I Went to Hollywood to Make My Own Music. Now I Make a Joyful Noise to the Lord. by KIRA FONTANA for Christianity Today
From the outside, my life looked great. I was living in a trendy area in Santa Monica, California, and enjoying a fantastic job as one of the top vocal coaches in Los Angeles. With almost a decade of experience at the highest levels of the music industry, I had worked with major-label and top-40 artists, as well as hit TV shows like The Voice and Glee. Clients regularly flew in from around the world.
Though I had moved to LA to pursue a career creating my own music, somewhere along the way that dream got lost. I wasn’t a Christian at the time, but my music always had a strong spiritual bent—and that simply wasn’t popular in LA. I made music and showed it to people throughout the city, but the response always left me cold. I faced so many disappointments trying to find a place for my music that eventually I stopped singing and writing altogether. The death of this dream was the greatest heartbreak of my life, and the five years that followed were the most creatively barren that I had ever experienced.
Praying to see truth
Throughout this dry time, I focused on my soaring coaching career, and I managed to find temporary peace and joy through an LA megachurch for “spiritual but not religious” seekers. The church was transdenominational, which appealed to me. Raised Roman Catholic, I later adopted Eastern beliefs about God and practices like meditation.
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After almost 20 years of spiritual seeking, I truly believed I had attained higher levels of consciousness than most people. I believed there were many roads to God, and my thoughts were awash with “love and light” and other positive-thinking mantras. However, when I really looked at my life, I knew something was missing. Despite all my “spiritual knowledge,” I repeatedly ended up in failed relationships and struggled to find true purpose.
Around this time, several members of my family became born-again Christians and started talking about Jesus. I remember one of my brothers calling my spiritual center “satanic.” At the time, I thought he was crazy! The word satanic conjured up images of evil people doing rituals in a basement. What could be so horrible about channeling love and light, attaining higher consciousness, and finding inner healing?
When my brother asked me, “Who do you think Jesus is?” I remember answering, “He was a great spiritual teacher, and one of the most enlightened people who ever lived.” This is what all the “advanced” spiritual books had taught me. My philosophy was all about trying to “live like Jesus lived.” When I explained this to my brother, he said, “How can you live like Jesus when you have no idea who he really is? You’ve never read the one book that would tell you who he is.”
