Sunday
November 28
The Bach Experience
By Marsh Chapel
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The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel:
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
A conversation starts, somehow. A conversation travels, somewhere. A conversation ends, sometime. After months of screen, of zoom, of facetime, of text, of email, of distance, of attention to spaces, electronic spaces to which nuance, humor, personality, humanity, and connection so often go to die, we have this autumn been returned to the land of conversation. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. There is a robust magic in conversation, whereby John Wesley named conversation a means of grace, alongside prayer, Scripture, sacraments, and fasting. Conversation. One step in and toward faith begins with a regard for conversation.
In our current Marsh Chapel ministry, on Bach Sundays, we engage a conversation. We model that conversation in two voice dialogue, Director and Dean. The conversation engages past with future, Scripture with music, wisdom with beauty, and Bach with experience. Our COVID time has muted conversation, to some degree, but has not squelched it, at least not yet.
In conversation, there abides, or lurks, the lasting possibility of heart to heart communication, heart by heart communion. That potential seizes you, not the other way around. You are longways, say, into a talk with an old dear friend, and of a sudden, you realize, you intuit, just how much that friendship means, a friendship planted and grown in conversation. You are gathered before dinner, and the children, coaxed, begin to sing the songs of memory, of history, of Zion, of nation, of upgrowing. The folksongs, the hymns, the partner songs, the spirituals, the camp fire rounds, multiple rounds, give off an invisible glow, a kind of verbal hearth. Or, there is a moment of difference. Some things, like some malignancies, you can never cure but you can manage. They are manageable but not curable. They can be managed, managed to ground, even though, unseen, the malignancy remains. In conversation, in the magic of conversation, such hard and dark and difficult truth can surface. You realize afterward, that one loved one, in one seemingly innocuous conversation, was trying to say something, something like, I am worried about this medical procedure… But the clues and hues and dues and schmooze are sometimes too indirect, too subtle, and you miss the marrow and meaning of the talk, only to recall it, only to get it, later, much later, too late. You are in a meeting, and all of sudden the temperature shifts, and sunlight and warmth become cave darks, stalactites and stalagmites. And the conversation flickers, withers, and dies. Something is in there. It would be utterly invisible and inaudible by zoom. But in conversation, in presence, with embodied silence, and incarnate body language, you see and hear. She is really hurting. He is really angry. I am in over my head. They want something they can never have. Somehow, conversation.
Dr. Jarrett, what does the music and beauty of Bach bring us in conversation this morning?
Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music:
There is a healing power, a healing grace in conversation.
I have a friend and colleague, a musicologist and viola da gamba player, whose research focuses on what he calls “Polyphonic Intimacy”. The notion that western music, with it’s subjects and counter-subjects, point with counter-point, strands of consonance and dissonance woven together, trace their roots in mirroring human conversation. Imagine one monk chanting the Te Deum. His neighbor in the cell next door, a plucky fellow he, decides it’d be fun to sing along with his pious brother, but does so in what we’d call today harmony. A musical conversation is born. A point and counter-point. Harmony. A musical conversation. Better yet, a musical congruence, where I shape my conversation to yours. Or perhaps the kind of conversation where a couple can complete each other’s sentences, or allow the conversation points to gather one on the other. There are unlimited possibilities. But the idea that music, making music, making music with others in community, can mirror societal discourse, modeling a path for our disparate voices to find commonality, unity, perhaps even fostering social cohesion.
Could it be that music has such healing power, a healing grace in music’s conversation?
Soprano and Alto. Tenor with Bass. The “I and Thou” reflected each day in the Imago Dei. And this Advent Sunday, the Christian Soul with Christ as Bridegroom, that long awaited restoration of Thou in me, Thou in you — conversation as dialectic. Music amplifies, augments, colludes, and collides with that conversation in powerful, yes even healing ways.
Soar joyfully, ye voices, aloft to the sublime stars. Love draws nigh. Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Love and Faith prepare a place for you in my heart. Come, dwell within.
Listen today for two virtuoso Oboes d’amore in musical conversation with one another (No 6), or in No 2, doubling, and thereby musically affirming, their soprano and alto conversations partners. Each aria, singer with solo instrumentalist, modeling a musical conversation, whose features, parameters, and sights are given to us by Bach. A space to make sense of it all, a thoughtful interplay revealing a path to reconciliation and renewal, affirming Thou in me, Thou in you.
There is a healing power in and through music, and, yes, a healing grace revealed in music’s conversation.
The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel:
Pastoral ministry, cut to the chase, is the dangerous and difficult pursuit of an faithful 20-minute sermon a week, alongside 25 genuine conversations a week. I and Thou. There yet remain some circles of ministerial wisdom shared in conversation about…conversation. Think of Seward Hiltner at Princeton, of Homer Jernigan at BU, of Henri Nowen at Yale, of Ann Belford Ulanov at Columbia and Union. They are not with us any longer, and not with us to remind us that the most the important things in ministry are the one-on-one things. Pastoral ministry is preaching. Pastoral ministry is conversation. Sit down and listen, listen, listen…until… until the cows come home.
With some exception, for the minister, every hour spent on a machine, every hour spent with zoom, with text, with email, with computer, is an hour spent apart from conversation, and so apart from life itself. Here is a warning word for the minister. Walk with a friend. Sit for intercessory prayer. Call somebody on the phone. Set a lunch date. Offer a coffee. Take with happiness the unannounced visitor to your office. Steer the conversation, when you can, away from doing and out onto the broad meadow of being, out toward memory and view, on out to where heaven and earth pass away. Keep a journal. Write a sermon. Craft a poem. Design and experiment. All of us are so challenged, so called, for ministry emerges from baptism first, from ordination second. All the baptized have entered ministry.
My grandmother grew up on a dairy farm near Cooperstown, NY. She graduated from Smith College in 1914. She taught school and married later in life, raising three daughters. She spent her later life in a modest Syracuse home, surrounded by piles of books, mounds of newspapers, and letters written or to be written and received, often long ago. She and her college roommate wrote each other once a week from graduation until death. She seemingly feared no conversation, and celebrated all conversation, no matter how middling or shallow or tiresome. Famously, she was thrilled, overjoyed, to have the Jehovah Witnesses come into her Methodist living room, on their mission. She loved to talk with them about the intricacies of Leviticus. She always wanted them to stay longer than they could stand to stay. They left worn out, bedraggled, dog tired, and exhausted. She just smiled and put a roast in the oven. They had been engaged in real conversation.
To listen is to love. To listen is to take one step in faith. People do not always know what they think and feel until they say it, until they say it to someone they know is listening, and really cares. This is not psychiatry, not psychotherapy, not formal counseling, nor any other of the—very wonderful, soulfully salvific, and endlessly helpful—forms of care. This is conversation, a means of grace. As a person of faith, it is yours, to receive and to give.
A conversation starts, somehow. A conversation travels, somewhere. A conversation ends, sometime. Today is our first day, our first Sunday, in a year of conversation, with St. Luke: Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
-Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music
