I Believe In Music

All the Levites who were musicians—Asaph, Heman, Jeduthun and their sons and relatives—stood on the east side of the altar, dressed in fine linen and playing cymbals, harps and lyres. They were accompanied by 120 priests sounding trumpets. The trumpeters and singers joined in unison, as with one voice, to give praise and thanks to the Lord. Accompanied by trumpets, cymbals and other instruments, they raised their voices in praise to the Lord and sang: “He is good; his love endures forever.” Then the temple of the Lord was filled with a cloud, and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God. (2 Chronicles 5:11-14)

Many years ago, when I was a student in theater school, we had an instructor who taught us his theory of the “levels” of drama. The first level was that of ordinary, naturalistic activity. At this initial stage the action on the stage is indistinguishable from everyday life. Out of this level proceed the next two stages of increasingly heightened reality (I don’t remember all the specifics. Like I said, it was many years ago). Finally, in certain instances, the “fourth level” is reached. At this level, naturalistic action is not sufficient to convey the significance of what is being portrayed.

In a Shakespearean performance, for example, an actor may suddenly step out of the scene and address the audience with a powerful and poetic soliloquy. In a movie, it might be a montage sequence, the juxtaposition of various scenes and images usually held together by a pronounced soundtrack that communicates the unifying mood or theme. But, the medium par excellence of the fourth level is the musical. Whenever the action of a musical reaches a particularly heightened point, someone breaks into song.

Something like this happens in the passage from 2 Chronicles. Solomon and the Israelites have completed the building of the temple of God. Overcome with joy and gratitude and reverence, they break into song. A good friend of mine, who identifies himself as an unobservant Jew who is into God, explained to me once that, “The ancient Israelites used to break into song when they experienced God; it is the perfect expression for the indescribable encounter with the Divine.” But in this scene, things do not stay at the fourth level. The song the Israelites sing is not just the expression of religious feeling. It is an action that causes the Divine to manifest. The fourth level here gives way to the fifth, sixth, seventh and beyond.

It is not the appearance of God that causes the Israelites to burst forth in this great musical performance. It is the love of God, the giving of “praise and thanks to their Lord,” that causes God to manifest. Hundreds of trumpets, cymbals, harps, and lyres, along with countless voices, join in unison to sing thanks to God, at which point “the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God.”

Too often, our religious discourse takes place on the lower levels of our human drama. We are far too hung up on the activities and carryings on of our fellow humans, that it seems we forget that religion should be more about eternal matters than temporal ones. We fight about what to believe, how to believe, whether to believe. I wonder where God goes when we start yelling at each other? I doubt at such times that he appears in a cloud of glory. My guess is he vanishes like a wisp of smoke.

Notice the detail of the story describing how, when God’s glory is present, the priests can’t do their job. “Then the temple of the Lord was filled with a cloud, and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God.” God, it seems, is not as interested in our ritual observances as we are in performing them. It is not the forms of our worship and belief that are essential, but the quality of our singing, the fullness of our praise.

Music is one of the ways we sanctify the moments and events of our lives. Whether there be a wedding, or a funeral, or a birthday party, music is a signal that what is taking place is special, set apart from everyday life. Music and song can also be a way to elevate the everyday—it can transform a mundane moment into a joyous occasion. Think of the excitement that comes over a group of people when a favorite song comes on and a spontaneous dance party suddenly takes place.

Often, when I am stuck in a dark mood, the only thing that will shift it for me is to put on some music. What works for me is usually some bourbon-soaked torch song by Frank Sinatra. I’m not trying to make my feeling go away, but to raise it to a different level, to give it meaning, to find the holiness in heartbreak, so to speak, and the sacred in the sad. I believe that we are each building a “temple of the Lord” and that temple is our lives. And the more we can let each moment “sing”—whether it is a song of pain or a chorus of joy—the more we invite the Divine into our lives.

To this end, the Sufi poet, Rumi, offers this advice:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Only The Lonely

Sunset
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs—

leaving you (it impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.
(translated by Robert Bly)


When I read the lines, “one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth, / leaving you, not really belonging to either,” I experienced a deep loneliness. But it is a loneliness in which I feel I am most at home in myself. A sadness full of longing that makes me happy. My wife likes to tease me about being an archetypally lonely man given to roaming the deserted beach in winter at night lost in my melancholy. There is some truth to this. But I want to say a word in defense of loneliness.

Loneliness is not alienation. In loneliness the Other exists. In alienation, it does not. In loneliness there is longing, in alienation, isolation. In depression or alienation the missing factor is meaning, or a sense of purpose, or contact with the invisible realms of existence. Rilke’s “not belonging” to either heaven or earth is really an affirmation of both. For it seems to me that it is the feeling of separateness that awakens consciousness of the other, that establishes, I believe, the reality of the other. And it is in separateness, in distinctness from one another that love becomes possible. And so, in some sense, loneliness is the soil in which love grows.

The great teachers of the value of loneliness are the Sufis. Rumi says, “the grief you cry out from / draws you toward union.” Hafiz, in his poem, My Eyes So Soft, is even more emphatic:

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft
My voice so tender,
My need of God
Absolutely clear.

One of my other teachers in this is Frank Sinatra, when he sings, “the songs I know, only the lonely know.” Loneliness teaches a secret knowledge – the value of love. The whole torch song tradition speaks to the truth that, sometimes, love is intensified through the experience of separation. It is more present in its absence. All of a sudden we become aware of the depth of our love when it’s object is gone. “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

In Rilke’s poem, the awareness of the two worlds we inhabit, heaven and earth, begins with the recognition of our separateness from both. I think he is saying that we don’t really know either until we know both. But knowing both means belonging to neither. Earth without heaven, says Rilke, is “hopelessly dark.” And without the activity, the variety, the transience of time-bound existence, heaven is “unswerving,” changeless, eternal monotony.

Suspended between these two great powers, says Rilke, all we can do is turn to ourselves, our own little lives, “timid and standing high and growing.” And it is there, perhaps, that we might discover we are not separate after all. “One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.” The two worlds exist in our own hearts. “The Kingdom of Heaven is inside you.”

I think of all the ways I avoid or distract myself from my feelings of loneliness – of longing, of loving, of “my need of God.” – watching TV, surfing the web, shopping for little electronic gadgets, even reading. I need to spend more time at the beach.

Whole-hearted acceptance -- variations on a theme

I've been reflecting some more on the quote from Jean Pierre de Caussade that I referred to in a previous post. Here it is again:

"The Treasure is everywhere. It is offered to us at every moment and wherever we find ourselves. All creatures, friends or enemies, pour it out abundantly, and it courses through every fiber of our body and soul until it reaches the very core of our being. If we open our mouths they will be filled. God's activity runs through the entire universe. . . . We could not choose to become good in a better, more miraculous, and yet easier way than by the simple use of the means offered us by God; the whole-hearted acceptance of everything that comes to us at every moment of our lives." ~ Jean Pierre de Caussade

I am conscious of the fact that truly understanding the writings of the mystics is not possible, as they are writing from the core of their experiences -- experiences that I have not shared. It is not just theory with them. They are trying to reflect in their words something of their actual lived experiences. Therefore, a merely intellectual approach to their writings will always fall short. So I try to listen to these writings as I would listen to a psychotherapy client. That is, I try to get an empathic understanding of the other's experience. Empathy is the process of trying to understand another by imagining yourself into their experience, by feeling yourself into their story.

I said in the previous post that I do not know what the Treasure is that Caussade talks about. That's true. After writing that, I thought some more about this. I tried to put myself in the position of someone who could accept "everything that comes to us at every moment of our lives" whole-heartedly. It was then that I got that rush that feels like insight. I had the thought, "I know what the Treasure is!" It occurred to me that the key is when Caussade says "God's activity runs through the entire universe." Perhaps the Treasure that is offered to the one who can open his or her heart to every moment is the awareness and the experience of the presence of God in each moment. The felt sense that God is active in each and every moment of our lives, waiting, as it were, for us to take notice. I don't know if that's true, but I have to admit that when I consider that thought, I feel something like resonance or excitement that has for me a convincing power.

Here are some others who say something similar to Caussade:

"When one does the next and most necessary thing without fuss and with conviction, one always does what is meaningful and intended by fate." ~ C.G. Jung

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~ Rumi


"My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: that a man should wish to have nothing altered, either in the future, the past, or for all eternity. Not only must he endure necessity, and on no account conceal it--all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity--but he must love it. . . . " ~ Nietzsche


"Don't demand or expect that events happen as you would wish them to. Accept events as they actually happen. That way peace is possible." ~ Epictetus


"[The] Christian worldview compressed . . . into a sentence: the world is perfect, and the human opportunity is to see that and conform to that fact."
~ Huston Smith