Daily Episcopalian will resume regular publication on Wednesday.

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By Jacob Slichter

I am one of several percussionists at Saint Paul’s Chapel in New York City. Under the guidance of our music director, Marilyn Haskel, we accompany congregational music with hand-percussion instruments. Visitors from out of town often come up after the service to express their interest in introducing hand drums and percussion to their churches back home. “How do we start?” Here are some of the principles that have guided us at Saint Paul’s.

Find instruments that cover a range of timbres—Eager as you may be to rush out and load up on drums, this is can be an expensive mistake. Consider instead building a palette of timbres, one that includes such elements as blocks, bells, shakers, tambourines, finger cymbals, etc. Let your current musical repertoire and the acoustics of your worship space inform these choices. In any given space, certain instruments will speak clearly, others will be easily lost, and still others will prove unwieldy. Many stores have an exchange policy, which will allow you to audition different instruments until you find those best suited to your particular environment and music.

Start where you are—While the percussion instruments you bring into church may have their origins in West Africa, the Amazon, or the British Isles, you are free to make whatever music you want with them. Alas, many concern themselves first with the question of learning authentic rhythms, but this can wait. Listen instead to the music your congregation is already making and begin there. Listen to the mood and personality of the music, to the natural ebb and flow of the groove (that mysterious element that makes you want to move your body as you listen), to the shape of the rhythms already present in the melodies.

Then think about how you can support these elements. Simple, easy parts can always do the job; even beginners can make great music right away. Listen to and then answer the melodies and countermelodies, support the bass motion, and so forth. Resist the urge to “liven things up” with percussion; music that works well is perfectly alive. What it wants is support and accent, not a personality transplant. Learn to listen thoughtfully, a skill infinitely more valuable than hand speed and dexterity. Give me the percussionist with hands of clay and ears of gold any day.

In time you’ll gain a natural sense of how rhythms from other musical traditions can be imported (perhaps with modification) into your church’s musical repertoire. At Saint Paul’s, we play a percussion postlude, an excellent time to strut out rhythms from West Africa, or, as we’ve done, from the drumbeats on James Brown tracks.

Always pay attention to the acoustics of the worship space. A cathedral where each note reverberates for several seconds may call for a sparser accompaniment than what you can get away with in a room with a carpeted floor.

Prepare—I favor making rehearsal attendance mandatory for anyone who wants to play. If possible, members of the percussion ensemble should be able to take the instruments home for individual practice.

In the best case, the ensemble (or lone percussionist) would have a chance to rehearse with singers, but if that’s not possible, make sure to sing through the music before coming up with parts. (I did a workshop at St Gregory’s Church in San Francisco, famous, among other things, for its use of liturgical dance. There, we danced through the various steps before coming up with parts that supported the dancing.) Ask yourselves, “Is accompaniment even necessary for this piece?” (While you’re at it, get your organist/pianist to ask herself the same question!) Why rob the congregation of the chance to hear the glory of their unaccompanied singing?

Use rehearsal time to plot out arrangement ideas such as staggered entrances of the various percussion instruments. Practice maintaining eye contact with each other. Establish the framework for improvisation. “Do an extra little something on the high drum during this section,” etc. If possible, practice with a metronome. Even better, make the additional purchase of a cheap Dictaphone and listen back to yourselves so you can make adjustments.

Be Givers, not Takers—Music joins your congregation in community. Let the percussion support, empower, and open up that experience. Be members of that community, not performers looking for an audience’s admiration. The minute you think of yourselves as performers, you cut yourself off from the congregation. The result will be playing that overwhelms or otherwise obstructs their musical experience.

Let your whole body listen to the congregation around you. Feel what they are feeling. Let them speed up and slow down if that’s what they have to do. Herd them together when they stray apart from each other, but avoid becoming rhythmic enforcers who club the congregation from joy into obedience. Remember that sometimes the most exciting thing a congregation can experience is the sound of their own voices, unaccompanied.

Don’t pick up a drum to get your ya yas out. Pick up a drum (or set it down) to bring the full pleasure of music making to those around you. As you feel their pleasure, you will have found the true power of drumming.

Jacob Slichter is a writer and musician who is a member of St. Paul's Chapel/Trinity Church Wall Street. He serves on the board of All Saints Company, where he has consulted in the development of Music That Makes Community, and he leads drumming workshops for interested congregations.

By Donald Schell

What St. Paul hinted at it in I Corinthians –‘Now we see in a glass darkly, then face to face: now I know in part; then I shall know even as I am known’ –he left to the writer of I John to speak plainly, ‘Beloved, we are already God’s children, but what we will be hasn’t appeared yet; what we know is this: when He comes we shall be like Him, for we’ll see Him as He is.’
More than ‘believing,’ seeing is becoming. Mirroring makes us who we will be.

Participants in a Music that Makes Community workshop feel the energy of that becoming when they learn by mirroring generous musicians like Ben Allaway, Ana Hernandez, Marilyn Haskel, Eric, Law, Lester Mackenzie, Emily Scott and Scott Weidler. In January and February All Saints Company will offer the eighth and ninth of these three day workshops at San Francisco’s and St. Louis’s Episcopal Cathedrals. Three years into this work discovery continues for both leaders and participants.

My own role exploring “What God’s doing in this music” has me reading and re-reading primatologist Frans de Waal and Neurologist Marco Iacoboni, scientists whose research could challenge the church to ask how liturgy and music-making in liturgy trains us in compassion and shapes us for community in mission. If our humanity emerges from empathic communication, and if singing together is older and more essential to our communities than language, as Steven Mithen argues in Singing Neanderthals, how can we do it better?

For millennia before we had printed texts our ancestors learned music from face-to-face mirroring. Many of us learned songs this ancient way at summer camp and maybe from learning some spirituals and work songs, or savoring world music that brings us living choral folk traditions from Africa and elsewhere. There are musical treasures that would be very, very difficult to learn without words and notes on paper. But singing by mirroring, learning without paper touches something profound in our God-given humanity and taps a primal root of human community.

Reaching to feel and see this deep synthesis of practice, reflection, and theory, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched (and of course listened to) Stanford University’s Talisman A Capella singing ‘When he comes’ (from the I John text) to nursing home residents in Capetown, South Africa.

Naturally enough the nursing home setting of Talisman’s song reminds me of my wife’s University of California doctoral research, a qualitative study of the daily meal interaction between nursing home caregivers and residents. One day Ellen was discussing her research with Leonard Schatzman, the groundbreaking sociologist on her dissertation committee. Ellen said, somewhat apologetically, “I’m really just interested in what happens locally, at the bedside and in the hallway outside the patient’s room face-to-face. I don’t know what to make of the big institutional stuff higher up.” Dr. Schatzman’s responded simply, “Ellen, face-to-face is all there is. It’s face-to-face all the way up.”

Watching Talisman’s singers key off one another face-to-face, we see and feel their faces and bodies communicating what they’re singing, and then, as the camera takes us to the faces of the old people in the home caught up in their visitors singing a song they know and love, we catch another glimpse of the community-shaping power of face-to-face.

But what about global politics? Does face-to-face music-making have anything to do with the big questions? Or is it simply that global systems and politics live beyond the reach of compassion? How does the coming of the tender baby’s kingdom change systems? To bring it home, what’s face-to-face got to do with conflict and change in the Anglican Communion? Schatzman’s point, of course, is that even presidents and archbishops change (or don’t) by what they see, feel, say and do face-to-face.

Singing together doesn’t change us all at once any more than a single encounter with an openly gay Episcopalian changes a homophobic Anglican. Friendship and the discovery of grace come with repetition. Face-to-face singing and learning music to pray together in liturgy changes us ripples out to generous leadership and creativity that emerge among us as we count on one another to hold tune and words. We used to know this culturally. Civil Rights movement songs like ‘We Shall Overcome,’ changed the people who sang together and echoed in hearts and minds facing fire hoses and police dogs. It’s courage, ‘heart’ that we find when we offer even tentative voice to sing what we’re just learning and eventually to stand in front of the group and take a turn as leader.

Another Talisman YouTube vignette takes that practice to echo life and death politics as Talisman sings ‘Hosanna’ at an Easter Monday liturgy at Regina Mundi in Soweto. We watch privileged Stanford students risking hubris. As pleasingly rainbow-colored as they are, these kids singing a Soweto hymn in a Soweto shrine and sanctuary of the anti-Apartheid movement are among the most privileged young people on the planet. They know that. They’re also a typical college mix of skeptics and agnostics with a smattering of cultural Jews and Christians. Singing at a mass at a shrine where anti-Apartheid martyrs’ funerals were celebrated, Talisman’s singers find legitimacy from their willingness to open their hearts and sing the music as they received it. Their singing steers clear of the hubris of claiming suffering they haven’t known. Just watching, we can feel and mirror how the music itself and the people they’re singing to enlarge their experience and ours. Talisman risks singing a mystery that’s stronger than their religious skepticism and we can feel that they sing a history that has now touched and changed them.

And at the end of clip, the camera gives us of a black South African congregation who lived through the terror and bitter politics. Again we’re mirroring the congregation’s skepticism, as we wonder, ‘what do they/we think of this?’ and then…communion, and gratitude at what the singers have seen and felt, what they have learned and sung.

Face-to-face we recognize authenticity.

Baby’s brains are primed to discern faces. Even an abstraction, a highly stylized pair of eyes, nose and mouth holds a baby’s attention. All of us began to discover who we and how we care by seeing ourselves in the faces, voices, and gestures of others like us. And in glimpsing their tenderness mirroring us, we longed to become what we saw. Our adult’s consciousness still involuntarily tips our eyes sideways to discern a face nested in print ;~)

Seeing isn’t believing, it’s becoming, and, as Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa insisted, we become both human and holy by seeing and by learning. ‘Gnosis,’ esoteric, fully defined knowledge for the few can’t build community. Learning together face-to-face does build community.

Imitatio, the imitation of Christ, is our becoming, our becoming like him who is, by the grace of God, our being. Repetition, mirroring, our simplest, most primordial building block of human learning puts us face-to-face, where compassion is born, where conversion and formation really happen.

Am I stretching too far to take this to politics and to our Anglican Communion?

Whether in church or in our workshops, when I’m singing in our familiar ecumenical, progressive mix of LGBT and straight church musicians and clergy, I find moments when I must give thanks again for the pioneering courage of our middle-aged and older gay who risked coming out. Coming out is face-to-face. I know it a little when I declare myself a divorced and remarried priest. Face-to-face takes us to the specific incarnational particulars of humanity. Who would we be without the sometimes joyful, sometimes disquieting experience of knowing people well when they tell us the next piece of their story and experience? Face-to-face changes us all.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.

Prologue
A host of resolutions are passed every three years at General Convention. Of these, only a few ever receive air time. And we all know which ones they are: the wedge issues used by seasoned culture warriors Left and Right to energize bases and attract new recruits. And yet, every three years, at least a few changes get made that rarely if ever get talked about but that truly move the church to its foundations. These shifts are rarely obvious but are comprehensive in scope because these are the changes that affect the people in the pews—whether they’re aware of it or not.

One of these resolutions was passed three years ago with little notice or fanfare. This resolution, known to history as 2006-A077, is only four lines long yet invalidates and replaces some twenty pages of the Prayer Book, affecting every Sunday morning service in the Episcopal Church. I speak of the change to the Revised Common Lectionary.

Another such resolution was passed this summer.

Bishop Neil Alexander of the Diocese of Atlanta submitted a resolution to begin the process of compiling a new hymnal for the Episcopal Church. It was Resolution B004. While not quite as big of a change as a new Prayer Book, a new hymnal will change the very sounds of Episcopal worship—from what service music we sing, to what hymns we use to worship. And singing is prayer too. What we sing shapes how we understand ourselves, our gathered church community, and God as well.
This is no insignificant change. This will change the very words we use to worship. This matters.

The Plea
Bishop Alexander, members of the Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music, and those who make decisions regarding the shape of this future hymnal:

As you begin this weighty work, I submit three suggestions. They are interrelated. While each can stand on its own, the combination of the three will, I believe, seize the unique opportunities that this moment offers in the realms of spirituality and communication. First, restore the hymnody of the Daily Office to the place that it deserves in our life of worship. Second, establish a commission uniting skilled linguists and liturgical poets to create the new definitive Modern English translations of these texts. Third, whatever works this commission produces—do not copyright them.

On the Hymnody of the Daily Office

The Book of Common Prayer intends for the Eucharist and the Daily Offices—Morning and Evening Prayer with their attendants, Noon Prayer and Compline—to function hand in hand. The Holy Eucharist is “the principle act of Christian Worship on the Lord’s Day and other major Feasts” (BCP, 13); the Offices are the principle acts on all the other days, taking a secondary place on Sundays and feasts. With the success of the ’79 Book of Common Prayer, however, rarely are the Offices heard in our churches. Rarely are their patterns taught. Rarely do devout laity—not to mention clergy—take prayer book in hand at the hinges of the day to link hearts and hands and voices in this ancient Anglican rite.

The more recognition we give it in official materials, the better. Anything we can do to increase its visibility enables it to continue shaping Episcopalians in the ancient patterns of prayer, East and West, and blessed by our Anglican forbearers.

For our Offices derive from the classical eightfold hours of prayer, and continue their legacy. Of these, the three major Offices, Matins, Lauds, and Vespers, had special hymns for each season, often referred to collectively as the breviary hymns. The majority of these have been in constant use for over thirteen hundred years. Through the rise and fall of empires, languages, and peoples, these hymns have reinforced fundamental Christian principles and shaped how we understand the pattern and purpose of the liturgical seasons. They images they deploy, the Scriptures they borrow, have become inextricable parts of the fabric of the Western liturgy. To ignore them, to lose them, to misplace them is to consciously cultivate an amnesia of the meaning behind the deepest patterns of the liturgical year.

These hymns—they ground us in what it means to walk the year with Christ.

And I wonder if you, Bishop Alexander, felt a pang as I did when at Convention you saw the proposal for a Creation Cycle within the Pentecost season? Did you—a musician and liturgical historian immediately think of the weekday hymns for Vespers in the Time after Pentecost that extol the wonders of the earth and its creatures, remembering in turn each day the wonders God wrought in the first week of Creation? Imagine—a resolution calling for the composition of something that the Church has already used continuously for well over a thousand years, if only we can remember.

Of course, for those who know, many of these hymns can be found—either whole or in part—in our present 1982 Hymnal. (Only two of the Vespers creation hymns appear, Lucis Creator optime, 27-28, and Immense caeli Conditor, 31-32) Several even offer the option of singing the ancient words to either a plainchant melody or a more recent chorale. But they are, in fact, hidden. No symbols denote them. No preface identifies them. They languish unless discovered by chance.

A Translation Commission

Several times in our past the breviary hymns have been discovered anew and restored to the English-speaking church. The greatest advocate on their behalf is certainly the renowned translator John Mason Neale, Anglican priest and gifted poet. No less than 45 hymns in our current hymnal are direct translations of his; he is a silent partner in at least a handful more which are themselves adaptations of his efforts. His works and our great debt to him on their account should never be forgotten—and yet it is past time to build upon his foundation. His poetic diction is not ours. His deliberate archaicisms are today’s incomprehensibilities. It’s time for new translations to be done.

As no new Neale seems apparent on our horizon, a team of both skilled linguists and accomplished liturgical poets will need to collaborate upon this task. Both will be required to achieve the goal: accurate, sober, and faithful translations of the originals that will yet thrill both ear and mind, consonant with the originals in tone, style, and yes even meter, yet in lucid modern English.

Please, I beg you, shun the notion of paraphrases! Root out with relentless fervor that suggestion of “improving”, “updating”, or “making relevant” these treasures! After all, thirteen centuries of continuous use point to a relevance that transcends any decade’s favored talking points. (Remember Urban VIII and observe what he failed to see!)

Without Copyright

If such a commission were to succeed in its task, its value to the Church could only be enhanced by foregoing the process of copyright. The American Books of Common Prayer have all been published into the Public Domain. Nothing could be more fitting than for such labors to likewise be given into the keeping of all. John Mason Neale himself once stated, “I am very glad to have this opportunity of saying how strongly I feel that hymn, whether original or translated, ought, the moment it is published, to become the common property of Christendom; the author retaining no private right in it whatever” (Joys and Glories of Paradise, preface [1865]). I’ll let lawyers argue the finer points of intellectual property till the cows come home; in this case I agree with Neale.

The treasury of Christian prayer, whether spoken or sung, is the patrimony of all—our modern achievements no less so than our eldest treasures.

Furthermore, in this internet age, ideas, efforts, and even translations spread on the basis of their availability and merit. Should such a commission succeed as I imagine it could, should its works be made available to all, its works would quickly find a home not just in our denominational hymnal but in bulletins, servers, and databases around the world wherever Christians use English in worship. High quality public domain translations could offer a new gold standard, supplanting inferior options due to the combined powers of quality and availability.

Would this cut into Church publishing’s profits? I don’t know. Would it be a contribution beyond value to the faith? I know it would.

Conclusion

Bishop Alexander, your hymnal resolution is one that looks forward, both to the contemporary world and to the future. Your calls for the church to “explore sensitivity to expansive language, the diversity of worship styles, the richness of multicultural and global liturgical forms” are calls to look around at the contemporary world and to look forward to our common global future. Only the last call to explore “the enduring value of our Anglican musical heritage” looks back. I pray that as you look back to see what value the past will play in grounding the future richness of our global faith, you will consider these liturgical gems that over the ebb and flow of empires and peoples and languages have formed countless Christians ever deeper into the mind of Christ.

Sincerely,
Derek Olsen

Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament at Emory University. He has taught seminary courses in biblical studies, preaching, and liturgics; he currently resides in Maryland. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X/Y dad appear at Haligweorc.

By Margaret M. Treadwell

Being who you are won’t always please your parents. The American film classic St. Louis Blues depicts musician W.C. Handy (1873-1958) as a pioneer, betraying his minister father who believed “there are only two kinds of music, the Devil’s and the Lord’s.” In marrying hymns and gospel music to blues and jazz, Handy became a legend known as The Father of the Blues. His memory has been honored annually for the past 28 years at the WC Handy Music Festival in his northwest Alabama birthplace.

Many musicians who have played for years at the festival describe themselves as feeling like they rejoin their family each summer. Indeed, their exquisite improvisations sound like they never cease practicing together, yet in the community of this spirited festival each shines forth their special talent as an individual artist. Like Handy, many had an overriding desire to make music as if there really was no choice, no matter how much their fathers discouraged their career decision.

“What part does your spirit play in your music and how does your music play on your spirit?” I asked seven male musicians who agreed to talk with me in a roundtable discussion for an hour between gigs. Their responses debunked the myth that “men are out of touch with their emotions,” added a new dimension to my week, and gave me some life lessons to share.

Drums: “Music is a musician’s whole life. It’s what you are rather than what you do. Spirit is everything. When I play, I open up my whole self to let it out. Communication is so important; you can’t do the music without relating to other musicians like an unspoken promise where you want to express yourself but encourage others to do the same – opening to possibilities of sharing everything we are. I’m hesitant to say that I’m channeling the music, but I think that selflessness happens to all of us at points during improvisation. We compose, the music is out there, and then the moment is gone which makes it all the more precious. Music is like life.”

Keyboard 1: “Yes, and being perfect ruins it. You have to take risks or the music wouldn’t be real. I think of it as the “Zen style” of playing which can get me into the zone – that’s the spiritual part of it. The worst thing I can do is to think too much about it.”

Vibes: “Swing is spirit and swing is everything. It gives back, lifts me up and always is there when I need it. There is mystery in the improvisation. It’s not about the instrument you play but about the humanity in the person.”

Trumpet: “My wife is an artist; we are speaking the same language in different mediums which is spiritual for me. It doesn’t really matter what your instrument is although trumpet – a wind instrument – gives me a chance to have a true voice, which started in 6th grade. Paradoxically, I’m not a trumpet soloist; I must trust and be with others to see where they’re going in community.”

Sax: “I’m a creative writer and the principles are the same as in art and music – contrast, design, color in the broader sense, and organization. To stay the course in a different professional way of life requires faith and tapping into the creative spirit every day. Music is a religion with a different language. Music is spirit and must be followed; spirit follows spirit.”

Trombone: “The spirituality of music is like group therapy for me. I couldn’t play when I had cancer, and I thought I would go crazy. Music keeps me on course.”

Bass: “I’ve played music as long as I can remember, and it gives me a direction even though I don’t think of myself as a man with goals. I’m spontaneously composing when soloing; when the others join me there’s a certain vocabulary we all use with phrases we know but never said before in the same way.”

Later I spoke with two other keyboardists. One said, “My music has started to flow through me from a secret place only God knows. It feels like I have come “home” to a place all of us look for. I do much of my work in prisons, churches and other places I can talk/sing about spiritual concerns. It’s dangerous if God is only in our heads; He starts to sound an awful lot like us.”

The second reflected, “Music will exalt anything to which it is attached – God, family, sex, hamburgers. It is a spiritual force second only to love. King David made it a requirement that the 4,000 Pharisees he dispatched to spread the word of God’s kingdom had to be musicians largely because music transcends language and speaks directly to the spirit.” As St. Augustine is credited with saying: ‘He who sings prays twice.’”

Margaret M. (“Peggy”) Treadwell, LCSW -C, has been active in the fields of education and counseling for thirty-five years. Following a long association with Dr. Edwin H. Friedman, during which she served on his faculty, she co-edited and helped posthumously publish his book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.

By Greg Jones

When I was an adolescent, coming of age, thinking about who I wanted to be "when I grew up," God sneaked up on me. As I look back now some twenty years from the time when I began to really consider "my future," as one so often does in college, I can recall a number of these moments when God slipped into my thoughts. One of them involved a band who I heard play in Raleigh on the campus of N.C. State.

Twenty years ago I was fascinated by the Cowboy Junkies' album, The Trinity Sessions. The album was a blend of rock, traditional Americana and gospel, and it was recorded in an old church with a single microphone. The lead singer had an angelic voice, and the gentle sound of the band was deeply engaging for me. Several of the songs became instant favorites for me, but the one which got hold of me was the traditional gospel tune, "Working on a Building." The song's lyrics are few, and all center around this sentence: "I'm working on a building, it's a Holy Ghost building, for my Lord, for my Lord."

The song got through to me in those days and achieved the Lord's goal of stimulating within me a desire to offer my life to more than my own personal goals and uses. As Peter wrote to the earliest disciples of Christ, "let yourselves be built into a spiritual house." (1 Peter 2.5) Indeed, I feel that our entire goal as disciples is to allow the Holy Spirit to build us up, and the world through us, into the house of God - wherein God may abide with His people.

That's what it means to me to follow Christ in discipleship and mission. Episcopalians, listen, we're working on a building, a Holy Ghost building, for our Lord, for our Lord. As the old song concludes, "If I was a singer I tell you what I'd do, I would keep on singing and work on that building too." Let us make that our song together, a song of birth pangs, growing pains, and ever building joy in Christ Jesus.

The Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones ('Greg') is rector of St. Michael's in Raleigh, N.C. and the bass player in indie-rock band The Balsa Gliders — whose fourth studio release is available on iTunes. He blogs at Anglican Centrist.

By Derek Olsen

Worship wars. Nothing is guaranteed to get more hits and generate more comments on my blog than worship wars. So many chattering keyboards and so much passion expended reminds me that, more often than not, something more than “taste” or “preference” is truly at stake. However, in all too many discussions of worship likes and dislikes the conversation stays at the surface and dissolves into personal preference and subjective aesthetic opinions. I know—I’ve done it myself all too often.

Recently, however, a discussion came up concerning church music on guitars and, in particular, the music of the St Louis Jesuits. You may have never heard of them, but if you’ve spent a few years around a liturgical church like ours, I’ll guarantee that you’ve heard samples of their music: “Gather Us In”, “On Eagles’ Wings”, “Here I Am, Lord”, “One Bread, One Body.” In the midst of the discussion, I got to thinking that instead of remaining at the level of a surface reaction, it was worth digging deeper—getting to the meat of the liturgical spirituality at work underneath, driving these arguments.

As the first major proponents of popular music styles in a vernacular idiom for Roman Catholic worship, the music of the St Louis Jesuits holds an appeal (and a disdain) for some not based on its musical or theological properties. For what it’s worth, I think the musical and theological qualities of much of this repertoire is rather limited. However, it is of immense symbolic importance, especially for Roman or Rome-leaning people of a certain age (read: Baby-Boomers) who were coming of age at the time of the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath. That is, their attachment to the music is due to what it represents–the American Catholic Church getting to do things its way, a new generation literally getting its voice heard and overturning old ways of doing things. Now that a new “new generation” is rising, certain elements are in classic backlash mode and despise the Saint Louis Jesuit style music for precisely the reasons their parents loved it. Being on the cusp of Generation Y, I’ll admit to having one foot in this camp.

To avoid dwelling in knee-jerk generational generalizations, though, I’d rather cut to what I see as the real reason why this is a fight–and why such a fight should exist.

It’s not really about guitars and folk songs or not-guitars and not-folk songs; rather, what lies at the center of the argument (as I see it) is competing notions of immanence and transcendence and their place in divine worship. Should church music sound like secular music? Why or why not? Speaking personally, I like guitars quite a lot whether it is in classic country or the virtuosity of Van Halen, Hendrix, Gibbons, Morelli or others. But that doesn’t mean I want to hear that style of music in church. I generally don’t like American Folk Revival music from the 60’s and 70’s anyway; I especially don’t want to hear that style in church.

For me, it’s too immanent; I crave something more transcendent. Some have argued that people can generally be grouped as Platonists or Aristotelians. That is, they either have a sense of reality as something “out there” or of reality as something “really here” intimately bound up with the nitty-gritty of life. I intuit that the same is true of spirituality. Some find their connection with God as the God who is immanent and bound up in the holiness of mundane existence. Others find that connection in the God of the transcendent who is “out there” and Other and speaks a word of challenge against what we think is our mundane existence.

Both sorts can learn from each other; both sorts need to learn from each other. But a basic orientation one way or the other will still endure.

I’m the second kind. I’m a Platonist by natural inclination. I find God “out there” and in the transcendent and in the different and in the things that shocking me out of my business-as-usual way of living and, through those experiences, can find God and the Holy in the mundane and the everyday in the ways that I can identify God shocking and surprising me towards transcendence.

As a result, I want my worship to be transcendentally oriented. I want it to help me get in connection with the God “out there” so that I can learn the feel, the touch, the taste of the Other and transcendent God in order that I might recognize that same God in my daily eating, breathing, and moving. Chant is to the ear what incense is to the nose what stained glass and icons are to the eye: culturally conditioned signs of the transcendent but—cutting through the culturally-based significance—vehicles that truly assist me to touch the face of God.

That’s why I don’t want guitars in my service.

And that’s why I understand that other people want them—and need them.

The other side is that I sang for a couple of years in seminary in a Catholic Mass choir that did Marty Haugen’s Mass of Creation with a guitar front-and-center. I’ve served and preached at folk services. I’ve even led with guitar in hand a Taizé-style service with guitar and recorder.

Yes, there can be a place for the guitar. Yes, it can be done well, reverently, worshipfully.

But it’s not my taste. And when I’m choosing a congregation where I worship, I will choose a service without guitars.

Derek Olsen blogs at Haligweorc, and is looking for a church home near Ellicott City, Maryland.

By Donald Schell

Two days after walking, singing, and praying with eleven Anglicans and one Lutheran across a hundred and fifty miles of the Camino de Santiago in Spain, my wife and I flew to Malawi, Africa where we’re driving distances on two lane highways crowded with pedestrians, heavy trucks, and bicycles (often laden with multiple riders or huge loads of charcoal for market) to visit community-based responses to Malawi’s AIDS crisis. When we turn off the pavement, we bounce along dirt tracks to visit village home-based care (HBC) programs, orphan feeding programs, AIDS education programs, ARV (anti-retroviral programs), and other locally generated responses to the AIDS crisis. Our Spanish pilgrimage and African project visits feel like one, and music is part of what makes that so.

My wife Ellen is the International Programs Director for Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance. Her day-to-day work is communicating with Malawi leadership (typically via email) on project development. Annually she visits to talk with local coordinators who are skilled in program and capacity development and with them she visits as many projects as possible.

Today our plans have changed, cutting short our last day’s visits in the Lilongwe (central) region. The husband of GAIA’s southern region project officer died last night, so we’re driving down to Blantyre this afternoon for the funeral tomorrow. Sr. Gertrude, GAIA’s central region coordinator will join the wake before the funeral, a whole night of singing to send the deceased man on with blessing, an old African custom that fits well with Christian hope and practice. Gertrude is a Roman Catholic. Alice, whose husband died, is CCAP (Church of Central Africa, Presbyterian). I’ll wear my collar to the funeral tomorrow, as other Anglican clergy will. Baptists and Living Waters (African Pentecostal) Church members will join the singing. African Christians take easily to ecumenism. And tomorrow’s funeral will be full of singing. Mourning or joy, sorrow, or hope – African cultures greet all with singing.

Prayer and singing have greeted us at nearly every project we’ve visited. Four iterations of All Saints Company’s "Music that Makes Community” workshops – two in San Francisco and two in New York with another coming up in Iowa have me listening carefully for how people make the music we’re hearing.

Here’s a typical scene: a lead singer makes a quiet opening call and sets up a rhythm with her or his feet, the group responds with feet shuffling in simple step laying down a gentle but steady percussion. The leader then offers a strong call – singing out the central refrain. A couple of other leaders join in harmony and they sing it through to a moment of sung cue when the whole chorus joins in – sometimes forty singers. Leaders continue to improvise. The melodic and harmonic paths are known and give a frame for improvisation. The English words we hear are about our visit, about the work the people are doing together - caring for orphans or doing AIDS education, and they’re nearly always about the grace of God, and giving thanks. The music practices shared authority. Learning and singing are completely continuous. Harmonies weave men and women, boys and girls together.

In all the fractious debate in our Anglican communion, we have managed, at least sometimes, to remind ourselves that ‘communion’ isn’t something we make or earn. Sometimes, at least, we remember that communion is what we do together that makes us one. I hope bishops at this summer’s Lambeth Conference will remember that communion is neither an enforced human artifact of pure unity nor a reward for agreeing that everyone like us is right and everyone not like us is wrong. But can we find our way without singing together when music is an essential nutrient in the fertile ground from which communion springs? Does this sound like overstatement? I do mean it.

Walking the Camino we began each day with teaching our group (eight out of twelve of us speaking no Spanish) the Padre Nuestro, The Lord’s Prayer in Spanish. We found this a surprisingly grace-filled exercise in old-fashioned rote memorization. It gave us all a way to pray with our Spanish sisters and brothers when we attended pilgrim masses along the way. And our pilgrims prayed the prayer, phrase by phrase as they walked (and sometimes we sang too, even walking alone).

Singing (like our day by day memorization of the Padre Nuestro) offered us freedom and trust in a caring relationship growing from learning by imitation. Each morning before our daily Padre Nuestro, our group sang together, exploring treasures of hymnody that recall the way to God as journey and pilgrimage. We also drew daily from Church Publishing’s soon to be released Music By Heart, Songs for Evening Worship. Music by Heart is All Saints Company’s first published contribution to a church-wide and international recovery of music we learn by ear and by heart. In this we gratefully follow John Bell’s lead. From the Iona Community he and others in other settings are also at work building community by singing together.

In Music that Makes Community (with a conscious nod toward traditional singing and African choral folk music) we’ve worked with a group of musician-liturgists from around the U.S. commissioning, collecting and teaching people to lead congregations in the music that comes to us by hearing and imitation, listening that takes the mind directly to the heart.

But what has this got to do with communion? In his book Singing Neanderthals Stephen Mithen argues compellingly that melody and ritual gesture were the fertile soil of humanity’s primal communication and community. Speech began in tonal expressions of hope, request, urgency, frustration, command accompanied by demonstrative gestures. Primal sentences expressing desires, fears, requests, warnings, and exhortations were the sea from which living words and powerful abstract ideas emerged. There’s a good summary review of Mithen’s book on-line in the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology – Mithen’s book fits beautifully with Louis Weil’s (Liturgy Professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific) observations, “Our bodies are the instruments of prayer,” and “The meaning of the ritual is learned in the experience itself.”

Human communication begins in singing together. Language, which began singing, has been our essential means of discovering and describing truth. Our church crisis is the crisis of a “not-listening process,” the opposite of singing together. Our divisions deny the personal and relational quality of truth. We’ve fallen to thinking with the mind in the head rather than in the heart. (“Thinking with the mind in the heart” is Parker Palmer’s insightful appropriation of the Eastern Church’s teaching in the Philokalia that true prayer begins when we pray with the mind in the heart.)

Music is communal, and making music together builds relationship (and shares authority among all who sing or play). I’ve heard this shared authority and community making in the kitchen at Wendel’s Guest House where we’ve been staying this week in Lilongwe. The guys in the kitchen sing and talk as they work, trading musical phrases, familiar songs, ideas, and gossip back and forth.

And every project we’ve visited – school, church, or village has greeted us with song (and often song and dance). Women, men, and children’s voices begin in simple response to a refrain, drums support and encourage, bodies move. Words and tunes are modeled by a leader, picked up by the group, and improvised. ‘We sing a song of welcome, welcome our dear vistors, welcome dear GAIA!’

Singing is a natural and graceful practice of community building and spiritual formation. Imitation and memorization give us a framework of relationship and a means of thinking together.

Where has music gone in Western and particularly American culture? Why do we imagine that there are people who can’t sing?

Our technologically shaped, individualized culture has forgotten that truth is ultimately relational. Could this relational (and musical) quality of truth be what makes the Nicene Creed more believable to some people when it’s sung together rather than when it’s said? Singing together enacts what the creed teaches – that God in Trinity is a perichoresis (the Greek word for a circle dance that the drafters of the Nicene Creed used to describe the personal and relational quality of the mystery of God).

At dinner here in Malawi we were talking with a distinguished Malawian physician who did her advanced training in the Great Britain. ‘People in Europe and America don’t seem to notice how fragmented their societies have become,’ she said. ‘Here in Africa we assume that we are in relationship with everyone. We talk. Your society is framed to minimize person to person contact, to make it all optional or by choice. One week in England I decided to see how little I could talk to people I didn’t know. I bought a weeklong bus pass that I had only to flash to the driver to get on the bus. I used the automated teller. I shopped for my groceries without saying a word.’ She wondered what we are doing when we allow ourselves to choose whom we will be human with.

So, we argue in written prose (not even using the melody of our face to face speaking voices). Do we actually believe we can enact church union without singing together, without the gestures and movements that make sacraments?

Unlike today’s church, Jesus didn’t think music was a decorative luxury. When looking for an image for an unresponsive generation, he pointed to the people in the marketplace annoyed with the children playing at ‘weddings and funerals.’ What sort of generation doesn’t welcome the kingdom? A commerce-preoccupied marketplace culture that can hear the prophet weeping and won’t mourn, and can hear the messiah piping and singing and won’t dance. It’s no surprise in Mark and Matthew’s accounts of the Last Supper, to hear Jesus and the disciples singing a hymn together before they went out to the mount of olives, that is, before their teacher went out to face betrayal, imprisonment, torture, and death. Seeing what was coming, Jesus didn’t offer his disciples a last word, after he’d taught and shared the meal again, he sang with them, making a community to gather God’s strength and blessing. Liturgical scholars tell us they probably sang Psalm 136 that night, a hymn of victory to mark the end of the ritual meal with a celebration of God’s unfailing love in the face of adversity.

Commands or exhortations to sing come up repeatedly (and emphatically) in the epistles – Romans 15:4-14; I Corinthians 14:15; Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:11-21; James 5:8-18; and the apocalyptic vision of God’s triumph in Revelation is also punctuated with song (Revelation 5:9; Revelation 14:3; Revelation 15:3). Two of the most powerful theological formulations in the New Testament – John 1 (‘In the beginning was the Word…’) and Philippians 2 (‘Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus…’) claim theological authority for the community’s hymns.

Music is relational and of the moment. Listening to one another as we sing, our music unfolds in time, in breath, and in rhythm. Timeless ideas, concepts without heart cannot live or build community. Truth that is not relational marginalizes and kills for the sake of ‘consistency.’ Our world came to be in song lines, hearing and imitating, call and response, and improvisation. Singing is humanity’s original listening process, knowing the other in love.

We can’t make music without sharing authority. Everyone contributes to a consensus of pitch and rhythm. Our primal language counts on my relationship to you and yours to me for us to work together. Any language in which I can be all alone in my right opinion or doctrine has severed itself from the human root of music and gesture. We may suspect the other churches in the communion don’t get our ‘baptismal covenant’ but it looks to me like our grassroots, democratic church, for all the important discoveries it HAS made about relationship and love, needs the nurture of much more African-style singing.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is Creative Director of All Saints Company, working for community development in congregational life focusing on sharing leadership, welcoming creativity and building community through music. He wrote My Father, My Daughter: Pilgrims on the Road to Santiago.

By Margaret M. Treadwell

Our grandchildren remind us that children are born with an innate joy in music. Four-year-old Lily has found her voice in creating tunes and lyrics, which she sings in her bath or first thing upon waking. Her sister, Nola, 3, quickly learns words to songs on the radio concerning adult concepts of love and yearning, which she loudly belts out as if on stage. And John, 3, is a guitar player who wildly strums his made-up pieces usually ending with the ABC song. They call me “Singing Nana” and frequently ask for my rendition of the WWII songs my mother taught me when I was their age.

Curious about children and music, I consulted the musicians at my church, St. Columba’s, in Washington, D. C., who shared some stories and their passion for their work with me.

The music program at St. Columba’s began in the 1970s, when rector Bill Swing and nursery school director Sylvia Buell wanted to give younger people a voice in the congregation and something meaningful to do in church. Over the years this first choir grew to include a Primary Choir (grades one and two), Boy and Girl Choirs (third through eighth grades) and The Gallery Choir (ninth through 12th grades). Parents and grandparents became involved in helping kids get to church on time to meet their responsibilities, obligations and commitments.

One of the program’s goals is to keep the innate joy of music alive. In an atmosphere of fun and encouragement, a group success is a personal triumph, which gives children a sense of well-being and dignity. No one ever is told they have no talent or don’t sing well; sometimes a child sings “off key” because they want to hear their voice distinct from others. Even when they don’t have vocal range, they expand their abilities if not discouraged or hurt by criticism. The youngest singers learn basic rudimentary diction and how to sing at their own level in a group. Soon they outgrow the fear of singing in front of the congregation, and this self-confidence spills over into dancing, acting and other areas of their lives.

Play, movement, drama and service are all part of the nursery school’s approach to music. For example, learning the Stone Soup Song several weeks ago involved the following steps:

1. Identifying the beginning, middle and end of the Stone Soup story and committing the song to memory.

2. Cooking the soup while learning about different vegetables and how to prepare them.

3. Experiencing the adage that many hands make light work and whatever one brings to the pot is a gift.

4. Examining the finished product in individual cups to learn about science and math.

5. Sharing the soup with neighbors – the church’s ministry for homeless men – to understand what joy in life is all about.

6. Eating yummy vegetable soup (well, almost everyone participated in that last step).

Music helps self-regulation as children figure out how to move and understand their bodies, including how to sit still. Then you can create your own songs. The following example is one my granddaughter, Lily Gordon, sings in her bath:

The wind blows softly and it pushes me to you.
It is time to go now,
I am ready to go now to kindergarten. I am ready.
I have to go now but it is more about me than it is you.

What can parents and grandparents do to promote music at home? Here are recommendations from the pros at St. Columba’s:

1. Sing to your baby while in the womb. She or he will recognize the song after birth.

2. Make as much music available as possible. Have a basket of musical instruments – xylophones, drums, shakers, violins and keyboards – and encourage noise and loud singing. Pots and pans with a wooden spoon will work too.

3. Turn off the TV and encourage all the family to participate in the fun. We learn best in relationship with each other. Remember that a child’s natural expression of joy isn’t necessarily convenient for parents, so make spaces for it.

4. Help children memorize songs. We own a song when we sing it by heart.

5. Provide opportunities to hear concerts and musical plays at an early age, but if your child wants to leave early – leave!

“Teaching music is not my main purpose. I want to make good citizens. If children hear fine music from the day of their birth and learn to play it, they develop sensitivity, discipline and endurance. They get a beautiful heart.” – Shinichi Suzuki

Margaret M. (“Peggy”) Treadwell, LCSW -C, has been active in the fields of education and counseling for thirty-five years. Following a long association with Dr. Edwin H. Friedman, during which she served on his faculty, she co-edited and helped posthumously publish his book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. She teaches a course on congregational leadership at Virginia Theological Seminary.

By Roger Ferlo

It was about 20 years ago, soon after I turned 35, that I decided it was time to learn to play the cello.

It turned out to be a religious decision. I had just become the rector of a small parish that had, so to speak, been through the wars. Nothing to do with the organist, thank God. The conflict centered on the rector who preceded me, a priest whom I have never met but whose parish I am sure I would have joined had I come to town as a lay person. He was one of those brilliant, charismatic sixties priests who had spent his early career in college chaplaincy, and happily never recovered. He brought his edgy, transgressive theological style to a parish that thought it was ready for it but really was not. The impact he had made as a writer, teacher and preacher had been extraordinary. Clearly, people’s lives had changed because of his ministry. But like most of us, he was also very good at excusing his several personal failings by theologizing them, and some parishioners loved him for this—that is, the ones who stayed.

It all fell apart in the end. The evangelical bishop refused to officiate at this third marriage, and basically forced his resignation, which made the parishioners feel that they were being besieged for their liberal views by the know-nothing fundamentalist right-wingers in the diocese, although it was clear to more level-headed people that even the present bishop’s more liberal predecessor would have been hard-put to accept the third marriage.

Anyway, by the time I showed up, many people were licking their wounds and loaded for bear, and the bear was me. So I took up the cello, figuring that would be cheaper than therapy and more rewarding in the long run.

In all the turmoil of the parish in those first years I was there, the music didn’t come easily. But I discovered that though I wasn’t great at this, I wasn’t all that bad, and as the weeks and months went on, the music began to center me. In a chaotic life, it became my one means of self-discipline. In the more difficult moments in that parish it became my only means of prayer.

But it was not just the music I loved when I played the cello in those days. I loved the sheer feel of the instrument in my hands. The shape of it, the sheen, the exquisite purfling, the absurdity of that scrollwork at the top, the flaming wood grain on the back, the miraculous way that inert slice of board could burst into the sound of a living voice. I didn’t play it so much as cling to it.

That clinging almost undid me. I was in my office one day, chatting with a parishioner, when the parish secretary called up the stairs to me that the cleaning lady was at the door. She had just come from the rectory, and was pretty distraught, something about my guitar falling over when she was vacuuming, and how it had broken in half, and could I come down and help her pick it up.

The news hit me like a sucker punch. I tried to put a good face on it, and act professional with my parishioner, but she saw right through me. I rushed out of the office, ran up the hill to the rectory, slammed into the living room, and there it was—the cello was on the floor, its neck broken off and splayed to one side. A large splinter remained attached to the body, with a piece of purfling jutting out like a broken finger bone. The poor cleaning lady was standing there crying, because she thought that it could stand up by itself on its pin, and she had only left it that way for a second, and was it worth a lot of money, and she didn’t mean to do it—

As you might imagine, I wasn’t feeling very pastoral at the moment, and I’m amazed I didn’t just fire her on the spot. All I wanted was for her to go home, and to leave me alone with—well, with the body. I realize now with some embarrassment that that’s how I thought of it. I found myself crying wretched tears of grief and loss, anger and frustration, because the one thing that had empowered me to endure what seemed to me in those early days the unremitting pressures and betrayals of parish life now lay in pieces on the floor in front of me.

Of course, I had lost all sense of proportion, both about the parish, which was full of good people, and about myself. As my cello teacher told me on the phone when I called him in panic, that in spite of appearances I lived in a pretty musical town, and he knew an excellent luthier, and in his long experience what was broken could often be fixed—

Wisdom. I love music teachers. I visited the cello in the shop a few days later. It had been completely disassembled, and its cracked face was now being painstakingly patched from within—the long, narrow cracks disappearing as if by miracle, the damaged inlay matched and restored so skillfully that only an expert could detect the difference. It took months and months, but when the work was done, it really could be made to sing again, cracked and patched and scarred, but whole.

Now you might expect that I want you to see in this story a parable of death and resurrection, But that’s not exactly why I’m writing this, although whenever I pick up my cello I see in its cracks and patches the history of my ministry in that place, which went on to be enormously productive and satisfying.

No, I tell this story because I know God works through us in our music and art. What musicians do with their various contraptions of wood and strings and pipes and wind brings us so close to things divine that it can steal our breath away. But I also know that no matter who you are, and whatever name you bear—Monteverdi or Mozart, Hampton or Hindemith—however good you are at what whatever you do—your finest achievements are but fragile things, as fragile as the wood of my long-suffering student cello.

It is so tempting to carve for ourselves idols out of such fragile wood, to make of our art another god, to pursue our music just for the music’s sake. In the hyper-competitive hurly-burly of our professional lives, all of us succumb to the temptation of thinking that in the end it is only the music that really matters, or the sermon, or whatever bottom line our jobs force us to toe. But there is no other God besides me, says the Lord. Everything we do and say—any music we have the grace to make—we make in the shadow of the cross.

Now there is wood that endures—that rough and jagged piece of executioner’s wood lifted high like Moses’ serpent in the desert, standing up by itself on its own pin, drawing all the world to itself like a sure-footed compass. All our talents, all our losses, all our triumphs, all our failings—the cross draws everything we are and everything we do into the searing truth of the wounded and resurrected Savior—the Holy One patched and scarred as we are, yet living, breathing, triumphant and loving.

Life can be hard. What is broken can truly be fixed, my teacher told me. It’s not true for everything, perhaps, but it is true for this. In the end, it is the cross that matters—that living sign of redemption about which we can do no other than lift our breaking voices in song, and tune our broken instruments in sounds of endless praise.

The Rev. Roger Ferlo is Director of the Center for Lifetime Theological Education at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he also directs the Evening School of Theology. He was trained as a Shakespeare scholar, and frequently leads audience discussions on religion and drama for the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, DC.

By Marshall Scott

I sit at my computer, listening. I’m listening to an opera – one of two that have become annual rituals for me. One has become part of my reflections for Holy Week. One has become part of my preparation for Christmas. I sit at my computer, listening, and the tears start.

Have you seen a Child
the color of wheat, the color of dawn?
His eyes are mild.
His hands are those of a King,
as King he was born.
Incense, myrrh, and gold
we bring to His side.
and the Eastern Star is our guide.

I am listening, as is my custom, to “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” by Giancarlo Menotti. “Amahl,” an opera in one act, was a Christmas tradition when I was small. It was written for television, and was first broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1951. In the years since it has been performed in a variety of settings. Each year it is a part of my preparation for Christmas.

Have you seen a Child
the color of earth, the color of thorn?
His eyes are sad.
His hands are those of the poor,
as poor He was born.
Incense, myrrh, and gold
we bring to His side.
and the Eastern Star is our guide.

I suppose we should consider “Amahl” an Epiphany story, really, rather than a Christmas story; but perhaps that’s an artificial distinction. (There was that year, after all, when we didn’t take the crèche down until the Feast of the Presentation.) If you’re not familiar, it is the story of the encounter of Amahl, a poor and crippled shepherd boy, and his mother, with three kings and their one long-suffering attendant. The kings follow a star to seek a child. With them they bring rich gifts, including gold, frankincense, and myrrh. When the mother asks about the child they seek (hoping, really, it might be her own son), they sing about the Child.

The Child we seek holds the seas
and the winds on His palm.
The Child we seek has the moon
and the stars at His feet.
Before Him the eagle is gentle,
the lion is meek.

As a Christian, of course, I know the Child they seek. I trust they will see him. And yet I am moved powerfully by the images they present. This Child is born both king and poor, both gentle and sad. In his tiny palm he holds storms; indeed, the universe revolves around him, from the most distant to the most familiar.

Choirs of angels hover His roof
and sing Him to sleep.
He’s warmed by breath.
He’s fed by Mother
who is both Virgin and Queen.
Incense, myrrh, and gold
we bring to His side.
and the Eastern Star is our guide.

Again, if you know the work, you know that it does have its conflict. Amahl’s mother, oppressed and obsessed with their poverty, and anxious for Amahl’s welfare, is overcome. She tries to steal a little gold “for my child.” She is, of course, discovered and seized by the attendant. Crying, “Thief!” and fending off Amahl’s attempts at defense, he brings the woman roughly before the kings.

I know something about that. Oh, I know I don’t share that sort of poverty; I’m not that big a fool. At the same time, I remember, as I try to be Benedictine myself, that St. Benedict wrote, “The life of a monk ought always to be a Lenten observance.” Enough of my spiritual life has been affected by St. Benedict and by Walter Hilton that I have some idea just how I am impoverished. The fact that I haven’t stolen gold just like Amahl’s mother doesn’t allow me to pretend I haven’t stolen other things, less tangible perhaps but no less precious. I have often enough had to remember, from the Prayer of Manasseh, “I have sinned, O Lord, I have sinned; and I know my wickedness only too well.”

I know, too, the embarrassment and the fear of being exposed. I have experienced my own interim times of judgment, just as I believe I will ultimately face the last judgment. And so as her character cringes on the floor, I cringe with her.

And with her, year after year, I sob, astounded, as a king sings,

Oh, woman, you can keep the gold.
The Child we seek doesn’t need our gold.
On love, on love alone
He will build His kingdom.
His pierced hand will hold no scepter.
His haloed head will wear no crown.
His might will not be built on your toil.
Swifter than lightning
He will soon walk among us.
He will bring us new life
and receive our death,
and the keys to His city
belong to the poor.

This is grace indeed. This is indeed the promise of new life, established in the child king. This is a hope so counter to the ways of this world: a king who walks among his people, who does not take his riches from the struggles of others, who builds his kingdom on love and not on power. How amazing, how confounding that these three kings have sought, and will find, this child king whose kingdom is so different from their own! And so, the mother sings through her tears, and I through mine,

On, no, wait…take back your gold!
For such a King I’ve waited all my life.

I will not tell you the rest of the story. I you’ll listen for yourself. And with twelve days in Christmas, and more in Epiphany, there is time.

Each year I journey again with a boy, his mother, and three kings. How wonderful the child they seek! How wonderful the child they will find! How wonderful to know the child they found, and to know that he transcends all their imaginings, and ours.

The Rev. Marshall Scott is a chaplain in the Saint Luke’s Health System. A past president of the Assembly of Episcopal Healthcare Chaplains, and an associate of the Order of the Holy Cross, he keeps the blog Episcopal Chaplain at the Bedside.

By Steven Charleston

Luciano Pavarotti died. His amazingly vibrant, soaring voice is silent. Around the world millions of people will mourn his passing, even if they knew very little about the art of which he was a true master. Pavarotti became synonymous with opera for many people who had never imagined they would care for his art form. He welcomed them to a part of their life they did not know. Part of his genius was not only in his singing, but in his ability to translate that singing into a message the whole world could hear.

Now his voice is silent. In tribute to this great man, I would invite us all into that silence.

If Pavarotti was dedicated to bringing art to the people, what does his silence have to tell us? At the very least, it should remind us that the effort to share in artistic expression with other human beings is not a peripheral concern for us, but a central issue for the values we proclaim as the church. Justice, community, human dignity: these are the same issues underlying the arts. Pavarotti brought art to the people. What does that mean to us? It means Pavarotti enriched other human beings, those who were deeply aware of his art and those who were only curious. He expanded our range of appreciation and, therefore, of contact. He demonstrated how art can unite us as much as it can inspire us. Pavarotti built community out of the thin air of song. He drew people of widely different walks of life to a single stillpoint of sound. His legacy reminds us that communities are not just bound together by rules, money or power: at our best, we form community through the beauty of our difference and the breadth of our imagination.

The silence should remind us that as the arts go, so goes community. In fact, you can chart the demise of community in America by charting the slow death of its artistic soul. The massive cutbacks in school art programs have robbed generations of children of the option of human expression. As usual, the first to feel the impact are those who can least afford it. The abandonment of our public commitment to art has diminished us. The arts are not a luxury for spiritual life, but a necessity. Art is not just a set decoration for the affluent, it is a voice. It is the people’s voice. The arts are the medium of the poor, the defense of the dispossessed, and the champion of the marginalized. Throughout history the oppressed have found freedom in their right to speak through theater, music and the visual arts. Art is not just for the privileged few. It is for every person, perhaps most especially for those who’s other choices are so limited. Young men and women who have very few chances in life discover strength in the authority of their talent. Art liberates the individual. When we starve the arts, we starve hope. We starve justice.

The silence is growing. Voices are being stilled. It is not a trivial thing to speak up for the support of art in America. It is a liberating thing. People who care about justice must care about the voice of justice: the arts that embody our collective voice as a people of God. That voice of justice finds its resonance in cultural diversity, its authenticity in freedom and its message in the human spirit. If we lose it, we may never get it back. And that’s why the death of Luciano Pavarotti is such an important opportunity for us. Not only to honor the passing of this renowned artist, but to support the principle that guided his career. Pavarotti brought his art to the people. He believed that art belongs to the people. It is their voice. His death prompts us to ask : by whose right is that voice denied? Who benefits when the arts grow weak? What is the real cost of denying access to free expression to a nation’s people? Is it time for us to stop looking the other way while school art programs are starved for support? The passing of Luciano Pavarotti urges us to speak our answer.

The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston, former Bishop of Alaska, is president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School, and keeper of the podcasting blog EDS's Stepping Stones.

By Heidi Shott

Just yesterday morning, I was thinking about what to write for my monthly deadline at the Café. Several times a day I get flashes of ideas for essays – the commonplace moment somehow connects to some big idea - but then the phone rings or someone says, “hey, did you pick up my shirts at the cleaners?” or I get a pop-up on feedreader with a story about a cop in Glasgow who was attacked by an octopus and I can’t help but click. These interruptions make it hard to be faithful to all the ideas that present themselves for consideration.

But some ideas are more tenacious than others. There’s something in the way they keep rising to the top of my mind that makes them hard to ignore.

The James Taylor concert falls into that category.

In March for his birthday or perhaps in June for Father’s Day, (sadly, I can’t remember) my sons and I bought my husband Scott two tickets to see James Taylor in August. The plan was he would share the second ticket with me.

So one evening a few weeks ago, 50 miles from our quiet village, we sat down to a table at a lovely restaurant near the Civic Center in Portland. The young waiter asked if we were going to the concert.

“S’pose you have a lot of middle-aged people in tonight before James Taylor?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he grinned and concentrated on opening the wine.

Over the last 20 years we’ve been to a lot of events at the Civic Center. Once years ago I paid for my sons to ride the elephant at the circus, then they chickened out so I rode it with one of their friends. I’m against elephant riding in general, but I’d bought the damn tickets. We’ve seen Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby. We’ve gotten backstage passes to see the Barenaked Ladies twice because our only famous friend, Ned Steinberger, is a friend of the bass player.

As we took our seats on the floor of the Civic Center, eerily near the spot I bestrode the elephant, we saw that the place was sold out. It was sardined with people of the boomer persuasion. We played a game of spotting people under 30 with the couple to my left (you can do that in Maine). “There’s one!” chirped the 50-something engineer-type beside me.

“Well, yeah, she’s under 30, but look, she’s with her mom,” Scott said.

“Right,” he said, disappointed, “doesn’t count.”

“Our son is here,” said his wife. “He’s 32. But he won’t sit with us.”

One night in the lazy summer of 1982 - the summer Scott and I painted the barn on my family’s farm, played a lot of badminton and didn’t do much else - we drove to Saratoga Performing Arts Center to see James Taylor and his band. Most people were on the lawn with their blankets and buckets of beer, but we had tickets inside. It was a great show but I didn’t notice that anyone in the audience seemed particularly old, including James and Karla Bonoff who opened for him.

At this concert, however, there was no opening act, no band, just James Taylor, his guitars, and a fellow musician playing various keyboard instruments to complement the show. He started out with a wave and hello and launched into “There’s Something in the Way She Moves.” He had all 8,000 of us from the intro. His untouched voice; his deft, self-deprecating manner; all was a balm. Just about everyone in the room had either come of age with or grown up with these familiar songs, depending on their place on the boomer continuum.

I remember first hearing “Fire and Rain” played by my brother Jim, ten years my senior, around 1970. By the time I started high school in 1976, I was listening to “Greatest Hits” every night as I nodded off to sleep. “You’ve Got a Friend” was the last song on Side A and my record player would click off all by itself. The cover of the “JT” album spent several years mounted on the wall next to my bed. He still had hair back then.

In college, Scott and I listened to “Flag” and “Dad Loves His Work” on the 15-hour road trips between school in Boston and his home in West Virginia. After we were married and terribly lonely working as teachers in Micronesia, pining for mail and books we hadn’t already read, two copies of “That’s Why I’m Here” on cassette arrived from different friends on the very same day. Years later, I listened to “New Moon Shine” over and over during those first quiet winter months of doing little else but sitting and nursing our twin sons. This extended soundtrack of my life, our life together, is an odd and precious thing.

It’s crazy to think that this man who I don’t know nor will ever meet and, moreover, have no desire to ever meet, has accompanied me through these last 35 years. At the concert an alarming number of people felt compelled to shout personal greetings to him, which he absorbed graciously. The concert ran three hours with four encores. We got our money’s worth certainly. We had a nice dinner out, alone, like a real couple on a date. We talked about the first concert 25 years before in Saratoga when it took us 45 minutes to find the car, back when we never suspected we’d be together all these years later.

As a person of faith, I can’t help but wonder what it is about James Taylor – this gawky, bald, 60 year-old - that draws 8,000 busy middle-aged Mainers to buy tickets and sit on folding chairs in a dusty ice hockey rink/monster truck arena…and to be able to hold that attraction for 40 years. As someone who thinks a lot about marketing the Church, I can’t help but wonder what we’re doing wrong. The song that we’ve been gifted with is a million times sweeter than “Sweet Baby James.” If you read the Gospels with a fresh eye, it’s hard to escape that the person of Jesus is wildly attractive and charismatic. Read the Gospels cold, and you know why the fishermen of Galilee dropped their nets to follow. Talk about backstage passes!

But what are we doing in this Episcopal Church of ours? On what are we focusing our attention? We’re not so great at crafting an achingly sweet soundtrack that draws people back again and again and again.

One of the most disheartening stories I ever heard as a diocesan communications officer was from a single mom who had stopped going to one of our churches. Bumping into her after not seeing her for a few years, I asked why she’d stopped attending. She told me that she’d arrived one Sunday with her two daughters and someone caught her before she sat down to remind that it was her day to provide snacks and juice for coffee hour after the service. Her life was complicated at that time and she’d forgotten.

“I panicked,” she told me. “I had exactly $25 in my checking account, but I was too embarrassed to tell the person who chided me for forgetting. That I didn’t have any money wouldn’t have occurred to her in a million years.” Though I knew this woman was doing better now, I could see how much it cost her to recount the story. “I grabbed my girls, drove out and bought juice and crackers, and set them up in the parish hall. Then we left and we’ve never been back.”

If only we knew how to flip the switch to be better at this stuff. If only we knew how to absorb the winsome attractiveness of Jesus and offer it freely to everyone – people we agree with and people we don’t, people we find interesting and people we don’t. In the James Taylor model, despite his addictions and demons so publicly chronicled, there’s a guilelessness, a generously proffered gift, a constancy over time, that his admirers are drawn to. It’s not a bad model after all.

That night James sang:

“The secret of love is in opening up your heart It’s okay to feel afraid But don’t let that stand in your way ‘Cause anyone knows that love is the only road”

I started this column last night with my laptop in bed. I was going great guns when Scott said, “Time to turn out the light.” So I woke up this morning and finished it. I’m just glad I remember who to send it to.

Heidi Shott has served as press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine since 1998. She is also communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development. Heidi's essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

Continuing our "Episcopalians go to camp" theme begun yesterday...

By Roger Ferlo

Orkney Springs, Virginia is not an easy place to find. The trip south from the District seems designed to test your nerves. You start off on the DC Beltway—trial enough—and then you lurch onto the notoriously congested I-66, which you have to follow all the way to the end (a prospect that must haunt the nightmares of daily commuters), where it turns south on I-81 toward Woodstock. You then find yourself deep in Shenandoah country, passing road signs directing you to the Luray Caverns or the Skyline Drive. But you resist temptation. You make a right turn and then another right and then another right (or was it a left?) through gorgeous rolling hills until you finally stumble your way onto a steep incline of a road called the Orkney Grade, which will funnel you and your motorcar straight into the nineteenth-century—to the old mineral spa known as the Orkney Springs Hotel, owned lock, stock and water barrel by the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia.

It was not always thus. For years Virginia Episcopalians owned the acreage to the west, where they long ago built a retreat center and an outdoor chapel—Shrine Mont, they call it, as close to building a cathedral that this die-hard low-church diocese will ever come. But folks must have had their eye on the hotel down the road for a long time, if only for fear that it would fall in on itself. It wasn’t until 1979 that the Diocese managed to purchase the ramshackle place. And now, completely refurbished in the simple style to which it has always been accustomed, it can sleep as many as 600 church people at a time. It’s a vast white-painted wooden pile five storeys high, each level completely ringed by its own complicated stretches of porch and outdoor stairs—an Escher print in 3-D, Shenandoah style. Virginia parishes vie fiercely for preferred weekend slots, when parishioners recover from the long drive on the interstates by gathering for fellowship in the Ladies Parlour on the second floor, or sharing potpie and cornbread dinners in the vast refectory hall, or submitting themselves to some serious lecturing or other sorts of pious carryings-on in the elegant third-storey ballroom with its floor to ceiling windows and its wide and gracious balconied porch.

Since moving to Virginia from New York City three years ago to teach at the seminary in Alexandria, I’ve been invited to Shrine Mont several times. I’ve preached from the curious stone pulpit in the outdoor chapel (which looks a little like a congealed lava flow), and I’ve lectured on art and the spiritual life to generously attentive crowds in that lovely ballroom. I’ve hiked up North Mountain to the fire tower surmounted by a cross, and eaten my share of canned fruit salad and pulled pork in the dining hall. It’s good to find a church spot where people remember to keep relatively quiet and to behave themselves and to say their prayers and to be nice to one another—behaviors that might seem pretty trite and obvious if they weren’t at such a premium in a church otherwise sorely bedeviled by lawsuits and name-calling and furious divisions. There’s a kind of country ordinariness at Orkney Springs that gives you a sense that church might go on being church even in spite of church.

I am prompted to thoughts like this because I just got back from spending a week in residence at the Orkney Springs Hotel doing something that had absolutely nothing churchy about it. For the past seven years, a remarkable cellist named Dorothy Amarandos, now in her 83rd year, has all but single-handedly organized a week-long music camp at the Orkney Springs Hotel—a summer camp for geeky adults. There were 48 of us this year, most of us middle-aged and older, many of us still relative beginners wrestling with this most recalcitrant and noble of instruments. When you look at the roster, you see that all of us were pretty successful type A personalities in high-powered jobs (there were five MD’s in the room, for starters). And yet there was nothing more humbling than what we had agreed to do last week, as we made ourselves vulnerable to each other and to our teachers in that most exposed of venues—a public recital. Learning to play the cello as an adult can be an isolating and lonely business. It’s seldom about success as we usually have experienced success. Few if any of us will ever get to a place where we would call ourselves cellists rather than cello players. The noise we make can be excruciating—no wonder we tend to keep our doors closed. And yet coming together like this for a week, guided by Dorothy and her immensely gifted colleagues, we all gave ourselves permission to break out of our lonely practice rooms, to play in consort with others—performing in trios, duets, and even in a full-voiced choir of 48 instruments, strains of Beethoven and Vivaldi echoing off the walls of that elegant third-floor ballroom. We were all engaged in kind of a secular ubuntu at Shrine Mont this past week.

As I say, there was nothing churchy about any of this, except, of course, that everything we did with and for each other in that quaint and gracious hotel was, at least for me, anyway, sacramental. In such a setting, prayer takes care of itself. On the last day of the workshop, there was a solemn little ceremony where Dorothy presented each of us with a certificate of congratulations. It was a sweet gesture, and touching to watch each of these highly accomplished people sheepishly come forward to accept our teacher’s simple tribute. The certificate included an epigraph from T.S. Eliot—“you are the music while the music lasts.” That line evokes for me the experience of that week in Orkney Springs, and the gift of quiet and hospitality that the diocese offered us in allowing us to use this gentle space. Sometimes the church does get it right.

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in time and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. There are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” from Four Quartets

The Rev. Roger Ferlo is Director of the Center for Lifetime Theological Education at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he also directs the Evening School of Theology. He was trained as a Shakespeare scholar, and frequently leads audience discussions on religion and drama for the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, DC.