What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort, … than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the chatter of spoken prayer. If we choose to seek the silence of the holy place, or to open ourselves to its seeking, I think there is no surer way than by keeping silent.
--Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets
From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence.
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
--Aldous Huxley, "The Rest is Silence"
People often complain that music is too ambiguous; that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me it is exactly the reverse, and not only with regard to an entire speech, but also with individual words. These, too,, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite...
If you ask me what I ws thinking of when I wrote it [one of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words"], I would say: Just the song as it stands. And if I happen to have had certain words in mind for one or another of these songs, I would never want to tell them to anyone, because the same words never mean the same things to different people. Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling which is not expressed, however, by the same words.
--Felix Mendelssohn, letter to Marc-André Souchay, 1842
I am, dear reader, about to engage in what does seem an extraordinarly ironic effort: I (a pastor whose business involves a lot of words) am going to write a lot of words to encourage you to be...less bound by words.
This particular Lent has probably been the most challenging I've known in many, many years, as I suspect it might have been for some of you too. It was a little less than a year ago that I underwent that major surgery thing, one which is now inescapable in its consequences for my daily life even as I am expected to be more or less "back to normal" (a word I refuse to use for my life anymore; the closest I will come is "routine," in that sometimes my life might be close to having one). Things started off well enough, and I even got to enjoy some beach time and a spring training ballgame, and then of course the world went splat and we all had to go home. More and more we seem to live in a place that simply cannot take care of itself or be trusted to do the right thing for the great majority of people, and that's a wrenching place to be.
Not shockingly, I turned to music. But it turned out that not just any music was going to work this time.
Normally this time of year I'd have been listening to all the Lenten music I've got - passions and other oratorios, Liszt's Via Crucis, MacMillan's Seven Last Words (and any other composers I could have gotten hold of), anything with a Lenten or especially Holy Week theme that I could load onto my computer (and then download onto a flash drive for driving listening, with my car no longer having a CD player). That project kept not happening, and then was scuttled for good. What ended up getting so recorded instead, for reasons I'm not even sure I fathomed at the time, was a whole bunch of music by Franz Schubert. Not the songs (or Lieder) for which he was most famous, but instrumental music - symphonies, violin sonatas, and especially piano music, including several piano sonatas.
The latter are, for the uninitiated, (usually) larger-scale works for the instrument, consisting of three or four movements most often. Neither Schubert nor the piano sonata as a genre was ever a particular subject of study for me during my academic years, so it's not as if it was a matter of returning to old favorites (as it is when I pull out the music of George Whitefield Chadwick, my dissertation subject). In fact, for a long time pretty much all I knew of those works was that a main melody from one of the late sonatas got appropriated and reworked into the main theme of the extremely average 90s sitcom Wings. Music scholarship pushed me into other musical directions, so that middling familiarity never germinated into anything in particular; it was classical radio programming and broadcasting that finally allowed me to hear the full sonata (Piano Sonata in A, D.959 - it deserves much better than that pop-culture affiliation).
So, I listened to those piano sonatas. I listened on the way to and from Vero Beach some; I listened around town; and especially when we became homebound by Covid-19, I listened. It became, out of no particular identifiable impulse, my Lenten discipline.
It took me a while to figure out why this happened. As the coronavirus situation disintegrated and epidemic was plowed over by pandemic, we were all inundated with instructions about what to do; washing hands and using hand sanitizer when washing had to wait (I finished off a small bottle of the stuff that I had had since I moved here), then the particular instructions for social distancing (keeping my distance from people in crowds is a thing I consider a specialty, so...), and finally the call for full-fledged isolation once the NBA broke down and major sports, theme parks and other entertainment edifices began to close. As church gatherings became prime opportunities for spreading the virus, the instructions continued, under the guise of "support" - how to put your service online, the various technologies available to do so (all hail the great god Zoom, at least until "Zoom-bombing" became a thing), and the various imperatives about what worship looks like in a time of isolation. Again, it took time for me to realize consciously what my subconscious evidently grasped very quickly: I needed a place to get away from the Hell (and I use that word most theologically) of words.
Frederick Buechner, quoted above about the need to shut off the chatter, was no word-hater, clearly - he has written a ton of them in his career, and has also had things to say about the power of words that themselves are among the most powerful words I know. Nonetheless I was forced to be reminded again by him that words are sometimes oppressors, and I needed a place to flee from them for a while. It is a strange thing to find myself in agreement with Aldous Huxley, but his appreciation of music (often snipped and turned into overly cute inspirational memes that would no doubt make Huxley gag) became my quest. Silence is impossible these days? Let the music drive out the noise.
And, pace Mendelssohn, the music needed for the moment was music not bound by words. Not that Mendelssohn was devoid of song with words - he wrote plenty, not to mention two whole oratorios and other choral works, not to mention instrumental works with words attached, so to speak - his three main non-choral symphonies, after all, have descriptive titles: "Italian," "Scottish," and "Reformation," the latter of which quotes the melody of Luther's great Reformation hymn "A mighty fortress is our God," making it inseparable from words even further. No, what was needed here was that could only mean, as Mendelssohn put it in writing to his wife's cousin, "just the song as it stands." Not that there was no meaning at all - far from it - but the meaning was not going to be bound by words, not going to be reducible to words.
Schubert's piano sonatas, it turns out, are pretty good vehicles for such un-worded listening. Unlike, say, certain Beethoven piano sonatas ("Moonlight," "Pathetique," "Appassionata"), most of Schubert's big works in the genre have no descriptive titles attached. In addition, they're quite "roomy" works. This does mean, among other things, that they're long, but it isn't length itself that makes for "roominess." Here further elucidation from Huxley helps. In the same essay as above he also writes:
Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven’s or Mozart’s, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner’s music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It “says” less because it is always speaking.
(So no, I'm not really a Wagnerian.)
The Schubert sonatas (again, especially the late ones) are pocked with silences - frequently unexpected and unprepared, and all the more arresting for their surprise upon the listener. At the same time, the sonatas are also frequently "roomy" in their measured pace; tempos might be fast or slow, but no idea is cut short or deprived of its opportunity to be heard and received and reflected upon in a measured and fuller way than, say, even some of Huxley's favored Beethoven. For music that is present, music that allows the mind or soul to be invited instead of merely demanded, it works pretty well. It does not submit to our words, no, but allows us to be drawn along instead of pounding the soul into submission. For this moment, it was (dare I say literally?) a godsend.
As this progress continued, I began to wonder where this particular bit of ... reflection? meditation? contemplation? might fit into my increasingly desperate quest for spiritual preservation (I dare not be so optimistic as to hope for spiritual "growth" in all of this, just let me survive...). In trying to look around ... I wasn't encouraged. Let's be honest; virtually all of the modes of meditation or contemplation or reflection or what have you in the Christian tradition (where I live) are pretty word-based. As for Buechner's declaration above, true silence is pretty elusive in the Christian tradition. And when such silence is in fact desired or explored or achieved, the end result pretty much turns out to be ... words.
So I wonder: is it possible that music - wordless music - might be an aid towards a form of silence, at least? Is it possibly, pace Buechner, an aid in clearing away the verbal clutter that so often and easily overwhelms our minds or souls, that tells us our feelings or emotions or spiritual yearnings are not "real" unless we can put them into words? (Never mind the Spirit's interceding for us with "sighs too deep for words" in Romans 8:26...) Might that things that, after silence according to Huxley, best expresses the inexpressible be a means towards finding some space for silence in our harried spirits? Might "just the song as it stands" (or the piano sonata, or the symphony, or whatever we can find - I have to believe there are options outside the Euro classical tradition for such un-worded listening but I claim no expertise to say) be a means to work towards mystery?
To me, that's where this becomes a thing I'm still grappling with. We stink at mystery. We have frankly turned the word into a literary genre about following clues and solving puzzles to catch criminals, so to speak, and lost the concept of mystery - that which lives outside of us, that which does not submit to our glib explanations and easy conceptualizations, that which is larger than us (and boy, do we hate to admit anything is larger than us!) and not controllable by us.
I have realized, I guess, that I am woefully ill-equipped to deal with mystery, and (distant enough from my scholarly past, I guess) am looking at musical experience as maybe, possibly, a portal into at least some form of spiritual mystery (as opposed to mysticism, I think). We end up suffering, I fear, when we cannot cope with mystery and the unknowable (trying to grapple with the unknowable was damn near killing me for a stretch over the past few years), and at least for the moment this kind of listening is helping me in a different way than I have known before.
So that has been this Lent's discipline, so to speak. I don't think this is one I can immediately give up or walk away from. Maybe I can listen to something besides Schubert, though. But I have to hope there is hope, or refuge, or I don't know what in the simple yet maddeningly difficult act of listening to music, unfettered by words, not seeking to describe or understand or analyze or break down or anything but listening, experiencing, maybe even feeling. At any rate, I have to keep going, I think.
Yep, pretty sure this would make Huxley gag.
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