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.