Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

February 4, 2007

“Music Deeply Heard: The Spirit of Comfort and Joy”

Rev. Kathy Duhon

Music is powerful. Music that is deeply heard lives deep inside of us. Just ask anyone who has worked with people suffering from dementia. They’ll tell you of someone whose mind is confused and memory mostly gone, but who can lustily sing old songs from the past, somehow summoning forth all the lyrics.

When I think back to all the French I learned in high school, I have very little comprehension left, but I can sing you almost all of a complicated and raucous Quebecoise song I learned when I was 16 and studying French in Quebec one summer, and I know what it means. As a young woman, I went to India to volunteer with Mother Theresa for a month and was given a chance to teach the nuns English. I seriously tried to stuff their heads with important English conversations that included asking directions and practical stuff. We weren’t doing too well – the sisters were bashful – but then I decided to try songs and we had such fun singing “Morning Has Broken” and others songs, which was the way they really learned English.

Music resides deep inside of us, in a different place from our usual knowledge, in a very secure place, and yet where we are vulnerable. Music can capture time, awaken a memory of ours, and bring it all tumbling back, much the way a scent triggers emotions. Many couples have a love song that they cherish, often from early in their relationship. Anyone have a song like that? What were yours? I tried to think back to what that would be for Jon and I, but the closest I came was the song, “Muskrat Love” by the band “America”. “Muskrat Susie, Muskrat Sam, do the jitterbug in muskrat land” – that silly romantic song seemed to capture who we were.

Deep inside of us, where music lives, is also where our spiritual and religious life is rooted. Is there any religion that does not embrace music in some form, from chanting to wailing to the St. Matthrew’s Passion, as a vehicle for its message? For when we participate in singing or making music, we are not thinking; we are not alone; we are instead a vessel for the spirit. We embody through our singing voices, or our other ways of making music, the messages of unity in diversity, hope and love in the midst of suffering, beauty beyond the brokenness, comfort and joy. Sister Joan Chittister says that she is part of a religious group who sings all the time because they know “that God speaks the unspeakable in music. And what else is life about if not an endless attempt to discover the unspoken?”

Martin Luther essentially began congregational hymn singing and composed many hymns. He believed music to be a gift of God and congregational singing to be an important aspect of worship in which all had the power to participate. A story has grown up that Martin Luther used bar tunes or drinking music for his hymns, and the same is often said of the famous Methodist hymn writers, Charles and John Wesley. I was even told in a workshop by a knowledgeable church music scholar that Martin Luther was asked why he used tavern tunes and replied, “Why should the devil have all the good tunes?” I’m not sure if that’s just a story or not, but many scholars believe that neither Luther nor the Wesleys used bar tunes. The style of hymns that they wrote is quite sing-able, the way songs in a tavern or bar are sing-able. In bars, spirits – drinks – do help with the ability to sing the tunes, but the Spirit is what arises through the singing of a congregation.

John Calvin next influenced the singing in worship by trying to limit it to the psalms and to music that was simple, if heartfelt. In theological school, I remember learning that John Calvin said the hymn was the sermon of the heart, but I haven’t been able to verify that and I wonder if it’s a myth too. I do know that Calvin believed that singing the psalms was a form of prayer, but thought you had to be careful not to use a meter that would remind the people of dancing. When the Puritans took Calvin’s teaching on worship to heart, they would only sing psalms, and only with minimal melody. Thank goodness we have opened up the area of religious singing to include a multitude of possibilities, being willing to keep trying new music. Of course the Puritans and Calvin should have listened to some of those psalms more closely, for they can be exciting in their tone and likely would promote dancing, as in Psalm 108: “I will sing and make melody. Awake, my soul! Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn.” The psalmist is making music all night, into the wee hours of the dawn? He had to be dancing.

The deeply meaningful events in life, whether religiously celebrated or not, are so often accompanied with music. A good friend wrote this to comfort me after my brother Brad died, "When I'm really depressed or sad I listen to Bessie Smith, who's one of the very few voices that can really speak to the subject of pain." As "Empress of the Blues," I thought Bessie Smith might comfort me, so I went out and bought a Bessie Smith collection, but her singing did not comfort me. Not much did. You have to find the music that moves you particularly, and for me, it is not the blues. But for my birthday that year, my sister-in-law, my brother’s widow, gave me a CD of Alison Krauss with the song they’d been listening to a few hours before Brad died, and I found that oddly comforting.

Music can give us other kinds of comfort than for our grief. When Anna was 10 years old, she acted in a summer play based on a Henry James short story, at Shakespeare and Company, and her role was huge – with hundreds of lines. She was understandably nervous and afraid, especially as the adults in that production were fighting a bit among themselves and the script kept being re-written, almost up until it was performed. On the long car ride to and from Shakespeare and Company we would talk about it, but we’d also sing songs. She always picked the hymn, “Be Not Afraid”, to sing.

Music can capture the spirit of a time. “We Shall Overcome” is the defining song of the Civil Rights Movement. “Over There” helped the country go through a world war that was far away. “Baby Beluga” was the anthem of my children’s childhood. For many of us, “Spirit of Life” holds the spirit of Unitarian Universalism in our time.

I want to leave you with a couple of stories about music that speak to its ability to shepherd comfort and joy into our lives, sometimes in the most unexpected of ways.

In the mid 1950's, Unitarian Norman Cousins went to visit Albert Schweitzer in Africa, Schweitzer being a Unitarian and a Lutheran and a great musician and humanitarian. Cousins remembered a simple image of Schweitzer and his music from that visit. He wrote, "The best grand piano ever made would be none too good for him. But he was now about to play a dilapidated upright virtually beyond repair." Cousins was struck by the contrast.

One evening while Cousins was visiting, a choral group performed for a party. They were not visible, but he noticed their "tremendous beauty" as the group sang Handel's Messiah. He thought the range of voices was unusual, but they were "superbly blended." He found out later that they were African lepers -- men, women and children -- who had been led by one of the nurses. He was incredibly impressed by this and by a later performance, and found in their singing a note of grace. Cousins wrote, after seeing a musical play by this leper group, "If I say that the entire experience was almost beyond awareness or comprehension, what do those words suggest? Can they possibly indicate the range of emotion or the stretches of thought produced by watching condemned people give life to a spiritual concept?" The actors lived, embodied, sang the hope, faith and forgiveness that they portrayed in the play. The music performed by the lepers moved all who heard them.

Now, one last story. In 1964, at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, Fannie Lou Hamer came from Mississippi to advocate, with others, for African American delegates to be seated, since they were not allowed to vote in their state and were not represented. It was a hard fight and the convention eventually settled on guaranteeing more equal representation at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Fannie Lou Hamer was remembered for her passionate pleas for justice, and also for her singing Gospel hymns out on the boardwalk, like “Go Tell It On the Mountain”. A young Jewish man, Arthur Waskow, was present and advocating for these “Freedom Democrats”, and also singing with Fannie Lou Hamer what he called “the old Black songs of Exodus”. He said, “I was a casually Jewish secular activist with only one connection one night a year to religious Jewish life, the Passover Seder. It was Fannie Lou Hamer’s singing that started weaving the invisible, unconscious thread that ultimately surprised me into Judaism and into becoming a rabbi.” With singing songs like “Let My People Go”, he made the connection between the God of the Exodus and the Passover celebration, and the God of American Justice and the Civil Rights Movement. For Rabbi Waskow, that music was the balm of comfort and the wellspring of joy.

Music deeply heard is a gift of the spirit, a grace for our lives. Music calms, heals, and enlivens – all great for one’s well-being. We celebrate this blessing of comfort and joy. Blessed Be. Amen.