Hers has not been an easy journey. There were many twists and counterturns. She hung out with folk musicians in Central Park, learned to play the guitar and sing in the oral tradition, lived on the edge (trying out psychedelic drugs), joined the Guitar Study Center, practiced yoga, became a school teacher, lived through failed relationships, and finally found a measure of harmony when her search for spiritual meaning and her music came together.
As singer-song writer, Kessler has four collections of songs: Another Day of Loving, Leap of Faith, No Solid Ground, and Bare Bones—which use images and stories from life. But her forthcoming disk—which “has devotional chanting inspired by Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Arabic chants from many different faiths and cultural traditions”—brings together the folk singer and ordained minister.
As in the case of most artists, the fire of her creativity comes from the crucible of life. Her best songs are infused with her mystical yearning to reach God, who is our home — from whence we came, and whither we shall return. This yearning for the divine gives her singing voice a resonance that is all her own.
The lyrics offer no certainties; they express a longing to find transcendence above and beyond a quotidian existence.
All her life, Kessler has felt the gaping dark center in life. An artist’s work, if it is any good, comes out of a perceived incompleteness.
Kessler was born in New York to a non-observant Jewish family, where no one had siblings. Each was an only child born to parents, similarly raised with no sense of an extended family. Added to that, there was no talk of religion. Jody was gnawed by a hunger for “a community, a tribe, a tradition.”
At folk venues, and at Saturday concerts in different churches and spiritual centers, where she leads the service as a guest minister, audiences find a connection to the yearning in her voice.
Her song titled “The Golden Ring,” from the CD No Solid Ground, expresses her lifelong search. The song tells it simply: Her grandfather took her to a carousel when she was 6, and while she was going round and round, he said, “Jody, look up, and each time your horse comes round to this spot, reach your arms out, stretch, and try to get a hold of the golden ring.” If she were to reach the ring, she would earn a free ride. She tried but could not catch the shining ring. The song goes on to say, “So close and yet so far.”
The ring that she tried to reach is for Jody emblematical of her life’s search. It stands for the wedding ring and the mystical oneness with God. “A thin veil,” she says, “keeps me separate from God.”
However “a moment of stillness brings a glimmer of the truth that I have always held the golden ring. So there’s a sense of knowing that comes through: Underneath all that searching and yearning, the ‘golden ring’ of God’s loving presence has been with me all along. What my life is about now is remembering the truth, and helping others remember that as well.”
