This meditation was offered by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the meditation below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.
Reading
The first reading was Poem no. 54 by Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa), from Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans. Peter Rickard (Edinburgh Bilingual Library, 1971), p. 152. Copyright laws do not permit the reproduction of complete poems without permission.
Meditation
I offer you this meditation on music and religion:
When it is a part of a worship service, music is not a performance. Music is always a mutual creation, created by the musician and those who listen to the music. Today, our culture assumes that music is purely the creation of the musician, and so when we go to hear a concert we sometimes forget that that concert would not exist without our energy and concentration.
And indeed, some popular music concerts are merely shows, where the performers don’t actually play the music, they simply dance and lip-synch along to a hit recording. Or, more commonly, the music is played, but it is played to reproduce as exactly as possible every last inflection of a well-known recording, with no place for the musicians sensing the listeners and incorporating something of their souls into the music. This is music that is played without respect or regard for the listener, because the listener is forced into an utterly passive role.
Music that is played in a worship service is the complete opposite of this. In a worship service, there is no audience, there is a congregation, which includes the musicians. Every person in a congregation is a full participants in the worship service. As a preacher, I can tell you that I get immediate and direct feedback from the congregation during the worship service, and they can and do affect the course of a sermon; and from talking with church musicians, I know they find the same thing is true for them.
But far more importantly, congregations come back week after week; the people in a congregation participate in an ongoing conversation with the musicians and other worship leaders. Sometimes, particularly in this congregation, the people in the congregation do indeed talk directly with the musicians. But there is something deeper than that going on. The people in the congregation are the ones who provide the true power of a weekly worship service; those of us who are worship leaders work to focus the energy of the congregation, but it is the congregation who ultimately determines what we are together, and who we are becoming.
Fernando Pessoa tells us that the answer to the question of life “lies beyond the gods.” I would say that if there is an answer to the question of life, it lies in direct intuition of that which is transcendent. There is that which is transient in religion — and so the ancient gods of Olympus were merely transient, because when ancient Greek culture died, they died — but there is that which is permanent in religion — and so it is that we seek that which is truly transcendent. We can experience something of that transcendent reality in music. And when we listen to music together as a congregation, we not only experience that transcendent reality, we co-create it: we hear our corporate selves into a new existence.
This morning we shall together hear into reality a beauty transcends our daily cares; and, as we do every Sunday, we participate in the divine transcendent through the co-creation of beauty together.
And so, at the end of Randy’s sermon, I invite you to pause for a minute of silent reflection — to let the music sink into our souls.
Sermon
The sermon consisted of Music Director Randy Fayan playing the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, J. S. Bach, BWV 582