From the storied Chapel of King's College, Cambridge, England, comes an argument for the primacy of the daily office: Matins (Morning Prayer) and Evensong (Evening Prayer).
[The services of Matins and Evensong] are made out of layers of tradition which are much older. The medieval services drew on the patterns and content of worship in Christian churches of the first centuries. They in turn drew on the worship of the Jewish synagogues, which themselves depended on the traditional Jewish scriptures which Christians call the Old Testament.Service Booklet. Introductory Note, p. 2. King's College Chapel, Cambridge, England.
Having placed the services in their historical context, the anonymous author of this introduction (could it possibly be Eric Milner-White?) then elucidates our place in this ancient pattern.
It follows that we need to do two things in order to enter into the spirit of these services. First we have to be patient and relaxed enough to allow a long tradition to have its say. Then we should allow our own thoughts and feelings to become closer to us than life outside admits. These two things are not separate. In the tradition there are, along with what is strange, strong expressions of our basic feelings about ourselves and God. And it is precisely the cool and ancient order of the services which gives a space and frame, as well as cues, for reflections on our regrets and hopes and gratitudes. The best analogy of it is in a relation of love. There, as here, we find ourselves by attending to another. So we may learn here a little of what we need and enjoy everywhere.Service Booklet. Introductory Note, p. 2. King's College Chapel, Cambridge, England. Emphasis added.
It's not surprising to find "a relation of love" when we consider the Matins and Evensong liturgies, or really any liturgy of the church. Beauty is both intrinsic to and the goal of liturgy.
John O'Donohue, quoted on this blog earlier this month in Evensong - the surrender to, remarks on the human soul's hunger for beauty. "In the experience of beauty we awaken and surrender in the same act."
This brings immediately to mind these words of Thomas Merton's No Man is an Island: "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." And do we not find and lose ourselves in the experience of love?
O'Donohue goes on to say that at its essence, beauty is love. (And not just any shade of love either, but Eros!)
To awaken and surrender. To find and lose. When we surrender and lose ourselves in the historic, authentic liturgy of the church, we awaken to love. One needs only to look to Christian hymnody to see what a archetypal spiritual image this is.
Perhaps the most famous words in this vein are those by John Newton
Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.
A lesser-known hymn by Elizabeth Cosnett (b. 1936) gets at the contradiction in trying to "find" God.
Can we by searching find out God or formulate his ways? Can numbers measure what he is or words contain his praise? Although his being is too bright for human eyes to scan, his meaning lights our shadowed world through Christ, the Son of Man. Our boastfulness is turned to shame, our profit counts as loss, when earthly values stand beside the manger and the cross. We may there recognize his light, may kindle in its rays, find there the source of penitence, the starting-point of praise. There God breaks in upon our search, makes birth and death his own; he speaks to us in human terms to make his glory known.
An anonymous 19th century hymn also gets at the paradox of finding the One who finds
I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me; it was not I that found, O Savior true; no, I was found of thee.
And in one of the grandest lines of hymnody, by the great Charles Wesley, we see that the goal of all this spiritual hide and seek is really so that we can lose ourselves in the beauty that is the subject and object of our worship.
Finish then thy new creation; pure and spotless let us be; let us see thy great salvation perfectly restored in thee: changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love, and praise.
And so it is with Evensong. If we attend to Evensong "in a relation of love", the great tradition of beauty which permeates this service will awaken us and cause us to surrender in the same act.
Evensong, in a noisy, demanding world, offers something rare. Our churches should offer it, and our congregations should be encouraged to cherish it.
Evensong should be loved.
Labels: Charles Wesley, Elizabeth Cosnett, Evensong, John Newton, John O'Donohue, King's College (Cambridge), liturgy, Thomas Merton
I've been confronted this week with my deep poverty of imagination and understanding on the concept of "power" as it relates to art. Part of my deep frustration with the powerlessness of which I wrote a few days ago is that I don't rightly know what the concept means as related to art, music, church music, the church itself, etc.
“You can kill people with sound.”
And so it seems to us at the blog at Sinden.org that the time is right hold a colloquium on the questions of power and art, and explore how these concepts relate to music within the liturgy of the church.
The ever helpful Maria Popova gets us started on the value of arts
This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.
Wholeheartedness leads to thoughts of Brené Brown, and (artistic) vulnerability of which I expect we will have plenty to say later. Note that the title of her TED talk uses the P word: The Power of Vulnerability
Which leads us to think maybe the power of art as found in its vulnerability could really be thought of as "weakness". I'd love to unpack the paradox here, and I may later reach for a title by theologian Marva Dawn, Joy in our Weakness.
There are moments on this blog when "power", as it is connected to art, music, and the church, has already surfaced.
Here are a few:
“If we consider what sort of music we should want to hear on entering a church we should surely, in describing our ideal, say first of all that it must be something different from what is heard elsewhere; that it should be a sacred music devoted to its purpose, a music whose peace should still passion; whose dignity should strengthen our faith; whose unquestioned beauty should find a home in our hearts to cheer us in life and death. What a powerful good such music would have”.
“You can kill people with sound.”
It makes you appreciate the tremendous power of particularity. If your identity is formed by hard boundaries, if you come from a specific place, if you embody a distinct musical tradition, if your concerns are expressed through a specific paracosm, you are going to have more depth and definition than you are if you grew up in the far-flung networks of pluralism and eclecticism, surfing from one spot to the next, sampling one style then the next, your identity formed by soft boundaries, or none at all.David Brooks, we of course interpreted his remarks are referring to Anglican church music, others related it to Anglican liturgy
And these words of music critic Alex Ross, which find their way on to this blog for the first time:
“Art does not stand apart from reality; if it did, it would have no life in it, no light, no darkness, no power.”"As If Music Could Do No Harm." The New Yorker, Cultural Comment Blog, 20 August 2014
“Art does not stand apart from reality; if it did, it would have … no power.”
As I look back over the ten year history of this blog (has it really been that long?) it seems that strands of this colloquium have been emerging for some time. I'm happy to try to collect these different strands into a more directed conversation. I am eager to see what emerges.
To bring this brief tour full circle for now, art, which Alex Ross so powerfully notes "does not stand apart from reality", has a peculiar kind of power. I believe this power is best explained by Thomas Merton summarizes when he says
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
Labels: Alex Ross, authenticity, church music, David Brooks, identity, liturgy, Marva Dawn, music, power and art, Thomas Merton, wholeheartedness
One of the statements that has stuck in my head ever since my time at the Yale Congregations Project in June was a line from David Bartlett's plenary talk:
Art we care about threatens us. –David Bartlett #YaleCP
— David Sinden (@sinden) June 22, 2013
And I'm not sure about how we care about art, I'm not sure how invested in it we really have to be, or what the threshold looks like. But the more I think about it, this is the very nature of artistic creation, it seems to me. And now I see statements like these everywhere.
What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.Greil Marcus SVA Commencement Address: How the Division of High vs. Low Robs Culture of Its Essence (from Brainpickings)
Marcus says this in a speech where he unpacks the high/low culture divide. It's a distinction that we can deny, but the divisions will never disappear, Marcus theorizes.
And this brings us to the whole question of "style," which is so often a word that stands staunchly in the divide between high-brow classical music and low-brow whatever else, stuff that so often involves plastic guitar picks.
In theory, we want this division to be denied in our worship too, don't we? I have two thoughts on this.
First, whatever music we employ, we have to be aware of it's "intrinsicalness". It is a fallacy to say that there are not "betters" and "worses" (as Martin Marty puts it) within any kind of music.
Organist David Crean writes: "In the interest of maintaining an atmosphere of tolerance, accessibility, and collegiality, we have ceded more and more of our legitimacy to popular culture." (quoted here)
And this brings me to my second point: maybe we don't or we can't deny the high/low divide in our worship.
See just a few recent articles at Patheos with titles like "Why good church music is so hard to find", "Why I've stopped singing in your church", "Why is 'Christian' music so awful?", and, just this past week, "Christian music…Why does it suck? What can be done?"
Here's a thought: industrial Contemporary Christian Music is bad because it is among the "worses" in our culture. It has little substance theologically and, because of it's high level of derivation, no value artistically. It has nothing to support it because it intentionally breaks ties with what Paul Westermeyer calls "the Te Deum and the long strand of the church's song which it represents". It doesn't speak of the orthodox faith, and it doesn't threaten us. Like popular music, we don't care about it. If we don't care about it, it doesn't threaten us.
Holiness, by definition, is something that is other. If our music is just more of the same, how are we to contemplate holiness?
And lets bring this discussion full-circle by thinking about what art is again.
"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." – Thomas Merton (via "What is art?" from Brainpickings)
If that isn't threatening, I don't know what is.
Labels: church music, David Bartlett, Thomas Merton, visual art
It occurs to me that perhaps I might offer a window on what it is to be a church musician in Holy Week. And perhaps a few other thoughts too.
This evening at the parish where I serve, we offered "Poetry and Music: Meditations for Holy Week." The Reverend the Rector chose several poems, and I set them to music, mostly at the spur of the moment. This is the third year we have done this.
As I entered this service/poetry reading/concert (what is this thing that we do, exactly?) I had several things in mind. First, something the pianist Jeremy Denk said about the last Beethoven piano sonata, Op. 111 when he performed it here on Saturday evening. He talked about how the second movement is a variation set, but that the theme eventually disappears, and that eventually "the answers overwhelm the question."
That phrase looms large in my consciousness this week. What is this thing that we do, Holy Week? There's darkness, a few candles, there's foot washing, altar stripping, moaning and groaning, more candles, more darkness, washing people in water, and suddenly it's Easter.
There was a question in here somewhere. Maybe it was "what is truth" or something like that. But the question we ask in Holy Week – if we let it – can and should be overwhelmed by the answers.
I was grateful tonight that the Rector broke the "rubric" if we can be said to have such a thing for tonight's little happening, and included the following prose by Thomas Merton's Thoughts in Solitude:
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
What wonderful reassurance for improvisation and for this life. "I have no idea where I am going."
But the answers come nonetheless.
Labels: Beethoven, church music, Holy Week, improvisation, Jeremy Denk, music, organ, poetry, Thomas Merton
Is it possible to come up with a description of Episcopal or Anglican music? Is it really distinct from the music of other churches? other religious traditions? other music?
Before answering this specific question, perhaps its scope ought to be widened: is it possible to come up with a definition for music itself? So many definitions of music, including that of the Oxford English Dictionary include words like beauty or words to that effect. Southern Harmony calls music a "succession of pleasing sounds".
I don't think that this really holds up in a post-modern milieu. The similarities between Lauridsen and Lordi essentially end under the umbrella term (terme générique parapluie) "music".
And we must be careful defining music as noise, for as John Cage proved in a work that turned the umbrella inside out (paraparapluie), 4'33", a piece of music need not have any sound at all.
The list of Anglican church choirs who perform this Cageian masterwork is surely a short one, but the contemporary Anglican liturgy is no stranger to silence. But how modern is the advent of silence in the liturgy?
Aside from the verse about the Lord being in his holy temple from Habakkuk 2:20, the American 1928 Book of Common Prayer contains no mention of this absence of noise. Rubrics in the 1979 book, however, allow for it in several places, including after each lesson.
Now if rubrics generally reflect changing practices between publication, there must have been an increase in mainstream Episcopal liturgical silence between 1928 and 1979. And if this is an example of the church naturally filling its role as a counter-cultural institution, it could have been responding to an increasing level of noise in our culture.
So if music is not a "succession of pleasing sounds" or even a succession of sounds, then perhaps music, at it's essence, is simply a succession.
In the Anglican tradition an integral succession is the Apostolic one. And the Apostolic succession contains the resonance of that hymn the disciples sang in the upper room.
In this way the Episcopal Church itself is music.
And its liturgy, and that of our lives, the succession of each journey, gathering, procession, reading, singing, preaching, believing, praying, greeting, eating and departing -- and especially the succession of silences within them -- is music.
He Who is infinite light is so tremendous in His evidence that our minds only see Him as darkness. Lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt. (The Light shines in darkness and the darkness has not understood it.)If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence.
Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1972) p. 131.
Labels: church music, liturgy, Thomas Merton
Merton Monday, the second Monday of every month on Sinden.org, features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton:
Praise is cheap today. Everything is praised. Soap, beer, toothpaste, clothing, mouthwash, movie stars, all the latest gadgets which are supposed to make life more comfortable--everything is contantly being "praised." Praise is now so overdone that everybody is sick of it . . .Are there no superlatives left for God? They have all been wasted on foods and quack medicines. There is no word left to express our adoration of Him who alone is Holy, who alone is Lord.
So we go to Him and ask help and to get out of being punished, and to mumble that we need a better job, more money, more of the things that are praised by the advertisements. And we wonder why our prayer is so often dead--gaining its only life, borrowing its only urgency from the fact that we need these things so badly.
Merton, Thomas. Praying the Psalms, Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1956.
Labels: praise, prayer, Psalms, Thomas Merton
Merton Monday, the second Monday of every month on Sinden.org, features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton:
The Church indeed likes what is old, not because it is old but rather it is "young." In the Psalms, we drink divine praise at its pure and stainless source, in all its primitive sincerity and perfection.Merton, Thomas. Praying the Psalms, p. 7. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1956.
I think it would be an apt reversal of Merton's thinking to say that what is young ("Praise music") is "old". Tired, worn-out, inauthentic.
You gotta love the Psalms. The source.
Labels: authenticity, Psalms, Thomas Merton
Merton Monday, the second Monday of every month on Sinden.org, features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton:
Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 104. New Directions Publishing.
Labels: Thomas Merton
Psalm 85:8-13
Isaiah 35:1-10
Luke 5:17-26
Summarizing today's lessons goes like this:
- righteousness and peace will kiss each other
- faithfulness will spring up from the ground
- righteousness will look down from the sky
- the desert shall rejoice and blossom
- the eyes of the blind shall be opened
- the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped
- the lame shall leap like a deer
- the tongue of the speechless sing for joy
Listen to the Pharisees when they say "We have seen strange things today".
Or Listen to Thomas Merton, who makes his regularly scheduled appearance on . . .
Merton Monday, the second Monday of every month on Sinden.org, features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton:
That which is oldest is most young and most new. There is nothing so ancient and so dead as human novelty. The "lastest" is always stillborn. It never even manages to arrive. What is really new is what was there all the time. I say, not what has repeated itself all the time; the really "new" is that which, at every moment, springs freshly into new existence. This newness never repeats itself. Yet it is so old it goes back to the earliest beginning. It is the very beginning itself, which speaks to us.Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 107. New Directions Publishing.
Labels: Advent 2006, Thomas Merton
Merton Monday, the second Monday of every month on Sinden.org, features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton:
You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt. You cannot believe in God unless you are capable of questioning the authority of predjudice, even though that prejudice may seem to be religious. Faith is not blind conformity to a prejudice--a "pre-judgement." It is a decision, a judgement that is fully and deliberately taken in the light of a truth that cannot be proven. It is not merely the acceptance of a decision that has been made by somebody else.Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 105. New Directions Publishing.
When reading this particular passage of Merton, we cannot but help think of an organist who is facing religious-seeming prejudice in Virginia.
To our overseas readers we should point out that Virginia, while north of North Carolina, is squarely in the South, and as such, is, shall we say, not very progressive.
We've mentioned Brett before, but we don't want to make it too easy for you to pick out exactly where he works, since he hasn't named his congregation in his blog: Out and About in the South.
Labels: Thomas Merton
Yesterday was the second Monday of the month, and as such it was supposed to be Merton Monday, a new regular feature on Sinden.org that features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton.
To hope is to risk frustration. Therefore, make up your mind to risk frustration.Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 104. New Directions Publishing
Labels: Thomas Merton
Today marks the beginning of a new regular feature on Sinden.org: Merton Monday. The second Monday of each month will feature an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton.
We are so convinced that past evils must repeat themselves that we make them repeat themselves. We dare not risk a new life in which the evils of the past are totally forgotten; a new life seems to imply new evils, and we would rather face evils that are already familiar. Hence we cling to the evil that has already become ours, and renew it from day to day, until we become identified with it and change is no longer thinkable.Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 106. New Directions Publishing
Labels: Thomas Merton
©MMXVII Sinden.org: a site for fun and prophet