By: MICHELLE BOORSTEIN, The Washington Post
Kirtan
Krista "Gita" Zember plays the harmonium and sings at Lil Omm Yoga in Washington. Her husband, Christopher Zember, plays drums. (Washington Post photo)
WASHINGTON - Beth Swick was a 40-year-old atheist with warm childhood memories of singing in the church choir when she found herself drawn by a one-word event notice taped to a door: "Chanting." Inside, she found something called a kirtan, or group devotional music.
That experience 12 years ago - joining a call-and-response song in the unfamiliar holy language of Sanskrit with a group of strangers and a beautifully voiced leader - blew the doors of nonbelief off the disaffected Presbyterian.
For decades, Swick had thought that she wasn't religious unless she identified with "some man-God off in some alternate universe in the sky somewhere."
Yet in that room, enveloped by the rich music and the group repetition of a single sacred phrase (although at the time indecipherable to her), Swick felt powerfully connected to something divine.
She was soaring.
She was praying.
"It was an expression of a feeling there wasn't room for in my life at the time, some of those feelings of praise. Where does the word "praise" fit into an atheist's life?" said Swick, a project manager for architecture and design firms in Maryland's Montgomery County who no longer considers herself an atheist.
After a few years of seeing kirtans only sporadically in the Washington area, Swick launched a monthly one in 2009...
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