Community Parson: To be human is to embody music

Sunday, June 24, 2012

To be human is to embody music

Memorial Service
June 23, 2012

1 Thessalonians 4:13-17
John 6:37-40

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

This passage from the First Letter to the Church in Thessalonika is about the future. It describes what the Christian believes will happen at the end of days. It depicts something which must be terrifying but also glorious, as all who will then be alive will be reunited with all who have gone before. It is a scene of great drama, and of great movement, and of great sound. It cannot be a surprise to us humans that the end of days is accompanied by great music.

Anthropologists frequently describe “the thing” that humans are made for: the animal who thinks. The animal who remembers. The animal with the opposable thumb. But this passage indicates that the human could be named “the animal who sings.” The human body itself is made to be an instrument. When we make sound, it is never just blah blah blah. It has meaning and structure. The tones are connected to each other in precise relationships. The sounds we make not only make sense, they make beauty. We know this, in our very bones.

About a year ago, a movie came out about some of the ancient cave painting in southern France. The paintings are astounding, and date from 37,000 to 11,000 years ago. But the movie showed something of human creation even older than the paintings: a flute, carved from the bone of a bird, from a cave in Germany, that was 40,000 years old. One of the scientists made a meticulous replica of that 40,000-year-old flute, and discovered that it plays a perfect pentatonic scale. In a pentatonic scale, the notes are precisely one-fifth apart.

This is not a coincidence, in a 40,000 year-old flute, carved from the bone of a bird. The person who made this flute already knew music, already understood the relationships between tones that made sense, that made beauty, that were pleasing to the ear. The person who made this flute already knew what it sounded like to make a note one-fifth higher than the one she had just sung. The person who made this flute did not invent the pentatonic scale any more that Stravinsky invented the 12-tone scale. The person who made this flute already heard that music, deep inside her or his own bones, and used the material at hand to fashion an instrument to amplify the sounds of her or his own body – the very essence of what it means to be human – out into the world. From that ancient flute until the last trumpet sounds, to be human is to embody music. It is the gift of the creator, embedded in our very bodies, one more sign of the incarnation, God not only with us, but within us.

I was not here, Peter, when you and Judy were parishioners at St. David’s, but many people have told me stories of your time here, and what an important and beloved part of this community you both were. Many of these stories involve music. Many were told with love and compassion about being with Judy as she retreated deeper and deeper into herself, not always sure where she was or what she was doing. But it was the music, one friend said, that always caught her attention, that brought her back to herself and to you, Peter. She could hear the music, she could recognize your voice. From deep inside the core of her being, she heard that music and she knew that she was alive, and that everything made sense and she was loved.

Judy died on Easter Day. The voice of the archangel, and the trump of God were just too alluring to her – she could no longer resist their call. You have gathered all of us here today, Peter, to remind us of that – to remind us that the music God gives us is at the core of what makes us human, and what connects us to God. It is what has tied us all together for thousands of years, and will tie us all together in the life to come.

Paleontologist Wulf Hein playing a replica of the 40,000-year-old flute

from The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a film by Werner Herzog

No comments:

Post a Comment

Missional church and the arts

What if we thought about church in another way, as "a small community that [moves] into a particular area (often one with a lot of deprivation and poverty) ... seeking to follow Christ but their focus is simply helping transform their community -- in arts, environment, in social needs, with youth and so on."

These are churches, as the English church missioner named Jonny Baker, "are not focused on growing big -- but more like the yeast of the kingdom that Jesus talked about infecting the wider batch of dough. ..." Such churches, Baker says, face "the challenge of weaning members off their addiction to consumer approaches to church where they get their fix of worship and teaching and meeting with friends before they could properly engage in this more local, outward-focused community approach (maybe we need a 12 step detox programme for leaving consumer church!?)"

We may benefit from thinking this way, as we explore how to connect our treasure, which is the Celebration of the Arts, into parts of the community that could use more art.

Thanks to the Patheos blog for sending this thought my way ...

"A prayer book even an atheist would love"

It does seem a teensy bit arrogant for a 21st century author to claim that he "edited" The Book of Common Prayer, but Brian Cummings seems to have added considerable value to familiar red book we find in our pews. In this 2011 volume (Oxford University Press), we can find the full texts of the 1549, 1559 and 1662 Prayer Books, along with introductions, explanations, notes and glossary. The review in the September 2012 issue of The Atlantic, gives the book a glowing recommendation -- both in its edited and "explained" form and in the original, which as the book upon which all prayer in our language is based "shaped the inner life and branded the tongue of the English-speaking peoples. Its phrases and rhythms did not merely enter the language. They largely defined the language. " Read more of the review here, and if you read it, let us know how you liked it!!

What I read - 2012

FINISHED:

At Simon's INSISTENCE I read The Hunger Games. Some parts I had to skim through, because the depictions of these young people fighting each other to the death was at times too gruesome, but it was overall well worth the read. NOW I have to get on with # 2 in the series

Dennis Lehane's A Given Day. Everything comes together in a slightly staged but effective way in 1919 Boston: anarchists, molasses, racism, repression and the Boston police strike. J. Edgar Hoover makes some unflattering cameos. I must say it is kind of Ragtime as it would be dramatized by Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg and Ben Affleck. It was in the days when you could tell what Boston block someone grew up on by the accent. The Irish don't come off all too well. Southie is a place to avoid in this prelude to The Depahted. It's good, though a little too graphically violent and written like a movie script. Let's just say Whitey Bulger came by his proclivities naturally.

Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman

quite charming and lovely; a peek into the modest domestic life and extraordinary yearnings of a summer community of Orthodox Jews in the Catskills

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Also saw the Swedish version of the first book.

The reminders of domestic terror in the most intimate sense are deeply unsettling. The author reminds of the percentage of Swedish women who are abused, beaten, left for dead, even. It is an all-too-steady drumbeat beneath human society.

Meanwhile, I found a new collection of stories, that is easier to read before bed. I heard the most astounding story on Selected Shorts: "The Mappist" by Barry Lopez. You MUST read it. Before you know it, you are in another world, that shines the most wonderful light on this place we inhabit and how we live in it.

I had a brief flirtation with a few of Joyce Carol Oates short stories. Bracing. I am always on the look-out for her perceptive comments about upstate New York.

Done with Cheever, and LOVED it. Again. If you read nothing else, read "The Death of Justina." Then again, I also like, "Goodbye, My Brother." Cheever; the chronicler of a world falling apart.

This summer ...
Middlemarch by George Eliot. This wonderful story of the intertwined lives of villagers contains the requisite English characters of pompous rectors, impoverished strivers and beautiful young women. It's like reading Trollope: you'll find someone you know in Middlemarch.
and
The Collected Stories of John Cheever. A perennial favorite. Poignant stories of families in mid-century middle America. Reading it again is a bit like Mad Men, where you are glued, almost in horror, at the train wreck you know is about to happen in these people's lives.

Responding to the Unspeakable

The shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in the days right before Christmas, with the deaths of small children and the people trying to protect them, wrench our hearts like nothing else. However we respond to this tragedy -- with silence, with weeping, with anger, with resolve to work so that something like this will never happen again -- all of our reactions are understandable. We need ways to regain our footing and imagine how we will live in the world as it is now, in this world in which we experience yet more grief and sadness.

On Sunday, December 16, the Prayers of the People at St. David's Church were in the words of parishioners and preachers, some from the very day of the tragedy. Find the text of those prayers on our Forming Disciples blog.