getting in tune with God's gift of music

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GETTING IN TUNE WITH GOD’S GIFT OF MUSIC

II Samuel 6: 14-23 (portions)

When the victorious army of Israel recovered the Ark of the Covenant, and returned it, there was much singing and blowing of trumpets. King David himself, danced without restraint before the Lord.

But David’s wife, Michal, watched him from her window. She saw her husband leaping and singing before the Lord and despised him in her heart for doing so.

When the rejoicing ended and all the people went to their homes, David too, returned to greet his household. Michal came out to him and said, “What a glorious day for Israel when their king conducts himself as did you, dancing and singing like an empty-headed fool, in the midst of servants and slave-girls,”

David replied, “It was in the presence of the Lord that I sang and danced, the Lord, who chose me to be prince over his people, Israel. Before the lord, then, I will again dance for joy; yes, and thus I will earn from you, yet more disgrace and, and will lower myself still more in your eyes. But the people of whom you speak, will honor me for it.”

Apparently even 3000 years ago, husbands and wives were known to argue, when they got home, about who behaved how (and shouldn’t have) at an evening’s events.

It may seem like too inconsequential an argument to have recorded in scripture. It may well have been, though, the beginning of the end of David and Michal’s relationship. They remained legally married, but had no more children, and shortly David took an additional wife. She was Bathsheba (who probably told him that his dancing and singing were “charming and marvelous”).

You caught what their fight was about, didn’t you? Put in contemporary terms, Michal was embarrassed because David was “singing too loudly at church.” Meanwhile, for David, it was a mountaintop religious moment: Israel finally taking back from the enemy who had stolen it, this sacred Ark which was the central symbol of their faith as a nation. Michal had no problem with anyone being happy about getting the Ark back, but it was no excuse for a king to go leaping and singing and cavorting down Main Street.

Michal, you see, was the well-bred daughter of David’s predecessor, King Saul. Hers was a strong sense, then, of the importance, for a king and his family, of dignified restraint, courtliness and royal etiquette. A king, stripping to his loincloth and dancing wildly in the street was NOT an example of any of that. No! It was the behavior of an ex-shepherd, a country “hick,” unfortunately proving to everyone, that while you could take the boy out of the hills, you couldn’t take the hills out of the boy.

But again, for David, music had always been a central force in his life. He was the writer of a substantial number of the Psalms in the Old Testament. As a young man, he had actually served as something of an early “music therapist” called in to play and sing for Michal’s father, King Saul, when Saul (who apparently had what we now would call a bipolar disorder), was in one of his frequent episodes of depression or agitation.

To David, music was so vital and important that he wasn’t about to apologize for being carried away by it. Loosely translated, he says to his wife, “So, Michal, you didn’t care much for what I did today. Well hold on tight, lady, cuz you ain’t seen nothin' yet.”

It doesn’t say what she said back to him, or what he then said back to her, or how the rest of the evening went. (Not well, we suspect.)

What we had there were two very different ways of relating to the power and excitement of the music that happened in Bethlehem that afternoon. Michal’s was more passive, intellectualized; an I-can-take-it-or-leave-it response. Very much in contrast, then, was David’s powerful, visceral, all-consuming, never-mind-what-anyone-thinks, response to it. Those were only two of countless different and divergent ways in which music is received and experienced by us human beings. Beyond question, though, is that throughout recorded history, music has always played a powerful but mysterious role in human life.

It is capable, under the right circumstances, of touching us human beings deep within, as little or nothing else does. For example, music frequently evokes inexplicable tears that are neither tears of sorrow or of joy. They’re simply tears of deep response. Other times, music can reawaken vivid memories of something that the person had totally forgotten. Music has, at times, galvanized people’s courage to go forth to face death in battle. In other instances, it has had an extraordinary quieting effect upon persons in the agitation of a severe psychotic episode. On and on go the examples of how and where, in ways that defy explanation, music has strangely, mysteriously, been a moving or healing or innerving part of our shared life.

Even so, though, somewhat similar to love and to faith, it is not something that can reliably be harnessed or be turned into a science. Its power remains an elusive one, stirring one person deeply and falling flat for another. Absolute statements about music keep turning out to be wrong.

I may convince myself that, because of study, experience or talent that I now have a sure handle on what is inherently great music, what is music of worth, what is music that is “appropriate.”

Uh uh. It doesn’t work that way. Humility is always in order. Right around you and me, are persons who are touched at the core of their being, by music that appalls me, AND vice versa. As much as I might attribute that difference to musical taste, or lack thereof, it is far more mysterious than that. As much as I may dislike, for example, back-country hymns like “There Ain’t No Flies On Jesus,” or “Get Under the Spout Where the Glory Pours Out,” as turned off as I might be by acid rock or by Country and Western music, it is, without question, a form of musical arrogance and intellectual elitism to close my mind to the possibility that it could touch and nourish anyone’s soul.

Right here in the Mansfield area we have had that illustrated when, a couple of months ago, someone decided to change the format of FM station 102.3 away from playing the old ballads and show tunes from the 40s, 50s and 60s, to rock music. The avalanche of letters to the editor of the News Journal was astounding. The objections and complaints went on and on and on. How many issues can you recall causing so much upset? A proposed new tax, for example, or a local scandal, a questionable piece of legislation, a controversial municipal project--didn’t hold a candle to this. I suspect that had any of the losing candidates in the primary two weeks ago, been smart enough to campaign on the issue of restoring 102.3, he’d have won. THIS was about someone messing around with the music in people’s lives. People felt robbed of the music that had been nourishing them, and they weren’t about to take it lying down. True, there were also a few letters from people who couldn’t seem to comprehend how anyone could feel anything but thankful when those “oldies” were finally replaced by some legitimate rock music, but those letter-writers became lightning rods for a lot of hostility too.

It smacked a little of an incident in which a fourteen-year-old girl, while riding somewhere with her father, had the car radio tuned to a rock station. As her favorite rock band was was playing a current, top, rock hit, she said dreamily to her father, “Dad, have you ever heard anything so wonderful?” He replied, “I can’t say for certain that I have, although I once happened to be standing at an intersection when there was a collision between a truck loaded with empty aluminum cans and another truck loaded with live geese.”

Just so! Though it might seem that somehow there ought to be, the fact is that there is nothing close to a general consensus or universal standard, when it comes to the nature of the music for which your soul has receptors, versus those of my soul.

That, obviously, is the first matter to keep in front of us as we gratefully reflect today, upon the music that touches yours and my lives and our faith. It is particular to each one of us. It is, again, as individual as is faith or love. As King David made clear to Michal, one doesn’t have to explain it, apologize for it, or justify it. Just embrace it, cherish it, and let it stir within you.

Another part of understanding it, though, has to do with the way we receive our music. Those who claim to know, tell us that it is the through the right hemisphere of our brains, that we are touched and moved by music. That is, it is not by way of our intellects.

Our intellects are the part of our minds that analyze whether the music is being played accurately, whether the percussion is drowning out the oboes, whether the conductor is any good, whether what I am hearing is the sort of music I prefer, whether the words make sense.

The part of our brains, though, through which music inspires, nourishes or refreshes us, is not that analytical part. It is the same part of the brain’s left-hemisphere in which resides wonder, intuition, the spiritual, the “feeling” side of us. Thus it is difficult and often impossible to intellectualize music and still be touched and refreshed by it.

As one writer said, analyzing music is like dissecting a frog. One can definitely do it, but it is very bad for the frog. Someone else commented that to experience music through the intellect ends up something like attending a tennis match, but not really seeing the game because of being preoccupied, the whole time, as to whether or not, when they painted the lines on the tennis court, they got them perfectly straight or not.

At its deepest and most nourishing, music, then, should be a holistic experience, one that washes over us and is allowed to do whatever it is able to do with our emotions, to our sense of awe, to our memories, to our longings, to latent passions, to our joy at being alive, to our sense of connectedness to those who have gone before us, and yet more.

Whether the music is happening in your family room, a concert hall, or here at church, for that to happen, it is necessary to make oneself consciously, intentionally, vulnerably, open to it. That gets more and more difficult in our part of the world where, through most of yours and my lifetimes, music has been cheapened by being used as background noise for shopping malls, dentists offices, restaurants, and elevators. One becomes inured--actually calloused to it, accustomed to hearing it, but not listening to it. It takes its place along with traffic noises, the hum of the heating or air-conditioning, and the sound of the neighbor’s law mower, as a general “din’ of modern living.

The other matter is that of coming to our music with expectancy--expecting, in some way, to be nourished, renewed, or respirited.

In one of the professional journals to which I subscribe, a minister tells of having had an extraordinarily difficult, frustrating, stressful week. In the middle of the worst morning of it, in order to be out of reach of everyone and to have some brief solitude, he got into his car and started driving to nowhere in particular. He had a deep appreciation for music, so after having driven a few miles, he turned on the car radio to a music station. He said that at that point, miraculously, his whole bad week broke open and the darkness of it left him, as from the radio came the voice of Cat Stevens (as he was then known) in that old recording where he sang,

Morning has broken like the first morning.

Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.

Praise for the singing. Praise for the morning.

Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.

Mine is the sunlight! Mine is the morning.

Born of the one light Eden saw play!

Praise with elation! Praise every morning!

God’s recreation of the new day!

“Why did that help?” asks the intellect. There are no theological or therapeutic insights delivered in that song. It offers no assurances that everything will be just fine. What could the voice of a blackbird, or morning sunlight or intimations of earth’s creation, possibly have to do with the daunting dilemmas and stubborn worries weighing him down?

He couldn’t explain it, I can’t, and neither can you. But that song being there for him in particular, at that juncture, with its soaring melody, combined with words of hope, of newness, and of God’s grace woven all through our living, restored his soul that day.

That happens. Music really can do that. Oh, not every single time, but more often than its given a chance. That’s why music is so much a part of faith. Martin Luther went so far as to say:

Music is the art of the prophets. It’s the only art that can calm the agitations of the soul. It is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given to us human beings.

Exactly! Whether calming, refreshing, stirring, inspiring, cleansing, reminding, there’s far more of God’s grace to us in our music, than most of us allow to reach us. So let it get to you, let it release whatever is stuck sideways in your soul, let it reach in and lift whatever weighs you down, let it pull you back to experience anew, your own spiritual dimension. That’s what it is here for.

© Clifford Schutjer The First Congregational Church Mansfield, Ohio. May 19, 2002

Edited March 12, 2007 by alocispepraluger102