13/5/2016 Lent Talks 2016 Heart in Pilgrimage Talk 2 Hearing the Music : Spiegel im Spiegel (The Revd Jeremy Davies)Read NowWe have reflected on the vocabulary of prayer : thinking not only about what words we
might use in prayer, drawn perhaps from regular liturgical usage, such as the psalms or the collects of Thomas Cranmer - not just our prayerful use of words, but the way in which words, in the hands of a poet, or dramatist or novelist - can open up vistas, enable new understanding, extend our horizons, so that prayer moves beyond the ordinary and the mundane to a place of wonder, surprise and silence. Of course the ordinary and the mundane are where we habitually are, and that no doubt is where our prayer begins - in the trivial round and the common task as John Keble put it, making drudgery divine, or sweeping a room as for God’s laws as George Herbert proposed. And Gerard Manley Hopkins, when he was not wondering at God’s Grandeur had some more down to earth observations to make: It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, white-washing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, - everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty. To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives glory too. To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dung fork in his hands, or a woman with a slop pail give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should. So then my brethren live. G M Hopkins from ‘The Principle or Foundation’ an address based on the opening of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola Words, though they can seriously impede our spiritual progress, because they encourage us to talk too much, nevertheless can move us, inspire us, change us - not just because they can persuade us by argument, but because they can kindle our imagination. We turn to the poets, more even than to the liturgists, to find both the words for prayer, and also words that help to create the arena for prayer. This is an arena of the imagination which does not shrink from the world as it is, but an arena where old men see visions and young men dream dreams; an arena in which we may consider the world as it might be. In creating this arena of the imagination where prayer may flourish, no art or discipline is more skilled than music: and not simply ‘sacred’ music that interprets words or sets texts, but music which in its own right interprets the world, registers the whole range of human emotions, brings heaven and earth together within one remarkable soundscape; helps to relate us back to the roots of our humanity, and at the same moment gives us a glimpse of the divine, and a way of holding onto the hem of God’s garment. Sometimes this release of imagination that brings us to prayer will happen in sacred space - evensong at the end of the day in some cathedral, for example. Or it may happen in the concert hall as we hear the dropping figure of the Incarnatus from the Creed of the B Minor Mass, when we are caught up in a musical landscape that powerfully reveals to us the mystery of that divine condescension - that the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us. Incarnatus from The B minor Mass by JS Bach J S Bach enables a credal statement ‘was incarnate of the Virgin Mary’ to become much more than a matter of doctrine. Christian teaching has to move from the head to the heart - however important the head and the intellect may be in appropriating religious thought. In the movement from the head to the heart we have to become enfolded, embraced, overcome by the reality we profess. That is what music mysteriously, powerfully and transformingly, so often effects. It may happen in the grand sweep and narrative drive of a Bach oratorio or Passion, or it may happen much more simply, when to use C S Lewis’s phrase, borrowed from Wordsworth, we are surprised by joy. There needs always to be an element of surprise in our Christian pilgrimage. Of course we always want to be in control, we don’t really like surprises. Tales of the unexpected is the terrain of the mystery writer, and we don’t like the mysterious or the unknown. I was washing up one day in our kitchen at home, thinking about the next business to be attended to. I had Radio 3 on to accompany my chores. Suddenly the clatter of cutlery and crockery was overtaken by very different sounds. I stopped what I was doing, and my thinking of the next thing, and became transfixed by the music - music so simple, so repetitive, so mantra-like - that it drew everything - every sound, the ticking of the clock, the birds singing, my own breathing - into its own timeless tranquility. Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Part That remarkable piece of music could go on much longer, and if you listen to it via the links given at the end of this chapter, you will be able to enter into its sound world. It was this piece of music which I arranged to have played on Good Friday at Salisbury Cathedral as the congregation moved at mid day from the cathedrals’ nave to the quire for the Good Friday Liturgy. It enabled us to make the transition from one space to another, from the outside world to the inner shrine, and by analogy it helped to still our busy, restless minds as we came to contemplate the divine reality most exquisitely and cruelly defined for us in the figure of a man dying on a cross. Music helped us to move in imagination, as well as in mind and body, into another world that pressed upon our own. As you were coming into this room earlier you will have heard some medieval plain chant taken from the liturgical rite known as the Sarum Use, which was developed and perfected at Salisbury Cathedral but which by the Reformation was the almost universal rite used in the British Isles. You would expect me, as a former Precentor of Salisbury Cathedral, to make some mention of the Sarum Use in a talk about music and prayer. Of course chant - the ancient music sung in the western church but only really rediscovered and given new currency in the nineteenth century by Dom Prosper Gueranger at Solesmes Abbey, in France - has been given a new lease of life beyond the church in recent recordings by monks of the Spanish monastery of Silos which achieved success in the popular music charts. Some years ago a hospice nurse from Montana in the United States came to see me while on a visit from America. He told me that all the doctors, nurses and carers at the hospice where he worked were musicians - and music was a major component in the nursing and palliative care of patients and their families. He said ‘We often use plainsong when we tend the terminally ill. Because there are no bar lines, there’s a sense of timelessness or eternity about the chant. We believe it helps those who are dying to unbind; to let go of time and slip into timelessness - not into oblivion but into what you and I might call God’s time’. And, there in my sitting room, he sang this plainsong Kyrie from the Missa de Angelis, to illustrate his point. KYRIE from Missa de Angelis Shortly before his death I visited Michael Mayne who after his retirement as Dean of Westminster moved with his wife Alison to Salisbury. I knew that Michael had only days or possibly hours to live. He couldn’t speak but his eyes smiled and he took my hand in his. I said some prayers with him - which I am sure included part of Psalm 139 - and then I sang. I sang that Kyrie from the Missa de Angelis with the words of that American nurse in mind: ‘There’s a sense of timelessness about the chant...which helps those who are dying to unbind’ Of course it’s not only as we approach death that music can evoke this sense of the timeless and the eternal. And it’s not only the simplicity of the chant that can achieve it, though the monastic chant certainly has that timeless quality which in prayer we attempt to recover. And that timeless quality is paradoxically achieved through the most timebound of all the creative and imaginative arts - namely music. In this entry into timelessness which our prayer can learn from our experience of music we may get the impression that prayer, like some music, is an escape from the exigencies of life, but as we shall see music like prayer roots us in the world as it, in a life ‘nasty, brutish and short’, while at the same time offering a vision of the world as it might be. Prayer is not an escape from life’s realities though it has a transcendent quality. In the words of the hymns ‘it brings all heaven before our eyes’ In prayer we come close to God : time and eternity meet. Peter Schaffer’s remarkable play about Mozart called Amadeus is based on the alleged rivalry between Mozart and his fellow composer Salieri. Here is an excerpt from the play, where Salieri consumed with jealous resentment at the unmatchable musical genius of the uncouth boy Mozart, hears the strains of Mozart’s slow movement from the Serenade for Thirteen Wind Instruments Salieri And then right away the concert began. I heard it through the door - some Serenade: at first only vaguely - too horrified to attend. But presently the sound insisted - a solemn Adagio in E flat. Mozart Serenade for Thirteen wind Instruments (Gran Partita) Slow Movement It started simply enough: just a pulse in the lowest registers - bassoons and bassett horns - like a rusty squeeze box. It would have been comic except for the slowness, which gave it instead a sort of serenity. And then, suddenly, high above it, sounded a single note on the oboe. It hung there unwavering - piercing me through and through - till breath could hold it no longer, and a clarinet withdrew it out of me, and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight it had me trembling. The light flickered in the room. My eyes clouded… The squeeze box groaned louder, and over it the higher instruments wailed and warbled, throwing lines of sound around me - long lines of pain around and through me - Ah the pain! Pain as I had never known it. I called up to my sharp old God, ‘What is this?… What?’ But the squeeze box went on and on, and the pain cut deeper into my shaking head until i was running - dashing through the side door, stumbling downstairs into the street, into the cold night, gasping for life. ‘What? What is this? Tell me Signore. What is this pain? What is this need in the sound? Forever unfulfillable yet fulfilling him who hears it utterly. Is it your need? can it be yours? Dimly the music sounded from the salon above. Dimly the stars shone on the empty street. I was suddenly frightened. It seemed to me I had heard a voice of God- and that it issued from a creature whose voice I had also heard - and it was the voice of an obscene child! Mozart! What is this pain? What is this need in the sound? Forever unfulfillable yet fulfilling him who hears it utterly. Is it your need? Can it be yours? Salieri’s question to his ‘sharp old God’ reminds us that the pain of our humanity that is conveyed even through the beauty of our world, is a pain that finds its correspondence in the heart of God. How could it be otherwise when scripture tells us that the Christ who has entered into the heavens has the never-to-be erased wounds of his passion upon him. Only thus can he be our intercessor before the Father. The pain of the world is God’s pain; our need is his need. Somehow through the beauty of Mozart’s music Salieri heard the voice of God and the recognition that in St Paul’s words ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world - and all its sorrow and hurt - to himself ’. Karl Barth, the great Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, wrote in his Church Dogmatics about Mozart that he ‘ conceived and composed a type of music for which ‘beautiful’ is not a fitting epithet: music which is not mere entertainment, enjoyment or edification, but food and drink; music full of comfort and counsel for his needs; music which is never a slave to its technique nor sentimental but always ‘moving, free and liberating, because wise, strong and sovereign’. And Barth continues that in Mozart’s music we hear the ‘whole context of Providence, and the harmony of creation’. Barth recognises that in that Mozartian harmony, the shadow also belongs but ‘the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway’. In the music of Mozart, Barth seems to be saying, the world as it is is revealed to us, but also in the transcendent quality of the music, the world as it might be. And the yearning quality which Schaffer’s Salieri identifies in Mozart’s music recognises this paradox. Music even when it captivates us with its beauty can also fill us with yearning - a sense of unfulfilment even as it fulfils us. It’s an extraordinary paradox that represents a profound spiritual truth. For prayer too is about a hunger and a yearning. It is expressed by St Paul in his epistle to the Philippians: I have not yet reached my goal : but I am still running, trying to capture that by which I have been already captured. The sense that even when we have been embraced by God we still yearn for more : to capture that which has already captured us. It is that sense of yearning and longing that music - perhaps most of all the arts - instills in us. That suggestion that beauty can be a piercing beauty which fills us with longing and brings us, as Salieri suggests. into the pain of God, reminds us that prayer too is a way of engaging with the world as it is. Prayer does not evade or ignore the world’s pain and anguish and violence and cruelty - why else would prayer (Christian prayer at least) be done always conscious of the outstretched arms and fearfully pierced hands of the one through whom Christians make their prayer. I often remember a radio broadcast by Mother Mary Clare the Superior of the Sisters of the Love of God at Fairacres. She was asked about the monastic practice of rising in the middle of the night to rehearse the Night Office. She said that in the small hours of the night humanity was most vulnerable. More suicides are committed then, people are alone and in pain; when the homeless are most alone and friendless, and the desperate most despairing. ‘ It is for them in particular that we pray in the middle of the night’. Sometimes it is music that opens our imagination - our hearts as well as our minds - to the world’s anguish. I was at a Promenade Concert in London in 1968 when Rostropovich played the Dvorak cello concerto on the day (August 20) when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to crush Alexander Dubcek’s liberal reforms. Ironically Rostropovich was accompanied by a Soviet Orchestra in that performance of a great work by a great Czech composer. During the concerto’s hushed opening the Royal Albert Hall resounded to strident yells of protest. In his review of the concert for the Daily Telegraph Julian Lloyd-Webber wrote: It must have been a nightmare for the cellist, yet Rostropovich proceeded to give a performance of such intensity that no one could have left the hall with any doubt about his feelings towards the invasion….In their very different ways both politics and music aspire to influence the human condition’. And then Lloyd Webber added words from the Book of Ecclesiasticus: ‘Pour not out words where there is a musician’ Dvorak Cello Concerto Music so often takes us to the heart of the human condition - and so music becomes a vehicle for prayer as we recognise our world as it is, and we pray for those especially who bear the burden of its pain and violence. Yesterday January 27, National Holocaust Day, commemorated the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Aushwitz and the end of the holocaust in which millions of Jews, as well as gypsies, gay and mentally ill people died. Jewish chant from the synagogue As Howard Goodall writes in his book ‘The Big Bang‘ there are no easy answers to account for being moved to tears by notes on a page, or of being stirred to anger and action, or being comforted in our loneliness. ‘It is a mystery how Rachmaninov’s flowing melodies and ripe harmonies make people feel romantic and amorous… or how Shostakovitch manages to express all Russia’s Stalinist agony without losing the essentially unbreakable spirit of the people at the same time. It is a mystery why Tippett’s use of Negro spirituals in his 1945 secular oratorio A Child of our Time so perfectly captures of the victims of Nazism in the second World War Tippett A Child of our Time It is a mystery - prayer helps us not to solve the mystery, but to enter into it. And music is often the key that opens the gate and unlocks the imagination and helps us to pray. Because it engages our emotions and kindles our imagination in the mysterious way Howard Goodall describes, music will often enlarge and enrich our life of prayer, and indeed lead us to pray. Sometimes music in church will do this for us - and it was St Augustine the third century Bishop of Hippo who is thought to have said ‘Those who sing pray twice’. Sometimes it is hymnody - wonderful words sung to a fine tune. How shall I sing that majesty for example, with words by John Mason and the tune Coe Fen by the twentieth century composer Ken Naylor; or Charles Wesley’s peerless O thou who camest from above sung to SS Wesley’s Hereford; or When I survey the wondrous cross, sung to Rockingham - with its wonderful final verse: Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were an offering far too small; Love so amazing so divine Demands my soul, my life, my all St Augustine had a point! Many of us will have experienced the way music brings us to prayer through the worship associated with Taize - the ecumenical, international, monastic community in eastern France which has been such a force for renewal within the church and beyond it - not least in its powerful empathy with young people. Of course professional Church musicians tend to be sniffy about Taize chanting - too simple, too saccharine, too unsophisticated. But it’s precisely because of its simplicity and memorability and mantra -like repetition ‘that the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over and our work is done’ and we come into an arena of prayer where even surrounded by two thousand people, when the chant stops there is a palpable silence which enfolds and embraces us - as though God himself were present and listening and spreading his mantle around us. As the melody of the chant dies away we are - in company with others - brought to a place of peace, silence and tranquility - and we are at home; at home with God. Taize Chant Maybe the last word should rest with the early twentieth century poet Siegfried Sassoon whose poem Everyone suddenly burst out singing expresses the capacity of music (singing in this instance - music in which everyone can participate) to express the beauty and the tears of life, and also allows us to transcend even the worst horrors of our world (and horror drifted away) so that we come at last to an eternity of song - a kind of vision of heaven that enfolds us all. - the singing will never be done. That thought has much to teach us about prayer. EVERYONE suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight. Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away ... O, but Everyone was a bird; and the song was wordless; The singing will never be done.
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