Songs Rising Up From Frozen Ground

Melodies of protest, neighboring love, and the hope we practice in place

By Emma Rooker and Juli Kalbaugh

This piece was first written during a time when neighborhoods in Minneapolis were experiencing heightened fear and uncertainty connected to immigration enforcement activity. While the national spotlight may have shifted, the deeper realities it revealed remain. Pain does not always follow the news cycle. Grief and vigilance often linger long after headlines move on, and so do the melodies that carry us through.

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In Minneapolis, streets once marked by familiar rhythms became crowded with uncertainty. Normal, everyday routines like commuting to work, gathering with friends, and even sending children to school were suddenly frozen stiff.

And yet, even in the face of fear, people continued to neighbor.

They looked out for one another.
They showed up in seen and unseen ways.
And remarkably, they sang.

The act of singing in the face of injustice is not new. Songs carrying messages of hope and serving as vehicles of change have long accompanied movements for human dignity, from the spirituals of the Civil Rights era to the farmworkers’ labor songs carried in many languages across California’s fields during strikes and protests. Communal music has helped people sustain courage, speak truth, and imagine new futures.

In Minneapolis, this history seemed to echo forward.

Across weeks of tension, people gathered to protest outside hotels, inside packed sanctuaries, and along snow-lined streets. Handmade signs rose above crowds as breath-visible melodies lingered in the frozen air. What many expected to hear was anger and violence. Instead, what carried through the cold was song.

In moments marked by anxiety and grief, communities chose presence in the form of shared voice. Videos of these gatherings began circulating online, showing crowds singing in the midst of uncertainty. These images appeared alongside the grief and tragedy filling our timelines, holding hope and despair in the same frame.

What might have seemed like ordinary acts of gathering revealed something deeper: a collective refusal to let fear or violence have the final word.

Singing and Doing

Old friends and new companions found themselves singing side by side, becoming more attentive to the place they shared and the people who inhabited it. These everyday people, painted a prophetic image of neighboring in real time.

Neighbors voiced needs.
Arms delivered groceries.
Legs hauled laundry for families avoiding public spaces.
Collective hands (and collective bank accounts) helped cover rent for those suddenly unable to work.

As it so often turns out, the most pastoral response to crisis was deeply practical.

Questions like How can we help? and What do you need today? became acts of resistance in their own right. Walking children to school, standing watch at street corners, crowdfunding emergency relief were gestures that transformed the ordinary into something profoundly life-giving.

In moments like these, neighboring becomes tactile. Love takes on tone and texture, and is tethered to the ground.

When attention moves on

Communities like these offer a quiet but powerful lesson: faithful presence still matters when the cameras leave.

Long after reporters return home and the news cycle pivots elsewhere, there is still work to be done. There are still wounds to tend. There are still songs to be sung. Remaining attentive to the aches and hopes of a place requires humility and a willingness not to look away.

It also invites deeper imagination and wonder.

What new language might be needed in moments when inherited scripts feel insufficient? What fresh expressions of faithfulness might emerge when the dignity of our neighbors is threatened? What new thing might God want to say in the face of what diminishes and defiles the Imago Dei in our communities?

Writing new songs for changing times

In response to these realities, groups like the Singing Resistance began gathering songbooks of protest melodies, some rooted in tradition, others newly written to reflect present conditions. These evolving repertoires are carrying people through uncertainty, offering courage when familiar hymns felt unable to hold the fullness of communal grief and hope.

There is wisdom here for the wider Church.

When snow piles up and sidewalks grow slick, we choose different shoes and outerwear than we would if temperatures were warm and the ground was grassy and green.

We adapt our movement and our presence to match the terrain.

In the same way, communities of faith are continually invited to discover new rhythms for following Jesus in changing neighborhoods.

Singing in dark times

Often, when we’re met with winds of icy despair, things like beauty, artistic expression, or singing can seem fleeting, useless, or trivial even. But, it’s actually the opposite: art matters.

Toni Morrison wrote of turbulent times: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write…that is how civilizations heal.” And in 1933, Bertolt Brecht fled Germany because of his early opposition of of the Nazi Regime and queried “In the dark times, will there be singing? Yes, singing about the dark times.”

Even the Gospels recount that on the night before his arrest, Jesus sang with his disciples.

Songs rising from frozen ground are therefore more than poetic images.
They are reminders that hope is often practiced collectively.
They are invitations to listen for helpers, for neighbors, for the quiet harmonies of a place refusing to surrender to despair.

Perhaps the question for us now is not whether singing will continue, it’s whether we will join in.

What songs are waiting to be written in our own neighborhoods? What melodies might help us stay rooted in love when attention shifts elsewhere?

Because long after crises fade from headlines, there is still neighboring to do.There is still beauty to cultivate.
There is still hope to sing into being.

Listen and Sing for yourself.

If you are curious about the songs that have carried communities through seasons of fear and faithful resistance, we invite you to spend some time listening, learning, and joining in.

Listen to Parish Collective’s Songs of Place album: a collection of music shaped by the particular stories, tensions, and beauty of real communities. These songs are meant to be sung not only in sanctuaries but on porches, sidewalks, prayer walks, and neighborhood gatherings. They help us practice paying attention. They remind us that God’s Spirit is already at work in the places we inhabit.

Learn about the ICE OUT Sing-In Resistance Songbook, compiled by Resistance Revival Chorus.

Join the Singing Resistance

Have a song that is carrying you through the wilderness? Share with us and others in the comments.