A Ministry of Music
James Ishmael Ford
20 May 2007

Text
A person does not hear sound only through the ears; (she or) he hears sound through every pore of (her or) his body. It permeates the entire being, and according to its particular influence either slows or quickens the rhythm of the blood circulation; it either wakens or soothes the nervous system. It arouses a person to great passions or it calms… by bringing… peace. According to the sound and its influence a certain effect is produced. Sound becomes visible in the form of radiance. This shows that the same energy which goes into the form of sound before being visible is absorbed by the physical body. In that way the physical body recuperates and becomes charged with new magnetism.
Hazrat Inayat Khan, Mysticism of Sound

Last Sunday the Board asked me to formally announce the selection of Anne Watson Born as our next Director of Music Ministry. I found myself quite emotional about it. This is, after all, a momentous occasion for us, with sad partings as well as containing bold possibilities. I, for one, am never completely at ease with changes, particularly big ones. I know how much I’ll miss Roberta Humez. The sense of dislocation we might feel is magnified, at least for me, as we also lose our children’s choir director Cindy Mapes and our organist Joe Muise at the close of this church year.

Today I want to focus on music and what it can and does mean for us. Here’s my thesis. The music program is at least as important as the words of the sermon in our shared worship experience.

So, think about this. Roberta Humez has been responsible for the music of our Society for the past forty-five years. Just to give this span of time some perspective, forty-five years ago I was not quite fourteen years old. Try to picture this. It was sometime in the late nineteen fifties when this congregation hired a new professional alto. Apparently the Board was particularly pleased because she came with, at no extra charge, a first rate tenor. Roberta and Ron quickly became a part of the congregation, although Roberta wouldn’t formally join the Society until just a year or so ago. Wanted to make sure we weren’t a fly-by-night operation, I think.

A few years after she began singing with us, and after she’d filled in as acting director a few times, when the director left somewhat abruptly, the Board asked Roberta to fill in as an interim. Just through the spring, they said. That was 1962.

In these ensuing years she had with the exception of selecting hymns full charge of the music program in all services. And since my arrival she selected the hymns, as well. There should be no doubt Roberta has given our music program its arc and its heart. Over these years Roberta worked with ten ministers. She directed with eighteen organists, although for the last ten she was able to rely on Joe’s solid support. She worked with three different hymnals, Hymns of the Spirit, called the Red Book, Hymns for the Celebration of Life known as the Blue Book and now since 1993, Singing the Living Tradition, best known as the Grey Book.

These hymnals reflect the many changes within our spiritual community and how music has been at the heart of who we have been and are. Roberta commented how the first of these hymnals could easily have been for Episcopal services. Roberta became music director of the Society when the denomination was one year old, and she has witnessed and actively participated in our evolution as we brought our Unitarian and Universalist strands together into something new. From that could-have-been Episcopal hymnal we’ve come a long way to our current world-religions friendly hymnal and Association.

Roberta saw it all. She vividly recalls when the cross was removed from what we prefer to call the chancel table when Leslie Pennington was minister here. And she remembers when Cora Wells, spouse of the then minister Clarke Wells first introduced sacred dance into the sanctuary. Over the years she has witnessed the waxing, the waning and the waxing again of our community. Roberta describes the time when at twenty the choir outnumbered congregants, who were then usually about fifteen for a service. During all these years it was her task to give us a spiritual grounding through the music program.

As a member of the search committee charged with bringing us our new director I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on this history, and also what music means within a spiritual community and particularly what a ministry of music might be for us now, not quite a decade into the twenty-first century. The five of us on the committee following the Board’s charge, closely read the comments from our last congregational survey, listened in a number of open meetings, as well as individually to all who had a thought to share, and then spent hours upon hours digesting and discussing those comments, hopes and fears. As I stood at our lectern last week and described our new director, Anne Born’s amazing resume, I found all those conversations and reflections which led us over the course of a year and a half bubbling deep within me. Waves of emotion washed over me. And my body trembled.

That feeling sense is actually very important, I believe. The former Catholic priest James Carroll writing in the May 14th Boston Globe observed “As happiness itself depends on vital interaction between thought and feeling, good religion (also) achieves a balance between these two polarities.” Our Unitarian Universalism is, at its best, a meeting of mind and heart, symbolized in some ways by our Unitarian and Universalist heritages. I find our history has been one of moving between these two poles, and includes correcting when we’ve drifted too far in one direction or another.

Without a doubt our drifting as a denomination for a long time has been toward the sacred gift of the mind. Frankly, I feel, we’ve drifted a tad too far in that direction, as have many others of us. And the correction is already well underway. We’re now drifting in that other direction, toward better and clearer expressions of our hearts. Of course we need to be conscious of this, as well. Carroll challenges us as part of the larger Western current of religious practitioners to be careful of drifting too far or, equally dangerously, uncritically toward our feeling lives. Carroll notes “The flip side of rapture is an aggressive anti-intellectualism.” A disembodied heart, we need to remember is just as dangerous to health as a disembodied mind.

This is an important warning, we need heart and we need mind. But if we a achieve balance, we win something powerful, something astonishing. We need to unleash our minds, our best thinking, and we need to unleash our hearts, our feeling lives. I suggest nothing unleashes the emotions like music, and joined with a clear mind, I deeply believe we are looking at challenging, inviting and changing both our selves and the world.

It took me some years to find this truth, particularly as it relates to the place of music in our lives. On the one hand I’m a cerebral kind of guy focused on the life of the mind and devoted to what has been called “reasonable religion.” Perhaps you’ve noticed. But there’s another part to this. I am one of those people who can tell you exactly when I learned I can’t sing. I was ten or so, and the music teacher came into our class, broke us into three groups, the highest voices, the middle voices and the deepest voices. After I first opened my mouth, she kept moving me to the group that wasn’t singing.

It was only with Kellie Walker, the Director of Music Ministry at our UU congregation in Chandler, Arizona, that I began to discover the transformative power of music. Until then I would often comment my contribution to the music program was standing away from the microphone. Actually I still try to do that. But Kellie worked with me, told me I was a tenor, showed me how to feel my way into matching pitch, which I learned I could do if given enough time. Then every Sunday she would assign a tenor from the choir to stand with me during at least one hymn. I gradually moved from not being able to sing to being able to sing very badly. I never thought I could achieve that. I almost weep as I recall this. Roberta has continued this support, weekly assigning some poor tenor to stand with me at our middle hymn. I take it as a testimony to their talents that I’ve, so far, not been able to knock any of them off key.

As most here know my primary spiritual practice is silence. I’ve explored it deeply, and I’ve found enormous value in it. But, I know, deeply, truly, that music is just as much the path. As my old hero Aldous Huxley observed, “After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” Actually I’ve come to feel music generally needs to be joined with silence, if we are to hope for the best in our spiritual explorations. Speaking of music as spiritual practice Zen master Seung Sahn once observed “Perceiving your own voice means perceiving your true self or nature. When you and the sound become one, you don’t hear the sound, you are the sound.”

I suggest, rightly used, music is one of the best ways we can engage our hearts; to bring our whole bodies into the great enterprise that is our spiritual journey. Music seems to be as old as our humanity. It is as old as language, maybe, I suspect, even older than language. Certainly music has been a central part of worship from the beginning of all records. I think of the last of the Psalm’s attributed to David. In Norman Fischer’s translation:

Praise to you in your holiness
Praise throughout your expansive realm
Praise for the power of your doing
For your abundance and everywhereness
All praise
Praise with the blowing of trumpets
Praise with the psaltery and harp
Praise with timbrel and dance
With stringed instrument and pipe
Praise with clear-sounding cymbals
And with crashing cymbals

Every breath is your praise

Michael Holmes, music director at the UU Church of Silver Spring in Maryland writes “(M)usic is for me the voice of God.” The great Sufi poet Hafiz observes “Many say that life entered the human body by the help of music, but the truth is that life itself is music.” Music is this important.

And so, I think of where we have been, and what we have done with our music program. And I am grateful beyond words. And, we stand here, on the cusp of our next phase, I think, I feel; hopes and fears wash through me, and I tremble at the possibilities.

Amen.