Sermon afterthoughts: Preaching an epistle I never wanted to preach

Back in seminary, if you had told me I would turn to the epistles of the New Testament for preaching material as often as I do, I would have probably laughed and said something clever like "yeah, right." I knew I was going to do a Romans series as soon as I had the chance, and I did exactly that. (It starts with this sermon and goes forward for a few months, by the time all is said and done.) I figured 1 Corinthians 13 would happen eventually, and there were a few other spots here and there that would happen.

It wasn't something I figured would happen all that often, though. I certainly didn't expect to preach from the epistles more often than from the Old Testament, for example, with all the good stories from Genesis to work from. I still tend to stick to the gospels as first choice, for the most part, but darned if the epistles don't turn up and grab my attention more often than I'd ever have planned.

And I certainly didn't expect to preach much at all from what are sometimes called the "deutero-Pauline" epistles. These are the letters which have Paul's name attached to them (sometimes quite loudly) but do not really appear to have been written or dictated or anything by Paul himself. Sometimes it's the subject matter, something that clearly wasn't an issue in Paul's time (imagine reading what purports to be a letter by Abraham Lincoln that somehow discuss the Spanish-American War). Sometimes it's the writing style; imagine you were reading something by C.S. Lewis and suddenly coming upon a passage by Ernest Hemingway that someone had snuck into your reading material unawares. And sometimes the book just flat says things that Paul wouldn't have said. 

Frankly, I just didn't want to deal with the fuss. I didn't want to deal with explaining biblical ghostwriting, or how sticking a bigger name on what you've written didn't carry the stigma of violation that it would today. (I am mindful of how many pieces of music of the late 18th century got passed off as having been composed by Haydn simply to sell more copies.) I certainly didn't want to deal with the not-very-Paul-like things those epistles say.

Perhaps chief of all of these was the epistle given the name "Ephesians." Even that title is a little hinky; most of the earliest manuscripts don't have that inscription "at Ephesus" in the greeting, suggesting at minimum that this was probably a circular letter with no particular congregation as its target. The extremely general nature of the letter's content also lends to this doubt; the way Paul is described in his farewell to the elders of Ephesus in Acts 20 stands in blazing contrast to the utterly impersonal nature of this letter. 

And no, I really didn't want even to come near the household codes of Ephesians 5-6. Greco-Roman boilerplate social mores, dressed up with some attempted churchy talk, that has become the basis for centuries of oppressive mumbo-jumbo about "biblical womanhood" and the whole business of "complementarianism" that shackles evangelicalism to some decidedly unchristlike standards of behavior and doctrine? Miss me with that, hard.

And yet, this morning, I just preached my third sermon from Ephesians based on this year's cycle in the Revised Common Lectionary. I'll preach from the book for the four further weeks as the lectionary offers. And then, when the lectionary's offered cycle is completed, I'll go back and slip in one more sermon based on the book, dealing with exactly those Greco-Roman household codes and what we Christ-followers nowadays should actually take from their presence in the New Testament. 

If I were in an evangelical church I'd get fired for sure. Even in my mainline church I might be in danger. But, unless God slaps me around a bit and says "child, what is with you?", that's how August is going to go. 

If I had never come off this, I'd have missed out on that giddy opening of the letter, one of the best run-on sentences in scripture (it really is all one sentence in Greek), a big exuberant blessing that doesn't know when to stop. I'd have missed on today's reading, a benediction on the letter's readers that pushes the boundaries of our understanding of Christ's love and leaves us gobsmacked. I'd have missed on chapter four's gifts for building up the body of Christ, chapter five's mini-echo of Colossians 3:16, and the chance to break down chapter six's "armor of God" passage. All of that would have been a shame. 

So Ephesians it is, ugliness and all. I suppose there's a point in all this. Maybe "never say never"? Or maybe it's something related to that increasingly famous prayer of Thomas Merton, the one that starts "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going...". Or maybe I'm just getting to the end of my tether. 

Whatever may be the case, the quote that actually sticks in my brain at this point actually comes from Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring: 

The road goes evern on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can, 

Pursuing it with eager feet, 

Until it meets some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

And so the fool's errand goes.

Sermon afterthoughts: Who you callin' a weed???

 I am not a gardener, and I never will be. 

I have not nearly enough patience for that. I'm pretty strongly opposed to being out in direct sunlight for that long with no hope of shade. I'm clumsy. There are a lot of reasons for it. 

One of them, though, is I've gotten to be uncomfortable with the whole idea of how exactly one defines a "weed."

All of this comes on the heels of dealing with Mark 4:26-34, today's gospel reading in the lectionary, and in particular the seemingly familiar Parable of the Mustard Seed. We know that one, right? It's the tiniest seed in seed-dom, and yet it grows into this massive growth that produces large branches in which birds can build their nests and take shelter. We have, in the church-popular imagination, made that into a parable about how what seems small and insignificant can become great and mighty, or something like that. 

That really isn't the point.

After all, the parable is introduced with Jesus's words, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?" (NRSV) Jesus's words make the link explicit: "It is like a mustard seed...". The point of the parable isn't to tell a small or frail child that they can grow up to be big and strong, or that whatever endeavor we've decided to take up will blossom and flourish like that tiny seed. The point of the parable is that the kingdom of God is like that shrub that spreads out and grows and has the big branches to nest in.

And then there's that word "shrub." (Ed.-Allow me a moment for a Monty Python reference that won't go away...)

(There, that's better.)

Jesus calls it a shrub, as the NRSV translates it. Am I wrong, or is that a word that doesn't necessarily conjure up grand and mighty? I mean, it's the root of the above Monty Python joke, or how Molly Ivins brought George Bush the Younger down to size. It ain't the cedars of Lebanon, that's for sure. 

Furthermore (as noted in today's sermon), this particular shrub wasn't exactly super-desirable. It did have some medicinal properties, but that wasn't a thing you went and cultivated that shrub to get - there was plenty of it available in the wild. Worse was that if this shrub got into whatever you were cultivating, your harvest was quite likely in some trouble. It wasn't perhaps quite as pernicious as kudzu - the Vine That Ate the South - but it did invade and crowd out other plants in its path. You wanted it to stay out in the wild, not in your fields. 

Oh, and those branches that birds can nest in? The same birds that were plucking away the seed scattered by the sower earlier in that chapter, in Mark 4:4? 

And this is what Jesus chose to compare with the kingdom of God?

Yeah, it fits. The stuff that grows into our lives and crowds out our neatly laid-out plans and boundaries we'd just as soon stay out in the wild, right? We're not keen to see our best-laid plans disrupted or uprooted in any way. We don't like it, and we want to root it out and toss it in the trash. 

This gives me pause. In the face of such a passage, I am charged to wonder what God sees in a thing I might regard in the way Jesus's audience likely viewed that mustard-seed shrub. Is there some redeeming quality in that thing that is getting castigated as a "weed" that I'm not seeing? Or let's get more directly spiritualized about it: am I going to fail to recognize the moving, spreading, in-crashing kingdom of God because it looks like an invasive shrub messing up my just-so life-garden? 

This comic also comes to mind:

Image credit unknown, which is too bad because this is really good.

To abstract some point out of all of this, we are (I fear) too often or too easily conditioned to equate the good (or dare I say the holy?) with the pretty. We also tend to want to equate the good with the orderly, despite how often and how readily order (even "law and" order) becomes an excuse to perpetuate all manner of evils upon those not like us. When we let the quest for the pretty and orderly and beautiful-by-human-standards take over all of our perception, we are flat-out going to miss the in-crashing, invasive kingdom of God. What we call a weed or an invasive species may well be where the Spirit is moving. At this stage of my life, I really don't want to cultivate any habits that might make me miss that.

Thanks be to God, I think.

Sermon afterthoughts: Disney/Pixar family values

 The latest reincarnatin of this blog that will never die: an occasional place for sermon thoughts to go when they don't quite make it into the sermon.

So today's sermon, on Mark 3:20-35, tries to grapple with one of those sayings of Jesus which we'd prefer Jesus hadn't actually said. His family has come to get him, and not necessarily with peaceful intent, and when the crowds tell Jesus that they're outside calling for him, Jesus drops this backhanded bombshell on them: 

Who are my mother and my brothers?

Here are my mother and my brothers! 

Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.

*Smack*.

We don't really handle this one very well, even failing to realize that in many cases this rejoinder is good news, for those for whom what our society worships as the "nuclear family" is not at all a place of refuge or safety. The reasons can be more numerous than the stars: abuse of many different kinds from physical to emotional, of every horrifying type; parental or familial rejection for such "sins" as having the gall to come out or to vote for a Democrat or to choose to take a job far away from the old home place (I have known people who have suffered all of the above, fwiw); parents incapacitated by drug abuse or alcohol abuse or mental illness or again, a wide variety of things, and simply incapable of caring for a child; fights or disputes over a girl or a job or a house or who knows what; the list can be frankly endless of things that can irreparably split a family. For a person caught in any of those forced isolations, Jesus's declaration is a message of hope indeed.

Still, the rest of this particular society doesn't particularly warm to this bit of instruction. To be sure, enough politicized verbiage over "family values" has been shoveled upon us over many decades now, and it would be hard to blame anyone for feeling that, contra Jesus's words, "nothing's more important than family."

Hmm. I've heard that phrase, but not from a politician. Actually, I heard it from Coco.

Coco, in this case, is the 2017 Disney/Pixar animated film about a young boy, wanting to be a musician but ferociously opposed by his family, who blunders into the land of the dead of Mexican tradtion to seek the great-great-grandfather who is his musical inspiration/aspiration. Miguel finds out things were not what he thought, but suffice to say that in the grand tradition of such animated fare everything does work out in the end, despite his family threatening his music even as it is the only thing that can prompt his great-grandmother, the titular Mama Coco, to remember that great-great-grandfather and thus preserve his existence in the land of the dead. (The power of music to affect memory is, of course, something any good music therapist could have suggested.)

And it is in such a context that Miguel utters the line noted above, "nothing's more important than family." Even as his family (in both the realms of the dead and the living) are doing all in their power to prevent him from learning and setting right the wrongs of their family's past, "nothing's more important than family."

Don't get me wrong, I love this movie, and its dramatic climax as he finally plays for Mama Coco was literally breathtaking - I actually forgot to breathe during it, in the midst of all the ugly-crying and nose-running. But that line is grating on me more and more every time I hear it.

This is a fairly recent example of a strong tendency in this particular animated tradition (others can talk up the live-action films like the various Mary Poppinses), taking in both classic Disney animation and more recent Disney and Pixar contributions to the genre. Perhaps one of the most extreme examples might be Cinderella (in whichever version), which draws on an old fable to play up the horrors visited upon the title character when she loses her parents and is forced to live with the prototype wicked stepmother and stepsisters. This bit of suffering from lack of family is only fixed (as is so often in these things) by Cinderella's rescue by a hansome, charming prince, which opens up a whole other can of worms. 

To be honest, the phenomenon of missing mothers (or sometimes fathers) in especially the classic Disney animated fare is awfully prolific. Think of orphans or otherwise parentless figures such as all those Lost Boys in Peter Pan, Arthur in The Sword in the Stone, Penny in The Rescuers. Add those who are prominently missing one parent; Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Nemo in Finding Nemo, even Pinocchio being "raised" by the "single parent" Geppetto. Throw in those actually lose parents as part of the film; Tod in The Fox and the Hound, Mowgli's mother in The Jungle Book, Quasimodo's mother in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mufasa in The Lion King, and both of Elsa and Anna's parents in Frozen (and Kristoff is somehow an orphan too). Plus, do I even need to mention Bambi's mother?

Throw in wicked stepmothers and -others (besides Cinderella, you can also point to the Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Mother Gothel, Rapunzel's kidnapper-cum-"mother" in Tangled) and you've got a long list. Source material in fairy tales and fables contributes to this a great deal, of course, but you know, you could look at other sources after a while. Even then, though, the single-parent theme seems awfully persistent: Tiana's father was a WWI casualty in The Princess and the Frog, and where is Andy's father in the Toy Story movies? Coco is almost an outlier for having such a prolifically present family. 

Rescue by a handsome prince still crops up an awful lot in such cases where princes make any sense; even as late a contribution as The Princess and the Frog throws in a handsome, charming playboy prince, and of course princes abound in the classic fare. Rapunzel is ultimately restored to her parents in Tangled; Mowgli gets adopted in a Jungle Book sequel; Simba mates with Nala in The Lion King. 

In short, there aren't many such movies in which some form of family restoration (either marriage or finding parents or adoption) is not the ultimate solution. Frozen can count as one, although Frozen II suggests that Anna and Kristoff do finally get together. Marlin and Nemo muddle through in Finding Nemo. I think the ultimate example of family resilience, as opposed to family restoration, in the Disney corpus is probably the least Disney-ish Disney animated film of all: Lilo & Stitch.

When the destructive little alien Stitch crash-lands on one of the Hawaiian islands and gets "adopted" by young Lilo, much against older sister Nani's wishes, a family, however unwitting, is "made," even if it takes a while to set in. Stitch (originally no name, just Experiment 626) has no real capacity for anything like "family" relationship - the only purpose built into him was to destroy. Lilo and Nani are orphans; their parents' death is described by Lilo barely in passing - "it was raining, they went for a drive." Nani, only a teenager herself, is losing her grip as Lilo's guardian, constantly on the verge of losing her to state guardianship. Yet after many misadventures (no point in spoiling the film), the three are finally a family, as claimed by Stitch himself as he is about to be taken into intergalactic custody: 

Grand Councilwoman: Who are you?

Stitch: This is my...family. I found it,...all on my own. 

It's little...and...broken...but, still good. Yeah. Still good.

Folks, that'll preach. 

Finding a family, when there's no such thing as family, must feel like a miracle. When Jesus turns to the motley crowd in Mark 3 and says "these are my mother and brothers!", who knows what kind of flabbergasted and amazed reactions that received - not from the disdainful biological mother and brothers or the bullying religious authorities, but from the crowd itself. The level of grace in such a claim overwhelms. There is the following statement that "whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." 

Respect those families made from grace, when all hope for that place of belonging seems lost. Respect those families made from struggling together. Respect those families that are made, the way Jesus made one.

What (or who) am I not listening to?

After that last post on "what am I listening to", I have been reminded this week of the opposite extreme in my listening practices. There is in fact one musical category I have been deliberately avoiding, for a full year in fact. I could not have gotten away with such avoidance in my previous career, especially for this past year, but in my current life it was relatively easy to do.

Yep, I'm one of those people who has been avoiding, deliberately, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. 

Specifically, avoiding Beethoven's music during the year leading up to the 250th anniversary of his birth, which you might have heard was yesterday. 

It should be noted that this is actually one thing that was enabled by the ongoing curtailment of activities due to the pandemic. Last week or last month or some time I'd likely have been compelled to attend a big choral concert of one of his larger works, because my wife would have been singing in it. So, a narrow miss there.

Yes, it was a deliberate choice. Yes, it was somewhat encouraged by the anniversary. No, I'm not the only person. 

Why?

Because there was no need for music organizations to spend the last year or the next year bingeing on Beethoven music.

Why? Because music organizations, for the most part, already spend a great deal of their time and energy bingeing on Beethoven music.

This is especially true of instrumental groups, symphonies most of all. But choral groups will jump in on a Ninth Symphony whenever possible, and in a year like this other works were going to get a workout. But on the instrumental side, it's a pretty strong likelihood that any orchestra that put forth a Beethoven cycle (or had planned to) for last season or this had already done a Beethoven cycle (or some limited form thereof) some time in the past decade. Aside from certain specialty organizations, it's hard to imagine such a group going a full season without a Beethoven something. (And in the interest of full disclosure, I did participate in the Beethovenism, to the degree that one of my few public recitals was devoted to LvB's string trios, even though I was no Beethoven scholar.)

Perhaps even more pervasive is the presence of Beethoven music on such classical radio as exists these days. I'm not going to spend a full twenty-four hour period listening to a classical radio outlet (I need sleep), but it's hard to imagine such an outlet going a full twenty-four hours with no Ludwig. There may be a handful of others who get such treatment (Mozart or Bach might come to mind), but not many. 

The one exception I have made in the past twelve months is to let pass the fleeting bars of "Für Elise" that Schroeder tries to pass as "Beethoven Christmas music" in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Even that example points to the depth of the phenomenon. Mozart or Bach never got that pop-culture kind of treatment, nor others. (To be fair, Schroeder doesn't use his Beethoven fanaticism to demean the music of other composers, as the strip below shows.)

Interestingly, many of the names on that list Lucy spits out spent much of their careers laboring under the shadow of Beethoven, whether self-imposed or as part of a musical establishment in which LvB was increasingly idolized (I use that word more literally than I usually do on a non-religious subject). 

So, for me as a no-longer-music-professional, I simply didn't see any reason to support the Beethoven Binge with such funds as I had at my disposal. 

But not listening to Beethoven wasn't enough; something else needed to fill the musical void.

I ended up, as slightly alluded in the previous post, finding out just how much I had underappreciated Franz Schubert.

I rekindled my affection for the composers of late-19th and early-20th century composers of the US who had been my principal scholarly pursuit back in academia. 

I happily indulged in music of composers such as Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, William Levi Dawson (and I'm not referring to his choral arrangements of spirituals), William Grant Still, and others who committed the unforgivable crime of composing while Black. 

I remembered how much I liked jazz. I actually went to some jazz shows, both local and more national, before the pandemic shut down most concert life, and picked up some online shows in the meantime. 

I also put out feelers into other musical genres I hadn't indulged in much in a while. I ended up picking up some Broadway I wasn't familiar with and trying to find some of the classical music of India that had fleetingly passed through my life at least two decades ago.

And I discovered I liked hearing those things. 

So, with the term of avoidance technically over as of yesterday's big anniversary blowouts (such as they were), I have to admit that I honestly don't know whether that avoidance will continue or be dropped. 

I'm still obsessing over those Schubert piano sonatas. Still absorbed by that Chrismas Cantata by Daniel Pinkham. The presence of what might be called "classical Chrismas music" on one outlet I have available is helping pass the time. I still am waiting for Margaret Bonds to get the public recovery that Florence Price has been getting. (Listen to this and this if you wonder why.)

And one other thing: I'm not sure that "greatness" is enough of a reason to be force-fed one guy's music to the inevitable exclusion of some other composer's work. Call me a heretic if you like. It wouldn't be my first time.

So I have no idea what I'll do the next time LvB pops up in front of me anywhere other than from Schroeder's piano. Eventually I might spend some time with it. But I'm in no hurry. There's a lot of other stuff I need to hear.

??? Who knows what I'll do...

What am I listening to?

 The title question popped up on Facebook a couple of days ago (I think?), from a colleague/friend asking what music others were listening to right now. I did not answer at the moment, being a bit busy and distracted (my default state these days). When I had a moment to stop and check myself I didn't answer either. I still haven't, mostly because when I finally put my finger on the music that was most occupying my ears and my mind right now, neither of them seemed to be a "jam," and the question did ask what was one's "current jam." Making a currant jelly joke seemed a reach, so I left it.

In fact there are two things that have been lodging themselves on my sonic devices in particular - one which has been occupying my mind for quite a while, and the other coming to the fore more recently, apparently tied to the advent of the Advent/Christmas cycle now upon the church. 

When last I darkened the door of this blog I confessed to an ongoing obsession with the late piano sonatas of Franz Schubert. At that time his penultimate sonata, no. 20, was foremost in my ear and mind. Since then my listening has broadened...all the way to his last sonata, no. 21. In particular the second movement has taken hold. (Fair warning: this movement itself is about ten minutes long, although obviously I consider such minutes to be well spent.)

You will note that this movement ...  is ... slow. Now this is not itself so odd; your average Classic/Romantic era piano sonata has a slow movement. What's odd here is that in this particular case, the first movement of Schubert's sonata is also rather slow, and two slow movements back-to-back is less typical.

Also, this movement is not only slow, it is quite spare, for lack of a better word. Aside from the slightly faster and somewhat fuller middle section, this movement is joltingly spacious in its texture. Rather than being spun out in a line (a not-atypical way to talk about musical melodies or motives), these notes and figures seem almost suspended in empty space. Laden with the burden of pandemic time, it almost sounds as if the notes are socially distanced.

Even when things seem to get busier, the musical activity often consists of repeated notes or figures, which manages to sound busy without necessarily sounding full, at least as Schubert deploys them. And even then, after what passes for great agitation in this movement, the music ultimately returns to the arrestingly spare sonic space of the first section, with slight tweaks of harmony and rhythm,  the emptiness of notes and motifs hanging from gently swaying mobiles in a darkened room. It is not the sound of silence - that is Simon & Garfunkel's territory - but perhaps it is the sound of quiet - quiet in the way Frederick Buechner describes a room where people are not speaking; the room is darkened, perhaps, but not empty. 

I hesitate to guess why this movement has latched on to me of late. Maybe in the deafening emptiness of pandemic-tide the genuine quiet of the movement provides sanctuary. Maybe I'm just really geeked by Mitsuko Uchida's interpretation of the sonata. Maybe it's just the pleasure of ten minutes that invite me not to be overwhelmed or ragged or confronted with the endless rounds of I don't know how to do this that constitute so many of my days in this time. Or maybe it simply invites me in the direction of mystery, and some part of me that is normally shouted down and drowned out sneaks into my consciousness through it.

The second, more recent, more seasonal, and shorter fascination of late is a more modern composition, by an American named Daniel Pinkham. It is the second movement of his Christmas Cantata, a setting of the ancient text "O magnum mysterium." You might notice some similarities to the sonata movement among the obvious differences. 

I have had the intense pleasure of singing this work a couple of times. "Spare" and "spacious" are fitting adjectives here also, and the hints of medievalism add to the effect. This is a movement to tax the breath control of the finest choral singers and brass players, and the sheer length of notes makes more space rather than filling it. 

The effect is, to be sure, deepened by those initial words of the text - O magnum mysterium, "o great mystery." The hearer is led directly into that contemplation, in this case the mystery of the Nativity and Incarnation. The mystery does not avoid the seemingly ludicrous; barn animals the first witnesses of the infant Messiah. There is a thickening of the music as the Blessed Virgin gets her shout-out, a build to a volume climax spiced with discordant intervals and the long sustained notes underneath it all interrupted for a fraction of a moment, and yet at the last it all collapses in slow motion back into the space, the quiet, repeated motifs from the brass and organ strung together and fading away, to one last unresolving chord. 

It is a text for the Nativity, but musically it is all Advent - waiting, quiet, unbearable anticipation. It is much shorter than the Schubert sonata movement, but it is still music that demands time. Somehow, I guess this is something I need in some way or other. 

Anyway, that's what I'm listening to.

Wordlessness, mystery, and Schubert piano sonatas

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.

Hymnody held hostage!!! (or, the perils of popularity)

So an article came across my news feed sometime in the past week I suppose, on a subject I'd so much prefer to avoid talking about mostly because my body is still easily subject to nausea after that surgery five months ago today. Still, I gagged my way through enough of it that it did get me to thinking about one of the challenges of singing "something new" in worship, having to do with the sources of our "new" songs for worship.

As described in this strangely unthoughtful article, performers of great popularity in the realm of music known as...is it Christian contemporary music? Contemporary Christian music? I honestly have no idea, it's been decades since I paid attention. Anyway, whatever it's called, some CNN type somehow decided it would make a good article to wonder why such performers didn't have something to say, to their audiences or in their songs or whatever, about the current occupant of the White House and his, shall we say, controversial nature. Apparently the occasion of the Dove Awards, the Grammys of the Christian music world (I guess that's still what they say?), provoked the thought somehow.

As I've indicated, it's a strange article, not least because it somehow fails to consider the possibility that such performers don't criticize that person because they like and support that person. It does happen, particularly among Christians, and especially particularly among certain categories of Christians (though such support is pretty broad). The performers in question are pretty good at mouthing biblical-sounding platitudes sans context to justify their silence, so there is nothing particularly informative about the article in the end except that large-scale national media continues to have less-than-zero clue of how to report on religion.

Still, though, the article does, in a sideways fashion, set me to thinking about the very different business of planning and preparing music for congregations to sing. (Note: I am not particularly interested in parsing the relationship between that music genre and congregational singing at this point; my interest is particularly not in offering particular critiques of musical styles per se, except so far as the theological content songs of whatever style may or may not offer. So, no comment there. As for CCM, whichever order the C's go, it's not a genre I follow these days. I'm mostly listening to jazz.)

The essential thesis of the article seems to be that such performers avoid comment in their songs because they don't want to lose their audience. Apparently such audiences are regarded as pretty controlling and quick to take vengeance on those who stray from the "true faith," which I guess is defined as whatever they think? There is in that fear, though, a lesson for the mainline pastor whose challenge is to select and prepare hymns and songs that, like the scriptures themselves and the prayers we pray, encompass a full and representative range of the the human response to God.

Given that need, there is a clear and present danger in being trapped in an extreme reliance on one particular style or another of songs for the church to the degree that particular styles tend to associate exclusviely or nearly so with particular theological postures. And no, dear pastor, I'm not going to name names. The theological discernment is your job, just as it is with scripture and prayer and liturgy and confession.

That said, I'm not above being unable to make the leap to use particular hymns, until it becomes impossible to avoid doing so. It's pretty much impossible to avoid singing "Seek ye first" (one of my least favorite bits of religious song ever) when your sermon is on the very scripture passage quoted in the song. The one hymn I can think of that I simply cannot bring myself to choose at this point in whatever ministry I have is, in fact, in a musical style that I find at least kind of interesting.

I can't bring myself to use "For everyone born," Glory to God #769, in worship. Musically it is an interesting or at least distinctive song, with a slow and even subdued tune marked by sometimes challenging syncopations and off-beats, that gains a bit more energy and uplift at the refrain. The music might be challenging to get some congregations to sing, but I can't get around the fourth stanza. To put it bluntly, I can't ask an abuse victim to be at table with her/his abuser. Leaving aside any theological questions or arguments, as pastoral care goes it feels like (swear word alert!) shit. Maybe my mind will change in the future, but as of right now I can't use that hymn no matter how popular it is. (And no, I'm not really looking to get into any arguments on the subject.) I have thankfully never been a victim of abuse, and I don't even want to come close to presuming what victims of abuse should have to go through in worship.

On the other end of the spectrum, the desire to curry the congregation's favor does put you, dear pastor, at risk of a kind of theological imprisonment. Not all musical styles are necessarily locked into particular theological topics or modes, but some are, and if you can't stray from that style when the need for a lament or something else arises, you've got a problem (this one I have seen from experience, though thankfully I wasn't the one in charge).

Musical choices have consequences, and sometimes those aren't always clear or expected. My only recommendation to you, dear pastor, is to keep your theological-discernment hat on at all times, and never let it be knocked off by a gust of popularity. You will likely have plenty of opportunities to "play favorites" in your church, but those can't stand in the way of being able to sing a hard word when it is necessary to face painful realities or hard truths.

As much as you cannot avoid hard scriptures at times, you're going to need the hard songs to go with them.

Lament is just one possible hard choice one might need to make...