The Music That Moves Us

UU Community Church of Santa Monica

Rev. Rebecca Benefiel Bijur

June 12, 2011

 

A few weeks ago, one of the graduates of our Coming of Age program was here in the pulpit, offering us his credit, his statement of where he puts his heart. He said he had been asked what do you believe? And he said, I believe in music.  And Sam went further, even, as he talked about music helping him get through the day, the music he listens to and the music he practices on the drums, his appreciation for anything with electric guitar, and then he declared from this pulpit, until someone gives me hard proof for or against the existence of God, I’ll take music.  

 

From the congregation I thought I could almost hear an Amen. 

 

I know for myself and for many of you music is what brought you to church and it is a large part of what keeps you here. You heard it on your bike as you passed by the corner of 18th and Arizona one morning, and you had to go in, and then you stayed.  You felt it in your bones, the old slow songs, when you were a young child with your parents in the revival tents of the old South, and it’s never left you. You sang with a choir once, your little alto self dissolved into the harmony Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and you reached out and touched the divine plan and pattern, you heard how we all fit into the great symphony of life.

 

It has always been this way with music, and the music that moves us has always been this way. In his Methodist church community, Don Saliers, a church musician and the father of Emily Saliers, who herself is one half of the folk rock duo the Indigo Girls, has written about music not as a spiritual practice, but as a “soul practice.” Music, he writes, “encodes life,” and the point of music is to call our attention to the presence of other human souls, and to listen with care and respect to our own souls, our souls joyfully celebrating life, our souls crying out in the wilderness.

 

Don has been playing the organ for his Methodist community for decades, and he writes that he “has heard many people confess that it is easier for them to believe certain things when they sing them instead of just saying them, much less try to explain them.” It’s just like Sam said: Don’t tell me this or that about God, just give me music.

 

Has it been that way for you? Sometimes my head gets in the way of all I want to express, all I want to feel, in this world. If I just sing it instead of say it, if I just drink in that music rather than trying to explain it, it works better, somedays.

 

In days full of pressures and forces beyond our control, in a world so full of hurts and fear, how good it is, my spiritual friends, for brothers and sisters to come together, to sing together, to express our yearning for the land we dream of, where  we bind up the broken where we sing the good tidings, the land we dream of, where justice will roll down like waters, and peace like an ever-flowing stream. Busy with work, with traffic, with child care, with elder care, with the thousand distractions that make up a full day of waking effort, it is hard to express what we are really feeling for one another. 

 

In the sacred space of worship, in the whisper of the symphony warming up, in the electric power of the radio, the ipod, the opening band, in the spiritual practice of sharing the music that moves us, we edge closer to imagining, expressing, and persuading one another of the resonance of a few deep truths and blessings: We are brothers and sisters. We are in this together. You are not alone.

 

Perhaps music has always been present in the life of faith, in the growing of souls, because it intergrates head, heart, and hands. It brings us together and makes us whole. Emily and Don note the way music is embodied in each of us, through the rhythm of our heartbeat and the flow of our breathing. Our earliest experiences of music require both voice and movement. In the storytime circle, as toddlers we each swayed, clapped, and turned our bodies as soon as the music started, unable to sit still. The music moved us.  Some of us retained this feeling, this motion, this dancing, even into adulthood, even into church! Some of us, not all of us. Some of us find the music without movement now, in the transcendence of stillness and listening deeply.

 

In the musings of philosophers, sages of different times and different places, it becomes difficult to know whether we hear and make music because it has always been within us, or because it is provided by creation itself.  The Christian mystic Mechtild of Magedeburg shares her vision of a world alive with song, a symphony conducted by the divine, as she writes:

 

Effortlessly, love flows from God into humanity.  Like a bird who stirs the air without moving her wings, thus we move in God’s world, one in body and soul, though outwardly separate in form.  As the Source strikes the note, humanity sings.  The Holy Spirit is our harpist and all strings which are touched in love must sound.

 

All strings which are touched in love must sound.  Touched in love, we find a new music, and in in music we find a language beyond language. We find, as Don and Emily Saliers write, “not simply an ornament of something already understood in words,” but a practice that “mediates the world to our senses and animates—literally ensouls—those who enter it deeply.”

 

It is not surprising that music has been so vital to the life of this congregation, and it is right that we gather again this morning to look forward and backwards in celebration of music, in celebration of Steve and Louis, our volunteer choir, and all those who join in the “soul practice” of music making in this church.  

 

The next chapter of our musical life together is still to be written, as we continue the final stages of search for a new Music Director and bid Steve a fond farewell today. 

 

Looking back, we know the music that moves us has always been part of this church and part of our lives. We celebrate the ways in which it will always be this way. As stargazers, dreamers, and magicians, we look forward to the next steps on this winding road, in which the music that moves us will continue to deepen, to challenge, to prod us into action to live out our values and build a land where there will be not only justice and freedom, but also dancing, and also, singing. 

 

May it be so.