Interview: Heather Choate Davis
Lutheran Forum interviewed artist, liturgist, musician, theologian, writer—and all around creative—Heather Choate Davis. In this conversation we discuss Heather’s background, inspiration for writing projects, her recent musical endeavors, and her hope for the future of the church. Learn more about Heather at her website: https://heatherchoatedavis.com/about/
This interview has been edited and condensed for publishing.
LUTHERAN FORUM: Today we are with Heather Choate Davis from Los Angeles, California. Heather is an author, liturgist, musician, and theologian who often lends her voice for the building up of others, including others in the church. Heather, we are so happy to have you with us.
HEATHER CHOATE DAVIS: Thank you so much.
LF: Heather, we wanted to talk to you because you are involved in so many helpful areas in the life of the church through your writing. You write articles and books, you write words that are then put to music, and you share words in communal settings of the church as a liturgist and speaker. But the first question I want to ask you is who are you? Who is Heather Choate Davis?
HCD: That is such a great question because a lot of the stuff I'm writing right now is identity stuff. I was called to faith at the age of thirty-three and up until then, although I had been baptized as an infant, I was pretty much a secular, hip, urban agnostic. I was working in creative fields in LA, and that’s where my identity was grounded. To be honest I still very much consider myself at home in that community. But in the middle of my secular creative career my son needed a place to go to school and we decided to put him in the little Lutheran school down the street. We didn’t do this for the religious education, but because we desired a safe place for him. And although we weren’t particularly religious we thought, what harm could a few coloring projects of David and Goliath do?
And then within five weeks of us being there our infant daughter—she was then seven months old— had a seizure that revealed a brain tumor, which led to a diagnosis and surgery. During that time we didn't know if she would make it. That's when Christ called me to himself and it was a very profound conversion experience. And so I went from deeply secular to deeply all in on the faith. I didn't know much of anything, but I did know I now belonged to Jesus.
LF: You've written a memoir about that time in your life. Tell us about that and how it opened up Heather the writer.
HCD: That was how I started writing books. My early career was advertising, and then I wrote screenplays, and that's what I was doing up until my daughter’s illness. After everything happened, I got out of the hospital and I set out to write the experience down because I thought what just transpired was white hot, and it changed my life. But I didn't think I was writing a book. And I really didn't even know I was setting out to write about spiritual thing, I just thought I was going to get the raw experience down.
The whole book was written within three months of getting out of the hospital while I was administering serious anti-convalescent medication to my daughter every day. I would block out a few hours each day to sit down and write what I think is documenting all the medical stuff and get the details while they're fresh. And the very first thing that comes out when I sit down to write is, “When I was little I loved to fly.” And one of the things that stayed in the book is the idea of having the fearlessness of a child that tends to disappear when you realize you’re mortal after all. Something switches, and its based in fear and trust.
And then the rest of the book just flowed. I hadn't written books before and nine months later I sold it to Bantam Publishing. And that was like my first book. And I was like—“Oh, okay, I guess I write books now.” But that one stands out to me because I wrote that story—I wrote my story—it's a conversion memoir. And believe it or not, it is the ultimate Lutheran story, which is why now in the last three years I've probably been to ten different Lutheran mission conferences and pastors conferences where they've asked me to read from that book. I think my story has struck a particular chord because Lutherans can be so insulated and not know what conversion sounds like in the minds of somebody who wasn't raised in the faith.
LF: So you're going through something in real time. And it turns out that you're not only experiencing something, but articulating something that echoes Lutheran theology.
HCD: This experience echoes the sounds of what it’s like inside the mind, heart, and spirit of someone who is not a believer in the modern age—because I was there. And I think Lutherans are recognizing that they don't know what that voice sounds like. For the most part Lutherans are raised in a multi-generational setting where they go to Lutheran schools, they marry a Lutheran who they met at a Lutheran college, and they’re realizing they don’t know the world outside of that. The Lutheran leaders I’ve gotten to know these past several years are the ones who are willing to do a little homework—and I guess I'm their homework.
LF: What do you mean when you say you became someone’s homework?
HCD: I think folks turn to me because they can hear the inner monologue of a person wrestling with faith in a time of crisis, but then also, in my later theological works—Man Turned In, Elijah & the SAT, Loaded Words, Happy are Those, Sola!—I translate what is dear to Lutherans about our beautiful orthodox theology into language that biblically illiterate, and religiously disinclined people can hear—and find compelling. That's my gift. And I can do it in a lot of different ways.
My first career was in advertising. I talked my way into a job at eighteen and just dropped out of school. I'd gone to college at seventeen, dropped out by eighteen, and was working in advertising during a Mad Men-like era. And the thing that's so great about advertising, for all the things people can say that’s wrong about it, is it trains you to be a quick study on the field you’re advertising. Whatever it is you’re working on you become an expert—finances, fried chicken, feminism—whatever. You learn to take ideas that other people have and bring them to the masses. I believe my experience in advertising prepared me to study, understand, and communicate deep theology in an understandable way.
When I made this switch I had a very clear understanding that I was now going to serve Christ, specifically with an eye towards people who are not raised in the church—or raised in the church and ran from it. Within those first four years I had this book come out, I recreated a public mural installed on the front of our church called “Jesus Rollerskating with Friends in Venice Beach,” and then I created an original arts-based liturgy called, “The Renaissance Service,” which is one of the greatest things I've ever had the opportunity to create. We had non-church going people coming from hours away just to be in these spaces. It became clear to me that a way I could serve Christ was to take the elements of the faith and put them together to reach those who I perceived were not being reached—especially in the Lutheran circles I now found myself in.
LF: Along those lines, you've written a systematic theology on sin—in dialogue with a modern person’s understanding of sin—Man Turned In On Himself. How did that project come about?
HCD: I was in a little Bible study with a new vicar at our church. This was before I even knew I was going to do my Masters in Theology. During one of our bible study sessions the vicar just dropped in this gorgeous Latin phrase—homo incurvatus in se—I hadn’t heard that before and I felt like the room was torn open when he said it. I jumped and said, “Say that again! What is that?”
And he said it was a mantra which meant, “Man turned in on himself.” And I was like, that is how you explain sin to the twenty-first century. But it wasn’t just that I was impressed by the Latin or something—it was that I could see the mantra—it was so visceral. I filed that image away in my brain and when I started my masters a year and a half later they asked me what I wanted to write my thesis on and I knew I was going to write about this idea.
My research brought me so much joy because it opened up this whole world of understanding. Everyone was crediting Augustine for the image but his curved imagery was about something else and it was Luther who gives us the image of humans being turned in on themselves as a picture of sin. Luther is the one who really deserves the credit for giving us this image that communicates well in the twenty-first century. Modern ears are sensitive to the distinction between selfish and selfless—and in this image it’s all there. Sin is selfishness turned away from God and neighbor. That understanding resonates with people, and it happens to be true.
LF: Another way you communicate is through music, but you’re not a musician by trade like you are a writer, where does that come from?
HCD: It was not intentional at all. Like none of this stuff is [intentional], it's always Spirit-led. Looking back I've always had a very high sensitivity to music—my mother was a very gifted pianist but she never played in our house, even though she was on the radio at nine years old playing classical music. The groundwork for all of this was put in place.
Due to my experience growing up I understood the power of music very early on. One of the key “heart openers” in my early conversion was hearing a chant refrain from Taize. I started listening to Taize—this deep, contemplative music—and then I started going to a monastery. All this is happening when I first come to faith. The Gregorian chants were always in my head, but I don't sing—I don't have a voice—and I never played an instrument either. About six weeks after coming home from the hospital with my daughter, I was invited to a retreat at a Benedictine monastery by people at our church. They hosted a little private retreat every year and this particular year there were still beds available. It didn’t take much convincing me to go.
I took piano lessons when I was really young, like four or five years old for about a year, but I didn't like it. I didn't like when I had to have a recital—I would get very nervous. I said to my mom, “No, I'm not doing this.” But what's funny now is I can remember very much all through her forties and fifties my mother was still trying to find her musical voice. She was convinced that if she learned music theory it would free her to be creative. She longed for that freedom. She's someone you could put an incredibly complicated piece of classical music in front of her, even now with dementia, and she could play it no problem. She took all kinds of lessons and classes in her fifties but she was never able to create something original. But if you sat in the room while she was “noodling” with chords, your heart would just melt.
So I asked her if she would play all the music for the “Renaissance Services,”—not only the complicated Marty Haugen pieces, but whatever improvisational music she wanted to set a contemplative tone when people were arriving. She did that for me, which is a great gift because she wasn’t really a believer. I have the videotape of the very first “Renaissance Service” on my website and you could hear her just playing. This was really such a beautiful thing that we got to do together. Now, twenty five years later, as I began my own process of learning theory and all the rest in my late fifties, I feel as if God is letting me use my creativity to bear fruit in a way she never could. I always play my new songs for her when I visit at assisted living and it has been a sublime gift.
LF: Before the pandemic you released an album, “Life In the Key of God.” How did those particular songs come about?
HCD: A few years ago a musician friend of mine, Blake Flattley, invited me to write an evening prayer liturgy with him—he would write the music and I would supply the words. I don’t know what it was exactly but something was planted in me during that process about writing hymns—about writing music specifically. After we wrote this liturgy together—I remember this vividly—I was in the shower and suddenly this song came to me. The best ideas happen in the shower, right? I heard the melody and the first verse of this song developing in my mind inside the shower. I knew I had to get out and get this down somehow before it was lost.
I called Blake right away and told him about this and how I didn’t want to lose it and he told me to sing it into the voice memos app on my phone—and I wasn’t even sure I knew what that app was (laughs)—so he helped me find it and then I did it. I sung the first verse into the app and that became the foundation for what would become the second song on the album. The words that came to me in the shower made the cut:
I want to know what angels knew
when they said fear not!
I want to see what they saw when they claimed it.
I want to feel in my heart
the sure quaking of His power in my life and cry out fear not!
Fear not!
Fear not!
Fear not!
Fear not!
Another song that came to me in this rush of creativity was the song, “Enter Here,” the first one on the album. I had started a program, a two-year program in Christian formation and spiritual direction, and I “heard” that song during the first week and then I just couldn’t get it out of my head. I kept thinking like, I need to birth one song in particular, and that was “Enter Here.”
It was this song that drove me to start taking piano, composition, theory and more. I just knew I needed to birth that song. Enter Phil Cordaro (yes, as in “heart”), a gifted musician, arranger and producer who’d been giving piano lessons to kids on our cul-de-sac for over a decade. It was the last Wednesday of July, 2019 when he parked outside my window and I jumped up with such urgency that I toppled my chair. Moments later I was tapping on his window. “Do you teach adults and could you teach me?”
We started two days later and he has been the perfect guide for someone who still had no idea where this was leading. What I really thought was that maybe I would turn the material from a draft of a new memoir into a one-woman show and that, maybe, I could learn to play this one song and use it as part of a final scene—an invitation to the audience.
I released a video with that guiding song, “Enter Here,” and I brought together all of these different people in my life—all neighbors!— who aren’t necessarily religious by any means but who have this same deep reverence for the sacredness of music, and they not only recorded the song for me but also agreed to appear in this music video we released. The way it all came together was beautiful.
But then more songs started coming. And with each song I started envisioning the perfect person to sing it. By the time I got to five songs and five dear artist friend combinations, I realized that what I was birthing was an album. The title just felt like it was always there: Life in the Key of God: songs by Heather Choate Davis brought to life by dear friends. It was released in November 2020, sixteen months after my first lesson.
LF: Any new music on the horizon for you?
HCD: Yes! My focus for 2021 is on releasing individual singles with narrative music videos. I am releasing two songs in September:
The first is called One More Time, and a woman named Hollis H. is providing the vocals for me. I first met Hollis when she was a little girl at First Lutheran Venice who left her parents in the middle of worship, walked down the aisle and asked me if she could sit with me. I knew God was assigning her to me in some way, but I didn’t know how or why. The family moved to the east coast shortly after, and actually took my son in on holidays when he first moved to New York. Last year the family reached out to say that Hollis wanted to move back to LA for school and asked if she could live with us. One More Time is a song that will speak to so many young women wrestling with their identities, anxieties, and the loss of childhood confidence that is rooted in the sure knowledge of the Creator’s love (One More Time is scheduled for release on September 9, 2021).
The video was shot and directed by my neighbor, Rachel Pollack, who sings on Enter Here and will have another single release in November called If Only.
The next song is called, Ordinary Time, with vocals by Theron Jenkins. I met Theron on Twitter. We were commenting on some issue unrelated to music when all of a sudden he said something that made me realize he actually knew who I was and had heard my album; a few exchanges later I discovered he was a choir director at a big Lutheran High School in Houston. We stayed in touch and I dug up some of his early vocals from an old band of his called, Wren’s Ghost, and I knew he would be just perfect for these soulful lyrics about seeing the extraordinary light of God in our ordinary days (Ordinary Time is scheduled for release on September 23, 2021).
I was so excited to pair his guitar and vocals with the images of New York-based photographer and artist, Amie Hollmann. Many in the Lutheran world will have heard of her husband Joshua Hollmann, a gifted Systematic Theology professor formerly of Concordia New York, now at Concordia St. Paul.
LF: My last question for you is simpler than technical questions about inspiration and writing music, but I think it encompasses all the themes we’ve been talking about. So, Heather Davis, where does your hope for the church come from?
HCD: This is where my hope could come from. The Lutheran tradition has this beautiful theology and I believe we actually could be the instruments of reconciliation and healing in the world at this moment where there is nothing more desperately needed. What this would mean is that those among us who have lost their way a little bit and started holding a little bit more tightly to cultural ideas about what they think it means to be a conservative American Christian—as opposed to what Lutheran theology expresses about being a human—we are going to have to do the work of self-awareness and repair in our own lives before we can be those instruments. But I have hope for the church because the pieces are there. We say theology is important to us in this church, well, let’s show that. There's no reason we can't be doing the work of reconciliation and healing. That’s my hope.
I will actually be releasing a song by the end of the year called Hope Is, sung by a young woman I’ve known from her first day on this earth, who I helped guide into a Lutheran grade school where enough seeds were planted to carry her through a very secular young adult season. We need more songs like this to help people find their way home.
The lyrics begin:
Will you tell me where hope comes from?
Is there enough to go around?
Can I keep it in a box
For days like these?
And end with this glorious reminder:
Hope is the heartbeat
Hope is the heartbeat
Hope is the heartbeat
Of God
Heather Choate Davis will be presenting at the Theological Symposium at Concordia, St. Louis, on Sept. 21st on “The Arts as a Window to the Divine.” You can support Heather’s work by subscribing to her YouTube channel and sharing her music videos.
