Two weekends ago, in between summer trips, I spent a couple of days attending my first outdoor music festival in many years.  This was the Outlandia Music Festival, a newly organized event, in its first year, and held south of Bellevue near the confluence of the Platte and Missouri Rivers.  When the line up was first announced back in the winter/spring I snapped up tickets right away.  Though I was initially unsure if this was real or not, given how great the line up was, particularly with Wilco as the headliners.

I asked my friend Teague to go along, and we headed down the afternoon of Friday, August 12 prepared for the sun.  The day wasn't too hot, unlike the miserable weather predicted for the next day, and we got great seats and enjoyed the music, beer, food trucks, and running into people we knew.  Friday night Band of Horses was awesome and so many The National lyrics really resonated with me, including "It takes an ocean not to break."  It was glorious to sit outside after dark too on this mid-summer night enjoying the stars and the glorious moon.

Saturday was supposed to be very hot, but ended up much nicer than predicted.  We had originally planned to go later in the afternoon/evening but, as the day progressed, revised our plans and headed to the festival earlier.  We didn't have seats as close to the stage, but we did get some in the sun.  For a late lunch I grabbed some delicious lumpia, missing the homemade lumpia I'd gotten used to during my marriage. 

We marveled at how well organized the event was--from the original adverstisements, to purchasing and receiving passes, to parking, to festival grounds layout and amenities, to the great music.  Plus there was a good crowd, but it wasn't packed or obnoxious.

Saturday's evening weather was even better than Friday's and the music was enjoyable too.  I realized it had been too long since I'd done something like this, and it was what I really needed.

I've seen Wilco live three times and each time has been amazing. (Remembering that I was 30 and 31 the first two times was a little nostalgic.)

When Wilco was finally up, we went and stood near the stage and let the music just overwhelm us.  I danced and sang along.

 

"Music's importance as consolation has only grown in an age that medicates grief and treats sorrow as an illness.  In moments of grief and despair, there is something unsayable about the experience that only music seems to express." 

Chapter twelve of Michael Ignatieff's On Consolation grapples with consolation as modernity began to move beyond god and religion.  He discusses Nietzsche, Freud, and Wagner, but the focus of the chapter is Gustav Mahler and in particular his Kindertotenlieder (which I found interesting given that last year I read Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought which also spends a chapter on this music).

In essence, the music admits that there can be no consolation on the death of a child.  Instead the music attempts to "provide meaning for men and women living after the death of the gods."  It does so through providing "an experience of the transcendental and sublime."  Such music can be an emotional release.  Any consolation we find will be the work of a lifetime.

In the next chapter he discusses Max Weber, who experienced "catastrophic depression."  Ignatieff argues that Weber was the first to critique the "disenchanted spiritual emptiness of capitalist modernity."  I'd not thought of Weber this way, so that was interesting.  Weber was critical of how work had come to be the thing that people focused on to give them meaning, after other forms of meaning-making had failed.  This idea was rooted in Luther's theological concepts of vocation and calling, but had become a secular, disenchanted notion.  He argued that work had largely become "remorseleness duty without purpose."  Instead, what humans needed was to live in truth and "To live in truth was to live without any consolation at all."

Weber was also deeply critical of many of the political developments early in the twentieth century, as people sought for meaning in politics and latched onto dangerous ideologies.  He thought we should put aside our "longing for salvation" and instead "assume responsibility" for creating our own future.  We were responsible for our own call.  Ignatieff concludes "the times themselves called him to inspire the next generation to embrace responsibility instead of taking flight in hatred or refuge in illusion."

 

Last night Sebastian and I went to see The Sound of Music at the Rose Theatre.  Somehow I made it to 48 without seeing a staged production of the musical, and I'm not quite sure how.  

Anyway, it was a good and enjoyable production, and also Sebastian's first full-length stage musical.  He seemed to enjoy it and really be into the songs.

My one new takeaway from this production was the now smack my forehead obvious conclusion that Max Detweiler is gay.  Which adds layers of complexity to his character and the decisions he makes, particularly why he chooses to get along to survive rather than take the bolder actions of Captain Von Trapp.  

What do you think?

Look & See

Philippians 1:6 & Baruch 5:1-9

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

5 December 2021

            Today is one of the rare occasions when even our Protestant lectionary gives us an apocryphal text for the Old Testament lesson.  And so we have this passage from Baruch, a book that claims to be written by the student and scribe of the Prophet Jeremiah, but likely came much later, probably in the century just before Jesus was born.  And it draws upon various images and words from other Old Testament writings, including today’s passage which relies a lot upon the Book of Isaiah.

            And I have paired that with one sentence from this week’s epistle lesson, a reminder that we are not finished, that God is still working on us.  Hear now these ancient words:

Philippians 1:6

I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.

Baruch 5:1-9

Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,

   and put on for ever the beauty of the glory from God.

Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God;

   put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting;

for God will show your splendour everywhere under heaven.

For God will give you evermore the name,

   ‘Righteous Peace, Godly Glory’.

Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height;

   look towards the east,

and see your children gathered from west and east

   at the word of the Holy One,

   rejoicing that God has remembered them.

For they went out from you on foot,

   led away by their enemies;

but God will bring them back to you,

   carried in glory, as on a royal throne.

For God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low

   and the valleys filled up, to make level ground,

   so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God.

The woods and every fragrant tree

   have shaded Israel at God’s command.

For God will lead Israel with joy,

   in the light of his glory,

   with the mercy and righteousness that come from him.

For the Word of God in scripture,

For the Word of God within us,

For the Word of God among us,

Thanks be to God.

            Of course I am not the resident musical theatre geek.  That would be Katie Miller.  But I am a gay man, so that gives me license to have opinions about musical theatre. 

            The theatre world, the popular music world, actually vast swaths of American arts and culture, have been mourning and eulogizing Stephen Sondheim, who died last week at 91 after a long career as a composer, songwriter, and creator of one Broadway hit after another.  Few Americans have had such a lengthy and rich influence on our culture as Sondheim has.  So it was good this week to read and watch the many tributes of him and his work.

            The Sondheim show I’m most well acquainted with is Into the Woods.  I first saw it as a teenager when the local college performed it.  And I was impacted by its storytelling.  The first act, which is a fun and enthusiastic mish-mash of various fairy tales, concludes with what appears to be the happy ending, only for the second act to descend into complexity, darkness, and ambiguity, raising rich questions about how we tell our stories and, therefore, how we live our lives. 

            In a tribute that appeared this week on the Atlantic’s website, Amy Weiss-Meyer wrote about Into the Woods and Sondheim’s overall approach to endings.  She said, “He never believed in simple happy endings, but he knew exactly how to take advantage of his audience’s yearning for them.”

            Yes, we do long for a happy ending.  We long for everything to turn out right in the end.  That if we work hard and do the right thing, life will be good and blessed.  But, that’s not what always happens.  Sometimes, despite our best efforts, things don’t turn out the way we expected them to.

            Back in the summer when the church staff picked our Advent theme, we began by acknowledging that we had no idea what to expect pandemic-wise come December.  Would we be in the midst of another winter surge or would vaccinations lead to a decline in infection rates or something else? 

            We then realized that this idea of expectations was the right way to orient our focus.  Of course there is the other meaning of “expecting” that has to do with being pregnant, of waiting for a baby to be born.  And the last time we used expectations in our advent theme, in 2015, it was precisely this idea that shaped our worship.  The joy and excitement and risk involved in waiting for new life.  “Wonderful Expectations” was our theme.

            But in 2021 our expectations are more unclear, complex, ambiguous even.  As like to be full of anxiety as they are hope.  Much less that we’ve learned the very hard way the last two years that what we expect might not happen and that we must be somewhat ready for the unexpected.  Though, how can you ever really prepare for what’s unexpected?

            So, we focused our idea for Advent worship around this ambiguity of waiting.

            In her Atlantic tribute, Amy Weiss-Meyer reflected on how Sondheim’s wisdom about endings speaks precisely to the moment we are in in the course of this pandemic.  She wrote,

Sondheim’s work was at its strongest when it lingered in the pain of the dawning realization that no ever after ever lasts long. His music and lyrics looked squarely at life and insisted, gently and eloquently, that of course it was never going to be exactly how we wanted it to be, that messiness and ambiguity were to be expected, and could even be part of the beauty. Voices overlapped, words whizzed by, anxiety and sorrow and joy were written into the very structure of the songs.

            So, maybe this Advent, our spiritual growth will be measured by how much we’ve learned that messiness and ambiguity are to be expected and can even be “part of the beauty?”

            And beauty is precisely what today’s scripture lessons imagines for us.  “Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction” we are instructed by the author.  And instead, we are to clothe ourselves forever in beauty, the beauty of the glory from God.  Wow, just wow!  One of grandest statements in our scriptural tradition, I think.  Definitely, worthy of our attention when we find ourselves in the midst of sorrow and affliction.

            And then the passage continues.  We will be robed in righteousness and crowned with glory.  God’s going to show off our splendor, everywhere.  And we will receive the name of “Righteous Peace, Godly Glory.”

            After these wonderful lines, the author invites her readers to arise and stand and look and see that their children are coming home, rejoicing.  They were carried away in exile by our enemies, and all have suffered, but God has spoken and the reunion is about to occur, just look and see. 

            And the road we children will be traveling home on, instead of being through a difficult wilderness, will be made smooth and plain and easy so that we might travel in safety.  And there will even be fragrant shade trees all along the way.

            If Paul in Philippians declares that God is still working on us, something like this vision from Baruch is the work that God is trying to complete.  God is turning us into our best selves.

            What amazing images.  What joy, what excitement.  Baruch describes about as happy an ending as one could imagine. 

            But dare we imagine that ending?  Can we truly hope for it?  Are we fools if we expect it?

            Frederick Buechner has a profound little book entitled Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, in which he reveals the ways in which our Christian story has all three types of endings.  It isn’t simply a happy ending; it messier and more ambiguous than that.

            This week I read again through the chapter on how the gospel is like a fairy tale.  The primary point Buechner makes is that in the Gospel, as in most fairy tales, our expectations get messed up.  The noble king might really be the villain.  The beautiful woman might end up being the witch.  The poor and dirty peasant is likely to be the hero of the story.  Or, as the gospel tells it, this child, born in a barn, in a small town on the edge of the great empire, to a teenage mother who was pregnant before she was married.  Among the most marginalized figures one could imagine—that’s the truly human one, the child of God, the savior of the world, the king of kings, the prince of peace, etc., etc., etc.

            Buechner also writes that “Like the fairy-tale world, the world of the Gospel is a world of darkness.”  The Gospel understands that all its visions, hopes, and dreams come in the midst of sorrow and affliction.  In fairy tales the characters learn to see beyond this world and its darkness to the place of beauty and joy.

            And so the spiritual wisdom that Frederick Buechner wants to cultivate within us is that same sense of vision.  He writes,

If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still.  No matter how forgotten and neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth.

            To see the possibilities of beauty and joy and hope is to see like children again, full of amazement and wonder.  And isn’t that part of what we enjoy about the holiday season?  Doesn’t it, at its best, break through our adultness and return to us a sense of magic and splendor and awe?

            We don’t want to give up longing for, hoping for, even expecting the happy ending.  While at the same time we have to learn that messiness and ambiguity are also to be expected and are themselves part of the beauty.  I like the poem by Hafiz that was read earlier, even when we are lonely in the darkness, there is an astonishing light in our own being.  Or as Baruch imagines, beyond the sorrow and affliction are splendor, joy, and peace.

Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A really fun read. Gioia advances a few key theses in this history of music--that music is deeply connected to magic, that music is deeply connected to violence, that musical innovations are created by outsiders and eventually mainstreamed by the power structure. The latter means that he doesn't accept some of the standard histories that claim some prominent political or church leader introduced some innovation and he goes looking for where the ideas really came from. He's got a thesis as to why drums were not prominent in early country music, and it ties back to the prehistoric move from hunting to herding cultures. He defends universal aspects of music (arguing with ethnomusicologists) and often the common thread that connects geographically diverse cultures with similar music is the animals they kept. This is full of fun, provocative ideas and stories.

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The Carols of Christmas: A Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Holiday Songs by Andrew Gant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another enjoyable read from Andrew Gant full of delightful wit and a passion for music.

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O Sing unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music by Andrew Gant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A delightfully witty and informative book on the history of English church music. Thanks to the book I've discovered some musical gems such as Wylkynson's 13 part harmony Jesus autem transiens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HyWo...

And Tallis's Spem in alium, a 40 voice motet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3FJx...

I've been looking up the pieces he discusses on YouTube and creating a playlist, which I'm not finished with, but here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...


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When Marian Sang by Pam Muñoz Ryan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A friend also recently gave this book to Sebastian. A beautiful telling of Marian Anderson's story, with a song lyric on almost every page, inviting the reader to sing. Of course, after we finished the book, we then had to watch a YouTube clip of Anderson singing "My Country 'Tis of Thee" at her Lincoln Memorial concert.

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Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was excited when friends recently gave Sebastian this book with included cd of Prokofiev's setting of the story. Excited because as a young child I had a 45 of the music that I enjoyed listening to often. Enjoyed, despite being scared of the wolf and the great motif Prokofiev composed to represent the wolf. My mother reminds me that when listening to it, I would hide behind a chair and peak out.

So, it was with nostalgic delight that I sat with Sebastian as we listened to the music and narration and looked together at the pictures in the book. He did not appear to be frightened by the wolf.

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