If Music Be The Food Of Love ...

St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate is being taken over in what can only be described as an act of spoliation, which the dictionary defines as ‘the action of taking goods or property from somewhere by violent means’. The eviction of its classical musicians, for whom it has become church in the fullest sense, reflects the kind of iconoclastic violence witnessed at the time of the English Reformation when monasteries were sacked, statues decapitated, frescoes and wall paintings obliterated. Now, it is orchestrated music that must be expunged. The musicians who for years have made St. Sepulchre a space for prayer and reflection, are being removed to make room for ‘worship and ministry’. One can only presume that what the musicians offer is no longer deemed to be worship or, for that matter, ministry. The whole unhappy business raises two things which ought to be of concern to all Anglicans, whatever their churchmanship.

Anglicans in this country have for too long ignored or condoned the kind of quick fix which certain manifestations of charismatic, and largely conservative, evangelicalism has thrust upon them. Church ‘plants’, and St. Sepulchre is to be one of them, are in fact a form of colonisation, a process which has already been described as the McDonaldization of the Church of England. McDonald’s and the goods it serves is not only extremely bad for our health, it is also bad for a nation or community’s self respect. The French who only a decade ago were the envy of us all when it came to body image, are now getting fat. Could the same thing be happening to the Church? I think the spoliation of St. Sepulchre’s indicates a very real danger that it might. The Church is getting fat as a result of the McDonaldization of its worship and the commodification of its inner life in God to suit the tastes of the market.

What this danger entails pertains specifically to what the present incumbent, who has instigated the eviction, is about to do to St. Sepulchre’s when it comes to worship and ministry. It implies, among other things, a very narrow understanding of worship itself and, possibly, a very shallow interpretation of both worship and ministry in respect to how Jesus spoke and behaved in regard to these vital areas of Christian life.

In one of the most profound theological conversations in the whole of the New Testament, we are told that worship is authentic when it is done in ‘spirit and in truth’ (John 4:24). Beautiful music, especially classical music and liturgy, and some traditional hymns, releases the mind and raises the spirit to God. It is a truth language.  It is truthful because it is received into the listener’s ‘God shaped space’, to borrow from St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal and scripture itself. It is received in such a way as to allow for an encounter with God. It does not tell the listener anything, or issue terms and conditions for this encounter to take place. It simply opens up a space. Beautiful music is not pure aesthetics, as some may think. It is worship.

Music is therefore a unique and infinitely precious gift, because in freeing the mind and momentarily opening the heart it allows both listener and player to encounter one another within the love of God. It is also essential to ministry, and ministry, rightly understood, is essential to the ongoing life of the Church. Bands, trendy songs and shallow sensationalist preaching do not minister to anyone except the performers themselves. They do not serve. They simply perform. Classical musicians serve. 

The proof lies in the extent to which trendy songs and endlessly repeated cliché choruses do or do not transform those who imbibe them. Do people come away from these events less selfish, less needy, more able to love those they find hard to love or even respect? Are they more lovable themselves? Are they Christ-like in every sense? Are they the body of Christ? None of the methods which purport to make a church successful bear any relationship to what it means to be the body of Christ. They are not evangelism. They are part of a commercial enterprise. They deal in the commerce of spurious success, and they are entrepreneurial in following a set recipe for achieving that success. Beautiful music, especially when it is performed in a church, does not purport to do either of these things and for this Anglicans should be grateful.  

What then can liberal thinking Christians, as well as people who are ‘not religious’ do to prevent the Anglican Church from sleep walking into a place where God in his ineffability is rarely to be found?

Perhaps the future lies with the ‘nones’. People who describe themselves as ‘nones’, when it comes to religion, are extremely valuable to the Church. For one thing, they are capable of being prophetic, because they are, by their own definition, outsiders. Jesus loved outsiders. He did not require them to prove that they had a faith. He knew them and loved them for who they were. He loved them because their faith, and the truth to which it witnessed, consisted in the extent to which they were capable of love, and on this alone did he rate people.

The Church must be a place which draws people to itself because it touches them where they need to both give and receive the love of God. This is its ministry, and it is the ministry of every local church. Worship will only happen when a church has been ministered to with Christ like love and in a spirit of service. It will happen when people encounter something of the sacred, of the enduring nature of the mystery of God in the beauty of their surroundings, and in music. Let there be music at St. Sepulchre’s.  

Black Dog

There is a French saying ne pas être dans son assiete, which roughly translates as ‘to not be fully in one’s own plate’, as when pasta, badly served, overspills onto the table. It’s a great way of describing the general sense of being all over the place which I think many of us experience from time to time. It is not something we can easily ‘snap out of’, as sufferers of anxiety and depression, in all its manifestations, will know. Not being fully in one’s plate is a debilitating state of mind, especially if you are a writer, teacher, or someone tasked with preaching sermons or providing leadership.

There are other names for this state of mind, like ‘writer’s block’ or ‘black dog’, not that the two are identical, but they invariably feed on each other. I find they do the same in the course of the average day, since all days are potentially creative, whatever kind of work we do. Things get put off when we are blocked. We feel tired. We live for that cup of coffee, or something worse. We are not fully in control. There is something random and anarchic about the way we go about the day and the way we apply our thinking, if we are able to think at all. At the same time, we are absolutely static, inwardly ‘blocked’, so that there is not even the dubious thrill of the roller coaster effect, teetering on the creative high before plummeting to the depths.

The way we are feeling prevents us from doing anything specific. It paralyses, and makes it impossible to do what, theoretically, we should do in order to get back on track and motor forward. There are different methods for achieving this forward momentum. Personally, I find that methods only work for a while, and that when they no longer work you are back on your own, dealing with the black dog, or with writer’s block, or with the inability to dream up a sermon if that is what is required of you.

I have slowly learned that what is needed in all of these situations is a deep and inexhaustible energy in which we can trust, something which we can draw on simply by owning our desire and need for it. Whatever work we do, but especially if it is creative work, we must continually return to its creative source.

But this is impossible if we have not first learned to accept and believe in ourselves as gifted, or fruitful, full of life and hope even if, right now, it feels that we have ground to a complete halt. Knowing ourselves as fruitful is not the same as feeling reassured by relative success. Success will often come at the price of the work itself, because to be sure of success means being willing to think of one’s work as a commodity designed to satisfy consumers and fit the mood of the moment. This is as true in the context of preaching sermons as it is in any other creative work.  In our own low moments it is tempting to simply generate the kind of work, or preach the kind of sermons, which will satisfy the criteria for success or popularity. But we may end up hating ourselves for doing so, and then hate the work.

We are only fruitful when we write or say what gives people permission to flourish as the persons they were created to be. We are fruitful when we free others into their gifts so that they can use those gifts, and their lives, in the service of the truth which makes us free. For this to be possible, we have to trust our own giftedness enough to wait on it, even in the depths of depression and self doubt, because it is often there that we meet people and offer them hope in their own dark depths. We offer them hope because we have visited the depths ourselves.  We have learned to forgive and accept ourselves there, so we are in a position to help others do the same.

A good way to begin this process of self acceptance is to get into the habit of returning to any period, or even a single moment, in our life when we knew ourselves to be utterly valued, that our very existence was a blessing to someone else. It is important to re-own such moments without feeling guilty that we are doing so, because guilt is itself a denial of love.

Loving and forgiving one’s self is the hardest kind of loving there is, especially if you have not been equipped for it in early life. It is often much easier to remain in the depths of depression and self doubt, simply because they are familiar depths, whereas acceptance and forgiveness open up new horizons, new roads to travel into the unknown. The unknown is frightening because discovering it will inevitably involve getting to know ourselves as we really are, and accept our giftedness. We are gifted in and through the love of God from whom all energy for creative work, and life itself, proceeds.

Morning

Source: nedhardy.com

What gets you out of bed in the morning? In a way, I find this question harder to answer as I get older. It has to do with old habits wearing thin. The things that used to get me going are either no longer relevant, or no longer exist. When it comes to relevance, after 43 years of being together I’ve finally had to accept the fact that my husband really does not like hot tea, so to trek back upstairs to bring it to him the minute the pot has brewed is a waste of time and effort. I now pour it and leave it for him downstairs. Then there’s the other reality. The children have long since left home and now lead lives of their own at some considerable distance from ours. The only reason for getting up early for their sakes has to do with fitting in with international time zones. This we manage to do at other times of the day.

But I still get up an hour earlier, and I still have a reason for doing so. For one thing, there is the silence, both external and internal. We live in a silent place. In other words, silence is consistent. It is a given. There is no ambient traffic noise. There are no times of the day when we are even particularly conscious of noise, apart from the change of predominant bird cry. Buzzards are very active at the moment and the swallows have not yet started marshaling the troops for the long flight south. They will get noisier when they do so in a couple of weeks time. Also, we have cut down the old elder in which the crows used to nest, as well as fight with the magpies. Their departure has made the silence almost palpable.

External silence has the effect of quelling internal noise. In the first hour of the day the busy mind is subdued. It has not yet woken up to mundane preoccupations, although it is not asleep either. In fact, I find that it is more awake than at any other time of the day. It is open, in every sense of the word. For me, the first hour of the day is a time of openness to the Real Presence, but it is not a mental vacuum which I expect God to fill. Instead, I find that I am involved in a kind of three-way dialogue between the mind, the senses and God. But rarely is anything said. Instead, the heart is allowed to have its own mind, to speak from its concerns and from its fears.

Today, it spoke of North Korea and the US, and of the threat to our very existence which the leaders of these two nations represent. The mind, and my personal fears, being quelled, I was able to sense the impact of the situation on its most helpless victims, the ordinary people of North Korea. What came to mind was a picture of its baby-faced leader peering through what seemed like an old fashioned pair of binoculars while two of his adjutants stood by. One wore an army uniform. The other was dressed in a thin fleece type jacket. The army character looked thin. His companion was emaciated. Their leader was wearing a warm well cut heavy coat. He looked very well fed.

The memory of this picture, seen either on line or in a newspaper, speaks to me of the deeper evil, and of the most pressing danger, which is at the root of this crisis. It is the total disregard for other human beings which comes when two narcissistic leaders are sated or infatuated with power. No doubt if these two leaders were to disappear, others would replace them, so the solution to the crisis does not lie in praying that they, and the danger they represent, will simply go away. In fact, when we are engaged in the kind of three-way dialogue I have been describing, the idea of a ‘solution’ to the crisis of potential nuclear holocaust recedes a little. We realise that something more than a solution is needed, because a solution would be no more than a political construct designed to get these two leaders out of the impasse they have created and so allow the rest of us to breathe a sigh of relief, at least in the immediate present.

But whatever calming devices are deployed, in respect to the two antagonistic leaders, they will not make a jot of difference to the suffering endured by tens of millions of North Koreans. Their suffering will not be diminished, even for a moment. The silence of the early morning tells me that it is their suffering which matters most when it comes to any kind of meaningful solution to the Korean crisis. There is no particular logic for thinking this, and it will appear naïve to many, but for those who know the value of silence, engaging together in God with the suffering of ordinary North Koreans is vital spiritual work. If you have read this far, please reserve an hour of mentally uncluttered time to join me in this work.