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Return to First Unitarian Church Website This sermon was delivered by Jim Reilly on November 18, 2007. Songs for Anything
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OPENING WORDS: 1: Distance (from the 1970's, revised) 2. A Flow of Tears
3. A Song for Anything I must compose CHALICE LIGHTING When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, When the meadows laugh with lively green, When the painted birds laugh in the shade PSALM 120 I cried to the Lord in my distress, * * * I want to thank you for inviting me here today. For me, Sioux City is the site of one of the Midwest's sacred buildings, the Steele County Courthouse, which ought to be a pilgrimage goal for everyone in the Midwest who cares about the Arts and what they can give to us; I got up early this morning and took a trip downtown to see it once again. Someone else has already thanked the taxpayers of Woodbury County; I want to add my thanks. And also, I want to thank Marlene Sturdevant, Alma and Bob Hatfield, Shannon Kennedy, Susan Peete and Dan Torgeirson, who have all helped to make this visit possible. I might be less nervous if I were here today just to do music and not to talk. Talking is always worse than playing the piano or even singing. But one of my intentions in saying anything is to throw out a few ideas that I think affect music in any religious setting, especially in a Unitarian-Universalist society like this one. More ideas than conclusions, and more questions than answers. Just so you know where I'm coming from, I did grow up a Universalist in the days before the merger with the Unitarians, but I've also worked as a church musician for many different denominations, including this one. My last job was both very interesting and very frustrating, for a Norwegian language Lutheran church in Minneapolis, a congregation which uses the state Church of Norway liturgy and hymnbook. So in one way I even bring a tiny international perspective to my work. But I have to confess that when I go to religious services by personal choice I usually chose Friends meeting where I hardly have to listen to music at all, and sometimes even very view words. Some of the sentiments reflected in the hymn you sang about silence are really my own. I sat through a sermon once at a U-U Church, and one of the subjects was worship. The different elements in the service had, according to the speaker, various functions. The sermon was supposed to make us think, and the music was supposed to make us feel. I think that many of us sometimes accept this artificial division of duties in a religious service, often without thinking about it. Even if one accepts such a thinking/feeling division as an accurate description of human psychology, it's a division, when used as that speaker did, which impoverishes sermons—spoken and written discourse—as well as music, another kind of discourse or communication. I'm more interested in sermons that make me feel as well as think, and I'm more interested in music that makes me think as well as feel. End of this idea—you can think and fell about it later! I think I could tell from your website that this congregation has some musicians. But I would still bet that the percentage of people here today who read and write words—that is, who are literate and exercise their language literacy regularly—is much higher than the percentage of people who can read and write down music and who do so regularly. Yes, I know, it is not necessary to read music, in the Western European notational system, or in some other system, in order to be musical, or to be a good musician, or to appreciate music. But of course neither is it necessary to read words to appreciate a good story, or to be able to tell one, or to understand language. We happen to live in a culture than encourages one kind of literacy more than another, and that has certain effects when we go to do music as a group. End of this idea—you can follow it later and see where it leads you! But you might imagine what religion or even everyday life might be like if the situation were reversed—if 99% read notes but only half of us, let's say, could read words. Much of the music I've written for U-U services is pretty simple stuff, written for small choirs. When I was the Music Director at First Universalist Church in Minneapolis at one point we went to two services a Sunday and started a small choir for the early service. The regular, larger, choir sang traditional four-part music, soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, some of it quite ambitious—but that wasn't possible for the tiny choir at the early service. And most of the music I could find that was easy enough to sing didn't interest me. So, I started writing stuff, easy unison pieces, or simple canons, and at least I could pick interesting and challenging texts even if the music couldn't be too complicated. Songs for anything, like I wrote in the poem you heard earlier. Songs which were supposed to help close some of the different gaps between us. Songs to express our wonder and puzzlement at the flow of life. Songs with traditional sacred texts, with all kinds of odd secular texts, and some with my own texts. I quickly discovered that there were things you weren't supposed to do, or ways you weren't supposed to do them. For example, I wrote a hymn that had several verses, each one longer than the one before. It was easy enough—sort of like a parlor game. I was told that was "too hard" for people, which of course was not true, and finally I got a lay minister to let me use the hymn in the service, and it worked really well. Another hymn had verses that got shorter as the hymn went on, which was also supposed to be also not "too hard". If you can't imagine what I mean, imagine a poem that has a first stanza six lines long, and second stanza only five lines long, a third stanza four lines long, and so forth….. In other words, even though I was writing traditional music, I was playing with the form in some pretty simple ways. Even the hymn you sang today—"A Core of Silence"—broke the rules, because it doesn't have "real chords", just two lines of music. When you look at it on the page, it seems to have extra blank space, and in a visual way reflects the meaning of the words. Some people who have sung it, including a folk music group which has recorded it on the West Coast, have insisted on adding chords and other things to it to make it more "normal". So here's another idea—many of the preconceptions we bring to music in our services, hymn-singing and otherwise—many of those preconceptions are unexamined until someone breaks the unspoken rules. I also discovered that while a choir might be permitted to sing something sad, reflecting the struggles and defeats that come to us all, congregations weren't supposed to do that. Congregational music was supposed to be uplifting and optimistic. For example, the hymn which you will sing later, "If We Seek Justice". This hymn was written after a particularly disappointing failure of a social action project at First Universalist Church in Minneapolis in the 1980's. Many people, including myself, had put a lot of time, energy, money, and emotion into the project. When it fell apart we were not only disappointed but in some cases even felt personally betrayed. Many of you have been through something like this in the struggles for social justice. Some people wanted to go on as if nothing had happened, immediately on to the next project. But we all knew something had happened, and some of us felt stuck before we could go on. So I tried to find a way to sing about it. I made some people unhappy by calling the tune "do-gooder", but I called it that because I think "do-gooder" is one of those fine insults that people use to…well, they use it to try to keep you from doing good! Some people didn't like the Latin words "Dona nobis pacem", either, but those words were there to emphasize our common cause with neighboring Christian Churches also working for good. But I especially made other people unhappy because they didn't want to sing about failure, even if underlying the hymn was the desire to persevere. But I think the hymn helped some people, including myself, by providing musical and verbal expression for what we felt, and validating, in a way, the very real emotions we couldn’t help but feel. Some of the music I wrote came out of other events in the life of the congregation. And this is one reason why you should encourage anyone in your congregation who can to create music just for you—and anyone who writes poetry, or who creates visual art. At one church meeting a woman talked about driving home late one night from an out-state meeting and finding her car radio tuned to a religious program, one of those unappetizing stations that Wisconsin seems to have a share of too. The preacher that night spoke about his feelings that gay people deserved to die, after all, they were sinful, he said. And so forth, you know the routine. The woman driving alone in her car, who was a lesbian, said the words chilled her to the bone, that she felt hated, actively hated. Is that something to sing about? Well, fortunately, I had been reading the psalms in the Bible not too long before, and the psalms in the Bible are marvels of all kinds of emotion from the most positive to the most despairing. And in Psalm 125 are the words "Lighten the sorrow of my heart, and lead me out of my distress. See how many enemies I have, and how much they hate me. Defend me! Deliver me!" So some ancient person, perhaps for different reasons, or perhaps for very similar ones, had sung about the very same feelings that that woman felt driving home alone that night. If some of the religious language was different than what she would have used, the feelings seem to be the same. And it was particularly ironic that these words came out of the same tradition that the radio preacher came out of. My own little revenge, to set them to music in such a context, I guess. And why can't we sing, just like the psalm writers in the Bible, about the things we feel, the despair as well as the hope, the loneliness as well as love and friendship, the grief as well as the joy. Maybe you folks here already do it? Do you have a service, for example, naming and remembering those who have died in the past year? a sort of U-U version of an All Saints day service? I hope you got to sing about both grief and joy on such occasions. And by singing about both, some of the gaps that normally separate you from each other may have been at least temporarily closed. If we don't sing honestly about what we think and feel, the gaps between us do rest unclosed, to use the words of our first opening poem today. And that's the point. We sing to understand ourselves and each other, to understand that we are not alone, to give us strength to survive our failures, and to celebrate our joys. We can be like Mary and Susan and Emily in the Blake poem read before the chalice lighting, and with our own sweet round mouths sings "Ha, Ha, He!" We can cry in our distress, to the Lord, or just to each other, in the words of Psalm 120 which we read responsively, that we dwell with those who hate peace. And we can even, at least in a Unitarian-Universalist society—and this has to wait for someone else's sermon—sing about love in all its emotional, spiritual, and carnal dimensions. Songs for Anything! CLOSING WORDS : Anche i sogni Anche i sogni hanno le loro storie: Even dreams have their histories: |