lenten journal: don't faith alone

We’ve been spending Saturday mornings during Lent with Job at our church: coffee, fruit, pastries, and suffering – what a way to spend a weekend. I’m the discussion leader and the guy who starts the coffee pot, so I get there early to get both the pot and my mind percolating. This morning we looked at the first cycle of conversations between Job and his three alleged friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar (Zogood).

I was rereading passages, browsing through commentaries, and trying to pull my thoughts together when I came across a section in one of the commentaries that talked about the significance of Job’s physical sufferings. The world came crashing in on Job first, with the loss of his possessions, then the loss of his family, and then the infliction of the seeping, painful sores that left him scraping his skin on the dung heap. The reality of his crumbling body brought him face to face with his physical finitude. But there’s more to it than that. The commentator said the significance of the bodily ailments pointed to the fact that our bodies are “organs of perception”: each of us understands the world physically, through our senses and our experiences. We are not objective. What we see and taste and smell and touch and hear and feel is what we experience.

One of the most fascinating things about reading This Is Your Brain on Music was Levitin’s explanation of what happens physically in our brains when we hear a song, and when we are moved emotionally by a melody. The Hebrews understood something we are having to relearn as Westerners drenched in Greek dualism: body, mind, and spirit are intrinsically connected; they cannot be separated. What we experience spiritually has physical ramifications and vice versa. Our bodies are not merely temporal shells for our eternal souls; every last bit of our beings makes us who we are and influences who we can become.

When Ginger was doing her doctoral work at ETS in Detroit, she took a class called “The Body as a Means of Grace.” The textbook was Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork. I remembered the title as I was reading the commentary. During our study time, Ginger talked about the physical work they did – movement, Reiki, meditation – and the spiritual experiences that came about as a result. Our bodies’ knowledge is intimate and direct. It even shows up in our language in ways that slip by us: we are touched by songs and books, moved by music and movies. The words are as physical as the experiences.

When I was on staff at University Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas, one of the pastors from University Christian Church, down the block, came to our staff meeting to talk about similarities and differences in our worship services. When we asked why they observed Communion every week, she answered, “Because we want to experience Christ with all of our senses in worship, not just by sight and hearing.” Then she quoted Psalm 34: “O, taste and see that the Lord is good.”

My Australian blog buddy, Simon Carey Holt, just began a new pastorate and writes beautifully about his first taste of community there:

Once installed last Sunday as the pastor of Collins Street, the very first thing I got to do was to lead the church at the table ... the breaking of bread and sharing of wine. I am glad that’s where it began.

For me, there is no better image of salvation than of a table prepared by God. It is a place of open invitation where all estrangement disappears. It’s a place of extraordinary intimacy but never exclusivity, one of challenge but never judgement; a shared table of healing, sustenance and hope. What’s more, as people of that table we are called to beckon the stranger with the same open hospitality that draws us.

Communion is both a metaphorical and material image of the physicality of our faith. We eat together, we feed each other, and there are always leftovers. The reality that my perception of the world, and of God, is only available to me through my physical senses, meaning there is no way I can be objective and that truth is always going to be larger than I am, means faith, like life, has to be a team sport. Figuring out our faith is the live action version of the fable of the blind men and the elephant: each of us hold of a different part and we need each other for a more complete view.

Don’t eat alone; don’t faith alone, either.

Around our table this morning were some who know firsthand the despair of depression, some who are living through the pain of broken relationships, some who are grieving over the loss of loved ones, some who are living with cancer and other serious illnesses, some contemplating major life changes, and there were only ten of us around the table. As we read aloud what the three friends had to say to Job in the midst of his pain, we found ourselves on both sides of the conversation. We knew what it felt like for well-meaning people to say things that did not help because they felt like they needed to say something to cope with their own sense of helplessness and we knew what it felt like to be one of those well-meaning people wondering what to say and wishing we could do something to help. Sometimes, the best we can do is remember a line from Alice in Wonderland: “Don’t just do something; stand there.”

Tonight, I am reminded of an old story from Martin Bell’s wonderful book, The Way of the Wolf, called “The Porcupine Whose Name Didn’t Matter.” I offer it here, even though it makes for an extra long post, because it belongs.

Once upon a time there was a cautious Porcupine name Joggi. Joggi lived with the mystery of his own life, much as any other porcupine, but he was exceedingly cautious. Joggi lived and loved, laughed and cried tentatively. One might say that anger, frustration, and tenderness had been so delicately woven into the fabric of his person as to make it difficult for us to perceive.

Joggi was cautious in the face of the mystery of life. So cautious, in fact, that almost nobody knew his name. Most of the animals in the forest who had seen the near-sighted porcupine moving slowly about, poking his pointed black nose into the vegetation, bristling and puffing, squinting and stumbling. Few had spoken to him.

Now and then, someone would say hello and attempt to strike up a conversation. It never really led to anything. When asked what his name was, he would answer: "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what my name is, can't you see, what difference does it make? It doesn't matter". More often than not, that would be the end of the conversation.

Joggi could not embrace another, he would not tell anyone his name. And the result was almost always the same -- the other animals avoided him. With one exception, this was Gamiel, the raccoon. It did not bother him when the prickly little porcupine was silent for hours at a time. And he never even thought to ask about Joggi's name. Gamiel could remember very little before the accident, and much of what had happened since was blurred somewhere in the recesses of his brain, all but lost to memory.

Raccoons are generally alert and resourceful creatures with keen perceptions and excellent memories. But all of this had changed. There had been a flash of light and then something hard ripped into the side of his head. His whole body convulsed with pain, white-hot, thrashing, 'God-when-will-it-stop' pain, that pitched him bleeding from the tree into the under-bush. Screaming pain that shrieked behind his eyes the one and only word of hope he knew, and then as suddenly as it had come, it was gone.

Everything changed. He did not even look like a raccoon. The whole left side of his head was missing, he could barely pull himself along with his right front leg. Gamiel had only to look at himself in the forest pond to realize why everyone hurried past when he called out to them. Except, ever since the accident, Gamiel had been totally blind.

Joggi found Gamiel about 2 days after the pain had stopped, and approximately 3 hours after the raccoon had given up all hope. "Is someone there?", Gamiel whispered. At first, Joggi didn't say anything, the near-sighted porcupine moved closer. "You are a raccoon", he said out loud. "Oh yes, indeed I am", Gamiel stuttered. "Only I think something awful has happened to me. I cannot see anything at all, and I can barely move. Please tell me what has happened to me. Am I going to die? Why won't anyone stop when I cry out? Why can't I see? Please, I'm afraid".

And in Gamiel's searching, empty, sightless eyes, tears began to form. Joggi sniffed and said to himself: answer him. Don't just stand there with your spines bristling and your heart pounding, answer him. Joggi spoke with a steady and quiet voice: "I believe you have been shocked. I cannot be certain, of course, but that is my opinion. Are you in a great deal of pain?" "No, at first there was pain, but I can't feel anything now. In fact, my whole left side is numb. No, no more pain. Just, well, nothing".

Joggi was silent. His tiny body shivering, breathing labored, short, difficult breaths. Gamiel spoke in a hoarse voice: "Are you still there?". Joggi's heart beat faster. "Yes, I'm here. I was just wondering what to do now?". "Oh, you don't have to do anything. Honestly, I mean that, you don't have to do anything at all. Just stay with me for a little while. Just stay there. Just don't go away. Please. I'm afraid. You won't go away, will you?" Joggi swallowed hard. "No, no I won't go away". "Thank you", Gamiel said quietly. And then the wounded raccoon fell asleep.

Joggi stood beside Gamiel all that day. Then when evening came, a cool breeze made his spines whistle slightly, the sound woke the raccoon. "Are you there?". "Yes, I told you I wouldn't go away". "I'm hungry". "I thought you might be", Joggi replied. "Can you move at all?". Gamiel stretched his right leg forward and pulled himself along the ground. "Good for you", said Joggi, "that will do nicely. I can bring you food, but you will need to maneuver for yourself in order to get water. I believe you have enough strength to reach the pond, it isn't very far, and I can guide you directly to it. Come on, let's see how it goes".

That was how it began. An unusual partnership perhaps, certainly the rest of the animals in the forest were surprised to see the pair of them moving slowly about, managing to live from one day to the next without really doing much of anything. Occasionally Joggi would describe something for Gamiel, or answer a question, or direct the crippled raccoon toward a tasty morsel of food. Gamiel, for his part, chattered happily, basked in the sun, and generally enjoyed his friend's company.

They made a home for one another, Joggi and Gamiel. Not a regular home, exactly, not a place. More like a shelter from the excessive pain that each of them had known. A coming together of two lonely and frightened creatures. A bond of trust that asked no questions, expected nothing at all except the merciful being together that made waking up tomorrow possible.

Joggi was with Gamiel for one full year before the injured raccoon finally died. It was a quiet event, almost a surprise, but that Joggi had been expecting for so long. Gamiel's strength just finally gave out. "You know, I've been expecting this for quite some time now", Joggi said to the raccoon, who lay their on the ground no longer able to hear. "I'm surprised that you managed to stay alive as long as you did. I knew the day that I found you that it couldn't last, and yet, well, I hoped it might have been a little longer. Do you know what I mean? You see, I never knew anybody very well before. Not that we ever talked much, or anything like that, but I felt like I knew you anyway, even without talking. I have a really hard time talking to anybody, or getting to know anybody. And nobody ever wants to get very close to me because of all these spines that I have sticking out of me. I don't suppose that you ever knew that I had spines sticking out all over me, did you? They're sort of like needles, and they're sharp. I guess they scare everybody a bit. I hope you don't mind my talking so much."

"I really don't know why I'm talking to you now. I really suppose it's just that I had a little more to tell you before you died. I have been wanting to say this for almost a year and never quite found the right time to do it. It's too late now, I realize, but I've been wanting to tell you that it has been an honor to meet you, and that you indeed are a very handsome raccoon. And that I would like to consider you my friend.".

The porcupine cleared his throat. Tears dropped onto his nose. “Tell him,” he said to himself, “don't just stand there with your spines bristling and your heart pounding, tell him.”

"Oh, and by the way, I'd like to tell you what my name is. It's a funny name, I suppose, but I'd like you to know what it is. It's Joggi." Without another word, the tiny porcupine turned away from Gamiel's lifeless body, and began to cry.

“Hospitality is salvation,” says Diana Butler Bass. I think she’s on to something, as are the rest of us.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: job's story

Over the years of writing this blog, I’ve made some connections with other blog writers. I wish I knew a better way to say it, but our vocabulary hasn’t caught up with our lives just yet. These folks are more than acquaintances because we have shared things about ourselves with each other, but they aren’t friends because we have a strictly virtual relationship, if you will. If I could find a way to become friends, I think I would choose to make a trip to Canada first to find Bill Kinnon. Something in the way he writes and thinks, and the role music plays in his life, makes me think we would hit it off swimmingly, that we would find we could trust the resonance we feel in cyber-space. That very resonance is what I’m leaning into tonight from his post about Job and Thomas.

It caught my eye because I’m beginning a four-week Saturday morning study on Job at church, using story as starting place. By that I mean, I want to start with the art of the tale, rather than see how fast we can bring our theological presuppositions to bear. What if we let ourselves begin with, “Once upon a time, there was a man named Job,” and see where that might take us. Bill has given me a great way to think about the story by sharing a quote from a sermon by Fleming Rutledge:

Now if God had answered Job in the way that we would expect, with soothing explanations and comforting reassurances, then the answer to the question, “Is there a God beyond what we can imagine?” would have to be, No. Anyone can imagine a God who does what we expect. The reason that so many people have complained that God’s answer to Job is no answer at all is that they want a God who fits their preconceptions. Job, however, is manifestly satisfied. The God who is really God has come to him and has revealed himself as the one who was already present, already at work before there was anyone to imagine him. God is the author of creation; the creation is not the author of God. This was revealed to Job by the living voice and presence of God’s own self. That was enough.

Yeah, I know I’m already jumping to the final scene before I even had my first Saturday session, but I love the idea that what “satisfied” Job, after everything that had happened and all that he had had to put up with from his alleged friends, was a God who didn’t give him the answers he expected. One of the ways Daniel Levitin talks about the songs that matter most to us – the ones that get under our skin and into our hearts – is they set the stage by offering a recognizable melody pattern and then, when we think we know where its going, take an unexpected turn in pitch or rhythm or timbre that makes us take notice: we remember the songs that catch us by surprise and expand the pattern in new directions. So it is with the melody of theology, with the songs God sings.

Bill goes on to use a quote that wasn’t far from where my mind went:

I am reminded of the children in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe who are afraid of Aslan when they first hear of him. When Lucy asks if he's "safe," Mr. Beaver replies, "Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he is good."

The Narnia scene I thought of comes from the children’s second visit through the wardrobe, all of them a bit more grown up. Lucy, the youngest, is the one who sees Aslan and runs to meet him.

“Aslan, Aslan. Dear Aslan. At last.”
…She gazed up into the large wise face. “Welcome child,” he said.
“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

However far I go, or however much I grow, there is more God than there is me. When comfort is my primary need, I love the image of falling into the grace of a God whose compassion exceeds my imagination. When I’m working to make meaning of my life, the reality of a God who is more than the answers to my questions, whose sense of humor baffles my wit, whose capacity for irony and nuance makes my story telling read like a phone book, whose tenacious love outshines anything I know experientially is disquieting. Once I get past what I know to be true and still struggle to accept: there is a God and it’s not me, the disquietude offers room to breathe and belong.

I know you can do all things
and nothing you wish is impossible…
I have spoken of the unspeakable,
and tried to grasp the infinite…
I had heard of you with my ears,
but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I will be quiet,
comforted that I am dust.
(Job 42:1-6)

“I’ve really got to use my imagination,” Gladys Knight used to sing, “to think of good reasons to keep on keeping on.” The first we were breathed into existence by a God who is crazy enough to imagine us, in the first place, and tenacious enough to not give up on us. As Pierce Pettis sings,

when you rise up just to fall again
God believes in you
deserted by your closest friend
God believes in you
when you're betrayed with a kiss
you turn your cheek to another fist
it doesn't have to end like this
God believes in you

Now that’s a story worth telling.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: only connect

The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography of neurochemical release and uptake between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems. When we love a piece of music, it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times in our lives. Your brain on music is all about, as Francis Crick repeated as we left the lunchroom, connections. (This Is Your Brain on Music 192)

The story of the chapter that ended with the above paragraph was one full of connections, human more than neurological, as Levitin talked about researchers he had read and met and worked (the Crick, for example, is of Crick and Watson, the discoverers of DNA) with to do what it took to figure out what happens to our brains on music. If I knew much about science, I’m sure the names he mentions would be hall of fame ready, but his point has less to do with name dropping that it does with how one discovery or realization connected to what someone else was doing, or what questions they were asking; most of the time, the connections that surfaced showed up with at least some element of surprise.

I can’t hear the word connect without thinking of one of my favorite novels, E. M. Forster’s Howards End because connection lies at the heart of a story that tries to reach across the class lines of English society.

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire . . . Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Last night, Bill Mallonee sang at our church. I know Bill because of John Brashier, who was my youth intern in Fort Worth and then invited Ginger and me to help with youth camp at his own church. Bill, with his band Vigilantes of Love, sang a concert at camp. Later that year, he came to Gordon College, north of Boston, and we drove up to hear him. That night we met Christopher Williams, who became a good friend and who is a wonderful singer/songwriter himself. Last spring, John asked me to come take part in a writer’s conference at his church in Jackson, Mississippi. He also invited Tim Youmans, who had been his youth intern and is now a soon-to-be Episcopal priest, as well as a singer/songwriter. The third leader was a person named Justin McRoberts, whom we only knew through his songs – specifically his cover of Patty Griffin’s “When It Don’t Come Easy.” Justin McRoberts is on the cusp of releasing a new project, Through Songs I Was First Undone, which is a collection of the songs that helped him make connections. I just noticed that if you preorder before February 23 (there’s still time), you get a bonus EP; Christopher Williams is singing with him on two of the tracks, one of which is the Patty Griffin song.

Only connect.

The more Levitin talks about all we have learned about how the brain functions and what neurons are firing and what processes are at work, the more there is to explore and explain. What we know best is how much more there is to know. Life and faith are no different. I can no more decide to just go about my business here in my little part of the planet than one of my neurons can decide to fire independently without cause or consequence. Both my neuron and I are inextricably connected in some ways we can comprehend and many, many others that are inexplicable and even invisible.

One of the folks connected in several ways to Bill et al. was David Gentiles, my friend who died a little over two months ago now. There aren’t too many circles in my life to which David didn’t have some sort of connection. As I was writing, I thought about a blog post he wrote a little over a year ago talking about his connection with his three daughters; the musings came about because he was listening to John Denver (on vinyl) singing “Poems, Prayers, and Promises.” The chorus catches me by surprise tonight, thinking of him.

I have to say it now it’s been a good life all in all
it’s really fine to have a chance to hang around
to lie there by the fire and watch the evening fire
while all my friends and my old lady
sit and watch the sun go down
and talk of poems prayers and promises
and things that we believe in
how sweet it is to love someone
how right it is to care
how long it’s been since yesterday
and what about tomorrow
what about our dreams
and all the memories we’ve shared

Connect the prose and the passion and love will be exalted. Gather in close and sing to each other. The connections run deep and resonant, my friends, across the hemispheres of the world as well as the brain, across miles and years, through synapses and songs, through heartbreak and hopelessness, outlasting depression and despair, holding us together because it is who we were created to be, as the old song says: we are one in the bond of Love. Patty Griffin wrote

when you break down
I’ll drive out and find you
when you forget my love
I’ll try to remind you
and stand by you
when it don’t come easy

Only connect: it’s the whole of the sermon.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: re-member

I was reminded of a Madeleine L’Engle story last Sunday because Jake, one of our divinity students, mentioned it in his sermon last Sunday. L’Engle spoke of a couple with a very precocious young daughter who was not thrilled at the prospect of having to share the house with a soon-to-arrive baby brother. Soon after they brought the baby home from the hospital, the little girl announced she needed to see the baby – alone. The parents were a bit hesitant, but the girl was insistent, so they agreed, but stood with the door cracked so they could hear what was happening without her knowledge. They listened as she pulled a chair over and climbed up into the crib with the infant, and then they heard her say, “Tell me about God; I’m forgetting.”

Life, faith, and memory are inextricably connected. How, then, do we remember?

Daniel Levitin is making me think. Hard. Our brains, he explains, create frameworks of understanding, or schemas, in order to make sense of the world and to give it some sort of structure and form. Because change is a constant and because our brain is constantly receiving new information, those schemas are always under revision and are an extension of memory: part of the structure the brain creates depends on what it remembers of what happened before. We remember names, dates, experiences, smells, sounds, images – to name a few – and, of course, songs. But when we talk about remembering music, we must also remember:

The most important way that music differs from visual art is that it is manifested over time. As tones unfold sequentially, they lead us – our brains and our minds – to make predictions about what will come next. (125)

As the brain give structure and form to the good vibrations, it has to do so over time, in real time, as the melody unfolds. There’s more:

Most astonishing was that the left-hemisphere regions that we found we active tin tracking musical structure were the very same one that are active when deaf people are communicating by sign language . . . We found evidence for the existence of a brain region that processes structure in general, when the structure is conveyed over time. (130)

Making music in our brain is multi-tasking at its best, as is remembering the songs we’ve heard. Making memories is much like making sense of the vibrations: the brain goes back to put back together – to re-member – what it knew before. Our faith is as old as the songs. We’ve been singing about and to Whoever’s Out There as long as we’ve been able to imagine that there is a God and it’s not us. Faith, like music and memory, is conveyed over time.

The Genesis account of how the universe came into being uses a week as a metaphor to say God didn’t just belch us into being, but took time to let the oceans flow, the mountains rise, the creatures find their places, and the sun to set. And it was good. Jesus didn’t drop into the world as a fully formed Messiah, but came into the world as a baby born in a barn and grew up over time. On the night he was betrayed, he ate with his disciples and said, “As often as you do this, remember me.” And then they sang a song together.

How, then, do we re-member who God is? How do we put things back together over time?

A number of years ago, Ginger and I got to go to Israel and Palestine. The Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives was one of the places where our guide said we could be sure we were walking where Jesus had walked. (Some of the other sites were not so verifiable.) The root systems of the olive trees there go back to Jesus’ time. I had recently been in a production of Godspell, and as I sat in the garden I remembered one of the songs I had sung:

on the willows there
we hung up our lyres
for our captors there
required of us songs
and our tormentors mirth
saying sing us one of the songs of Zion
sing us one of the songs of Zion
but how can we sing
sing the Lord’s songs
in a foreign land

The Israelites held captive in Babylon couldn’t imagine how to re-member their songs and their faith when they were so far from home. How could they put the structure of their lives back together when they were far from what they knew to be safe and secure? But that is when we need to sing most, for it is the songs and the repertoire of memories they carry in their melodies, that help us re-member ourselves, re-member our faith, so we can do what all the king’s horses could not.

A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times in your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music. (166)

Over all the years of youth camps I have done, Communion has been a last night tradition. One year, Ginger and I were at camp with John Brashier and, as we finished Communion, I put Sarah McLachlan in the CD player:

I will remember you
will you remember me

The emotion in the room was palpable. “That song is full of memories,” he said.

“It seems like a good time to unpack them,” I answered. We stood and watched as the memories rode in on the words and music and the individuals in the room re-membered themselves and put themselves back together, again.

Come, tell me about God. I keep forgetting. Let us re-member together.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: the melody of theology

I graduated from high school in 1974, which means all my high school dances were before disco took over, which is to say we had live bands. One of my friends was on the committee that picked the bands for our dances. If they could play “Free Ride” and “La Grange” they got the gig. The little bit of recorded music that was played was saved for when the band took a break and was mostly all slow dances. The best slow dance of them all was “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues. Those of us who owned the record of Days of Future Passed knew that “Nights” went on beyond the radio edit into a poem, “Late Lament,” that finished with these words:

cold hearted orb that rules the night
removes the colors from our sight
red is grey and yellow, white
but we decide which is right
and which is an illusion

I thought of the closing lines of the poem as I read further into This Is Your Brain on Music this afternoon because Levitin was discussing perceptual illusions and the brain. He used Kaniza diagram to demonstrate how our brains perceive what is not actually there.

No matter how much I tell myself the triangles aren’t actually there, I still see them. So what does that mean about what I see? Is it “there” or not? It comes down to what we mean by that word illusion. The dictionary says, in psychology, it means, “a perception that represents what is perceived in a way different from the way it is in reality.” Then it says reality means, “something that constitutes a real or actual thing, as distinguished from something that is merely apparent.” Levitin has more to say:

Perhaps the ultimate illusion in music is the illusion of structure and form. There is nothing in a sequence of notes themselves that creates the rich emotional associations we have with music, nothing about a scale, a chord, or a chord sequence that intrinsically causes us to expect a resolution. Our ability to make sense of music depends on experience, and on neural structures that can learn and modify themselves with each new song we hear, and with each new listening to an old song. Our brains learn a kind of musical grammar that is specific to the music of our culture, just as we learn to speak the language of our culture . . . Music, then, can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to experience emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music. (108-109)

Illusion. Reality. Perception. Actual. True.

All of them are words in common usage and, when it comes to talking about how we think and feel as we live our lives out on this planet, they become charged, even dangerous. Listen to Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes - The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

There is what we see and hear, and then there’s what we see and hear. Real and true are not necessarily synonymous. The reality is any musical sounds are made up of vibrations, yet when we hear them, we hear music: voices, instruments, melody, harmony. And we hear the same music: When James Taylor makes the strings of his guitar vibrate, we all recognize the introduction and are ready to sing along:

when you’re down and troubled
and you need some love and care
and nothing oh nothing is going right
close your eyes and think of me
and soon I’ll will be there
to brighten up even your darkest night

As I was thinking about the implications of what Levitin was saying, I remembered a book (or at least the title of a book) I hadn’t pulled off the shelf in a long time: Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Melody of Theology. I opened the book to find these two quotes as epigraphs:

Without ceasing and without silence, they praise the goodness of God, in that venerable and thrice-illumined melody of theology. – Nicephorus of Constantinople


The virtuosity (or special calling) of a person is . . . the melody of a person’s life – Frederick Schleiermacher

Perhaps, we can also say of theology what Levitin says of music: the ultimate illusion is that of structure and form as we respond to the rhythm of God, to the melody of faith. I find myself, again, at the hymn that closed last night’s post:

my life goes on in endless song
above earth’s lamentation
I feel the sweet though far off hymn
that hails a new creation
through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing
it finds an echo in my soul
how can I keep from singing

Faith, said the writer of Hebrews, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Just as we are moved to love and laughter and tears by the perceptual illusion of music and melody, so are our lives called and changed by the melody of theology that knocked Paul off his horse on the road to Damascus, sent the Samaritan woman running back into town to bring people to see the man that knew her life story and still loved her, forgave Peter for his denials of Jesus over breakfast on the beach, and left Moses barefoot in front of a burning bush.

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes - The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

The mystery of music, Levitin says, is in the “perceptual illusion” of the structure our brains impose on the sounds we hear. The mystery of Communion is in something more than the motions of passing the bread and wine to one another. The mystery of faith is in the evidence of things not seen in the melodies that are our lives.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: get out the map

Over the last several years, and thanks to both inspiration and encouragement from my friends Chris and Kelli, I make handmade cards. I’m not doing much of it right now, but I enjoy looking through the boxes of scrap paper I have to find bits and pieces that collage together into something beautiful. Often the cards are blank inside, but one caption I keep returning to is, “Life is a journey without maps.” It’s a borrowed idea (I wish I could remember from whom; Buechner, I think), and I love the sentiment. We have often used the cards to celebrate graduations and other major transitions.

One of the glories of the English language is words can mean more than one thing. The kind of map I think our journey is without is a directional one: a spiritual GPS. Jesus said, “Follow me.” That’s as far as the directions go. No illuminated mall map with the “X” that says, “You are here.” Then there are descriptive maps: topographical maps, for instance, that document the landscape to give an holistic view rather than traveling instructions. When it comes to the second definition, life is full of maps, or so I was reminded reading This Is Your Brain on Music. Indulge me in a couple of lengthy quotes to explain what I learned.

We can think of the (basilar) membrane as containing a map of different pitches very much like a piano keyboard superimposed on it. Because the different tones are spread out across the surface topography of the membrane; this is called a tonotopic map . . . The auditory cortex also has a tonotopic map, with low to high tones stretched out across the cortical surface. In this sense, the brain also contains a “map” of different pitches, and different areas of the brain respond to different pitches. Pitch is so important that the brain represents it directly; unlike almost any other musical attribute, we could place electrodes in the brain and be able to determine what pitches were being played to a person just by looking at the brain activity . . . for pitch, what goes into the ear comes out of the brain! (29)

Life is a journey with a tonotopic map, a map that shows how your brain listens to music, and what the map shows is we listen with all of our brain, all different parts catching their part of the melody. Very cool. Stay with me – one more quote. The tones we hear are actually the frequencies of vibrations (strings, voices, you name it) and the notes we name in our scales (our musical map, if you will) have specific frequencies.

There is a fundamental quality of music. Note manes repeat because of a perceptual phenomenon that corresponds to the doubling and halving of frequencies. When we double or halve a frequency, we end up with a note that sounds remarkably similar to the one we started with. This relationship . . . is called the octave . . . This phenomenon leads to the notion of circularity in pitch perception . . . music is often described as having two dimensions, one that accounts for tones going up in frequency (and sounding higher and higher) and another that accounts for the perceptual sense that we’ve come back home again each time we double a tone’s frequency. (31)

Two things. First, I thought of James Fowler’s book, Stages of Faith, and the way he talks about what conversion means. Growing up Southern Baptist, I was taught conversion was a one-time-walk-down-the-aisle-come-to-Jesus-turn-away-from-sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll kind of experience. But Fowler talks about conversion as ongoing and repetitive: we come to Jesus over and over our whole lives long, being born again and again and again. When we do come to those moments of profound, life-altering change, we have to take time to circle off the path and assimilate the changes, examine the tonotopic map of the heart, and notice what we are hearing, or perhaps, how we are singing in a new key.

Second, I thought of Lent, or rather the liturgical calendar as a whole: I thought of it as a scale of sorts. Each year, beginning with Advent, we set the melody for the year, counting Sundays, keeping time by marking significant events in Jesus’ life, and in the life of the church in the largest sense – the Body of Christ – repeating the cycle now for half of the church’s life, at least. Coming around again to Ash Wednesday is like doubling the frequency, like moving to the next octave, moving forward and circling back home all in one motion, taking time to reflect and observe the tonotopic map of the heart to see what part of ourselves is responding to the minor key of Lent, the restorative melody of Resurrection, the carols of Advent and Christmas, and the simple soundtrack of Ordinary Time.

I love to tell the story for those who know it best
seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest
and when in scenes of glory I sing a new new song
‘twill be the old old story that I have loved so long

Many years ago, I had the privilege of corresponding, briefly, with Madeleine L’Engle. The last letter I received from her was a form letter sent to tell of the death of her husband, Hugh. That letter had as much to do with my learning to follow the liturgical calendar because of the way she marked time: “Hugh became sick just after Epiphany,” she wrote, “and died just before Pentecost.” She could have said he got sick in January and died in early May, but she chose to keep time, to borrow a musical term, by circling back to notes she could find on the tonotopic map of the heart. Life, indeed, is a journey with a map – a map that leads us on even as it circles around to help us find the vibrations of the Spirit that resonate in our hearts and souls and minds.

my life goes on in endless song
above earth’s lamentation
I feel the sweet though far off hymn
that hails a new creation
through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing
it finds an echo in my soul
how can I keep from singing

Life is a journey with maps -- and music, as is Lent.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: tune my heart

I’m in over my head. One chapter into This Is Your Brain on Music and my brain is reeling, trying to take in all the terms and ideas Daniel J. Levitin has crammed into the first chapter. There is enough metaphor and music in those fifty-odd pages to keep me writing all through the night, if not all through Lent.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I was in second grade when I started taking piano lessons. We always had a piano in our house when I was a kid, though no one spent much time there. My mom would sit down every so often and play one or two hymns that she knew, but that was about it. She also knew she wanted me to take lessons, so I did. For six months. And it was the seventh teacher who came out to the car and said, “Mrs. Cunningham, your son has musical talent and it will come out one day, but do him a favor and do me a favor and let him quit taking piano.”

Thus endeth the lessons.

What was happening in my lessons was I was learning to play by ear, rather than learning to read music. I got some of the basics – F A C E and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (she was British) – and could pick notes out enough to play the piece, sort of, but when she would stop me because I would make a mistake, I would say, “You play it so I can see how it sounds.” I could memorize what she played and repeat it faster than I could learn to read the notes. She caught me because she intentionally made errors and then I duplicated her mistakes.

I was in ninth grade before I got serious about an instrument, which was the acoustic guitar – and I still play. And I still don’t read music. I know chords, enough theory to be dangerous, and I still have a pretty good ear. When I look at a piece of written music, it feels like I’m looking at something in a foreign language, which is a good analogy because written music has a linguistic quality. I read music about like I speak Spanish. Un poco.

My friend, Randy Brown, is the reason I’m reading the book. He and I go back to Baylor days and working together on our act for All University Sing at Baylor. Music has been a part of our friendship from the first. So when he called to say the book would not only help me understand more about music, but would also teach me some things about me, I decided to read it for Lent. He also told me the first couple of chapters were pretty heavy on science and music theory, but to do the work to get through them because it would pay off. And, even though I feel stretched and a little lost, I’m already glad I’m reading.

I’m struggling with how to speak about what I’m learning without having to recap all the technical and scientific stuff, as well as the musical stuff, to set up what I want to say. I think the best I can do is hit the high points and encourage you to get the book because he explains things very well.

Levitin says pitch, rhythm, and timbre are the three key elements when we begin talking about music. Pitch, he says, is a psychological construct that answers the question, “What note is that?” When the hammer on a piano hits the string and the string vibrates, the vibration only becomes a tone when we hear it, which is to say it is psychological because it happens in our heads. Pitch is also one of the main ways musical emotions are conveyed. Melodies are relationships of successive pitches across time that our brain can learn to recognize, even when the melody is in a different key – at a different pitch – that what we heard before.

One more definition: tuning refers to the relationship between the tone and a standard (as in tuning the guitar) or between two or more tones being played together (as in tuning an orchestra). There’s more, but I’m going to stop here and say, since I read the chapter this morning the line (and melody) that has stayed in my head is, “Tune my heart to sing thy praise.”

And so Lent begins, for me, as a tuning exercise, if you will: tuning my heart to God and to those around me, seeking to hear and recognize the melody of grace in whatever key it may come, high or low. “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” is a hymn that serves as both melody and metaphor for me. It is both one of my favorite texts and one of my favorite tunes, when it comes to hymns, and one that has had a significant place in the soundtrack of my life.

o to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be
let thy goodness like a fetter
bind my wandering heart to thee
prone to wander Lord I feel it
prone to leave the God I love
here’s my heart Lord take and seal it
seal it for thy courts above

There have been times when this was a jubilant hymn: Sunday nights singing with my youth group in Fort Worth; days when the song came soft and low in the darkness of my depression; times when it carried reassuring memories and seedlings of hope as Ginger and I made moves and changes together; and nights when it was the bonding melody of friendship, sitting around our living room with guitars and other instruments, singing songs we knew by heart. Each time, my heart was tuned both to God and those around me.

Life, in many ways, is something we have to play by ear, if you will: there’s no set score to follow or part to memorize. Still, our lives go on in endless song. To learn the melody we must listen and tune our hearts to sing together.



Peace,
Milton