A-World-of-Susan-Boyles

A World of Susan Boyles

“Everyone was laughing at you. No one is laughing now. That was stunning.” So Newsweek quoted a judge on the TV show Britain’s Got Talent after Susan Boyle knocked the world over with her singing.

Really? Who was everyone? Rather it seems to have been commentators and TV show hosts who affect a cruelty that for some disreputable reason is considered cool, who undoubtedly use skin products most men would have been ashamed to be in the same room with ten years ago, and whose less-than-intellectually oriented heads are carefully coiffed with a 21st century updating of the old British short-back-and-sides.

What were they thinking (if they were thinking) when Susan Boyle stepped onto the Britain’s Got Talent stage? That her voice would match what their eyes – without any contribution from heart, brain or life experience – saw? That it would come out, sort of, in a thin little waver full of fear and pathetic illusion that her sheer desire for a singing voice would endow her with one? How can “everyone” get to be however old they are (maybe 47, like the unlikely Scottish diva) without knowing that churches everywhere are loaded with Susan Boyles –women like Darlene Love, an American gospel singer who became the to-die-for voice of “The Crystals,” one of the most beloved of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound hit-making groups in the Sixties. Everyone would have done better to hold their laughter and instead move back and give the contestant plenty of room as soon as they heard the word “church” associated with her.

But they probably did know and don’t much care about the soaring vocal wattage of church choirs (whose membership requirements don’t include a body-mass index under 19 or noses without bumps). As long as singers who fail to substitute carrot sticks for meals confine themselves to pew and vestry, media know-it-alls are not offended by their existence.

What some have trouble getting their heads around – and this is not unique to them; indeed it has been a widely-suffered mental condition for centuries – is that a woman who fails to conform to their unimaginative conception of beauty should have the capability to publicly leave in the dust those women who do. How could God have given her a voice that rightly belongs in the body of a super model? In His wisdom he may have thought it fitting that Susan Boyle’s voice repose in the body of a woman whose runway experience has been limited to airports. That said, let’s remember that physically unattractive people have no monopoly on goodness. I once saw a beautiful young blonde offer her subway seat to a disabled man. She looked like the old “Breck Girl,” for those readers old enough to remember that.

Openly expressed gay pride, acceptance of baseball caps on old people, and at least a glimpse of a post-racial world are wonderful. But one awaits the day when our enlightenment will also transcend the notion that beauty exists nowhere but the Grand Canyon and in fair-haired young people whose smiles are in debt to orthodontists. What’s so difficult about perceiving the beauty of elderly women who volunteer literacy help to disadvantaged kids? Or of two mentally retarded teenagers whose lives (and maybe even looks) are transformed by finding friendship with each other? Millions of Americans, including the overweight and otherwise plain, give billions of dollars annually to charitable causes -- much of it through churches. Beauty is like air and water: it’s everywhere.

Recently I attended a baptism service in one of the world’s many beauties: the seaside Massachusetts town of Marblehead. The pastor, in his sermon “From Behind Closed Doors,” spoke of Susan Boyle and speculated on the great number of us who have the company, behind closed doors, of our hopes, needs, fears and dreams. Not content with sending us home with an inspiring, food-for-thought sermon, the church then served up a spellbinding performance by a local mezzo-soprano followed by a highly appetizing buffet (see what those of us who sleep in Sundays are missing?). If Susan Boyle’s church is anything like the one in Marblehead, I doubt she’ll be “made over” anytime soon. She will be too busy enjoying everything – and everyone – she undoubtedly already possesses.