focus, it is people. Feeding, regenerating, and nourishing body, soul, and soil.

Tonight’s concert is an invitation for you to participate in all of the above. Our hope is that both the music and garden celebration to follow will bring a feeling of uplift and connectedness, and that you are left inspired to bring the same to others in our ever expanding, beloved community.