Lord, Grant Me Detachment: A Guide to Prayerfully Surrendering Performances
I don’t know about you, but I have a love/hate relationship with performing.
On the one hand, performing is amazing. I feel the profound privilege of being able to share with others this gift of music that God has blessed me with, and I’m continually grateful when the opportunity to perform arises. But on the other hand, performing is a risky business requiring vulnerability, and it can be all too easy to walk away from a less-than-perfect performance thinking about all the ways it could’ve gone better.
I know I’m not alone in this, so I wanted to write about a virtue, a spiritual “secret weapon” if you will, that’s truly a game changer for creating a healthy mindset around performing:
Detachment.
Before we dive into detachment, let me be clear on what it is not.
Detachment is not the same as dissociation. It’s also not the same as getting to a place where you just don’t care about how you perform. You can care about giving a good performance while remaining detached from the outcome.
There is a distinction, too, between a post-performance review of the good, the bad, and the ugly and being too attached to the performance and its outcome. It’s good for us as musicians to honestly appraise our performances so that we can continue to grow and improve. Being able to run an honest appraisal actually falls under the virtue of humility: the ability to clearly how we stand before God and others without inflating or deflating our sense of self.
Detachment, instead, involves surrendering every part of our lives—our relationships, our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our weaknesses—to God and trusting Him with the outcomes.
When it comes to performing, then, detachment looks like surrendering our performances to God and trusting Him with the outcome, no matter how well (or terribly!) we think we performed.
Tangible Ways to Practice Detachment
This, of course, is much easier said than done! How, then, do we go about practicing detachment from our performances?
I would like to suggest three tangible ways to practice detachment as a performing musician:
Prepare to the best of your ability. This will look different depending on the performance, or even the season of life you’re in. The key is to prepare to the best of your ability with the time you have. This allows you to walk away from the performance, regardless of outcome, knowing that you did your best to prepare. In turn, this can fend off some of those pesky negative thoughts that tend to pop up post-performance.
Pray for the graces to be detached. As important as it is to do what we can to prepare, detachment is at its core a spiritual practice. There will always be times when we really did do our best and still gave a performance that didn’t reflect the work we put in—and honestly, those are the times when detachment can be the hardest. But God desires to help us grow in detachment! If we pray for the graces to be detached, He will grant them to us. The Surrender novena is always a good prayer for detachment. Even just memorizing and praying the refrain: “O Jesus, I surrender myself to You. Take care of everything.”
Create a prayerful post-performance routine. This doesn’t need to be complicated! It can be as small as taking a few seconds directly after performing and verbally giving it over to God: “All for you, Jesus,” or “Do with that as You Will.” Taking the time to name our desire to surrender the outcome to God is a helpful practice for growing in detachment.
A quick note for directors
Practicing detachment from performances isn’t just for those performing. It’s also for those leading performances, too! If you’re directing an ensemble, detachment can become a little extra complicated simply because the outcome isn’t entirely on you, but it certainly reflects on you nonetheless. This can create extra pressure, and even another layer of difficulty in letting go of a poor performance.
But detachment is for you, too! The above suggestions are applicable; but I would also encourage you to include your students or ensemble members in your prayers, and surrender them to God, too. This advice also applies to those playing in an ensemble, by the way — surrender your fellow ensemble members to God when you surrender your performances to Him!
So there you have it: some practical, tangible ways to practice detachment with your performances.
The more we practice detachment, the more we become receptive to welcoming God’s peace into our lives. The world might say that peace comes with perfection or ideal circumstances (in this case, a fantastic performance that’s well-received), but God’s peace is not the same as what the world offers: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you.” (John 14:27) The world can only offer counterfeit peace, an imitation of the real thing. God’s peace is far better.
God has given you the gift of music to share with others. To Him be the glory. He can bring good out of all things.
And yes, that even includes a subpar performance.
