June 19, 2011

Sande Ramage

Trinity Sunday     Genesis 1:1-2:4a     Matthew: 28:16-20

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

You haven’t caused a riot yet St Matthews but you’re certainly stirring up a storm in Anglicanland.

Being passionate to the point where others feel uncomfortable and even change their thinking is often seen, according to one of my former employers, as going too far. On reflection, I don’t think I ever went far enough.

Paris, the city of lovers, is a place of spirited change. On a beautiful May evening in 1913, a theatre in the Champs Elysees was filling up; women dripped with jewels as they promenaded with their escorts resplendent in top hat and tails. 

First up on the programme was Les Sylphides, a romantic reverie set to the music of Chopin, familiar, soothing – food for the soul. As the dancers sank to the floor in their final ethereal movement, the bassoonist began Stravinksy’s new composition, The Rite of Spring.

Without warning the music turned into what has been described as a monstrous migraine of sound. What started as a slow, gentle flowering had burst into an asymmetrical, relentless cacophony.

Jonah Lehrer author of Proust was a Neuroscientist, writes of this event, ‘the tension builds and builds and builds, but there is no vent. The irregular momentum is merciless, like the soundtrack to an apocalypse, the beat building to a fatal fortissimo’.

Slap, bang, wallop! For the audience, it was as though their brains were being fried. They got angry, started screaming and attacking one another. The whole thing ended up as a full-scale riot.

Listening to music has a lot to do with frequencies and recognizing patterns. Even though music is a series of individual notes, our brain tries to understand the relationship between the notes. Once it finds a pattern, it starts to predict what will come next. By listening for patterns and having expectations, the individual notes become the symphony we hear. When the patterns are unexpected the human brain struggles to cope.

By the 1940’s we had absorbed Stravinsky’s new pattern of music and Disney used it in the animated movie Fantasia. The first section tells a version of the creation story with dinosaurs as the central creatures. First there is the evolution of life, then conflict and confusion leading to the dinosaurs’ extinction and the eventual rebirth of the earth. It’s a three-part process mirroring the ideas of creation, destruction and preservation in Hindu mythology.

Three – the mysterious number that keeps cropping up in religion and mathematics. We talk about three stages of life, maiden, mother and crone. Anglican theology is meant to be like a three legged stool, scripture, tradition and reason. There are three kings from the East in the Christmas story. In Torah study, three is the number of truth mediating between two opposing or contradictory values. Buddhism has Three Jewels; Taoism has The Great Triad and Christianity the Mysterious Holy Trinity.

A mystery indeed but no matter how much theology we think up around it, there is nothing particularly Christian about it for the number three seems to be fundamental to just about everything. To complicate this more, in our three dimensional universe the particles that constitute it are based on the third or cube root of the speed of light. Weird and enticing all at the same time.

Is three a familiar pattern that the brain has already memorized, or is it implicit in our human building block, something we instantly recognise and connect with? Part of the universal truth we are instinctively drawn to but don’t understand?

Strangely enough, over the last three years, three significant things have happened in my life that shocked me out of familiar patterns and given me a different perspective on the church.

While I was a school chaplain, singing every day was part of my job. I eventually realised music was resonating within me at a level beyond my understanding so I went exploring. Despite having been refused entry to the junior church choir when I was 10, I packed that anxiety in my handbag and headed off to singing lessons. 

My world was transformed. I would have killed to get to my singing lesson at 4 o’clock on Tuesdays. Singing at that intensive level was the most integrating, energizing and healing factor in my life. Better than all the therapy and angst and girly chats and crying into my vino that I had done for decades.

So I started to wonder, if music was so healing, how come church choirs were diminishing while people all over the world were gathering in flash mobs and civic choirs to sing their hearts out. Maybe people outside the church instinctively know that music gives us a clue to the symmetry of the universe as the thinker Andrew Worsley says in Flying on the Wings of Genius. 

The second disruption in my life was to accompany my brother who had been in a major vehicle crash and sustained a severe brain injury. Like always when faced with challenges I don’t understand, I start reading and exploring my new world. I was fascinated to find out how plastic our brains actually are and while ‘we don’t know’ was the phrase I heard most often from the medical staff through five months of daily hospital visits, there is a growing body of knowledge about the brain that is accessible to us all.

For instance, many studies have been done about how the brain functions during meditation and why that’s good for us. Type meditation into Youtube and you get about half a million pages. On one of those pages is a Buddhist meditation that has nearly 10 million hits. Despite this huge interest few people are rocking up to church to ask what we can offer in this regard.

My third shock came when my job as a school chaplain ended abruptly 10 months ago. Since then there has been no singing every day, no chapels to prepare, no sermons to write, no classes to teach. No work. No real connection to the institutional religion that I have been in or around for most of my life. 

Like the greater percentage of people in this country I went about my life without the church. I kept writing, and watching and listening to people talk. s some of you know as soon as someone knows you’re a priest it takes about a nano second for talk to turn to God and what makes meaning in life.

Once we’d got over their comments about the irrelevance of the church, some accurate and some way off beam, most of what I heard was a desire for wonder, a deep yearning for connection with Spirit, with our universe, with that which is beyond. And I despaired at the great gulf that exists between the church and people of spirit.

At its best, religion offers a crucible for alchemy, that mysterious process where the rough stuff of life can be transformed into what is precious. This happens through holding sacred the great mysteries of existence, using ritual, art, music, sound and smell to activate our connection to the patterns of the universe and at the same time so disturb us that we realise we are not separate selves but part of an inexplicable interconnectedness. As a result, boundaries quite naturally fall down allowing mercy and justice to become commonplace. This is the life of the Spirit that we yearn for at our deepest core.

During the last 10 months my life has been dismantled and my own addiction to the familiar patterns has been unraveled. One of the things I’ve learnt is that we live in a neurological trap that allows us to keep expanding our mind, that is, to learn an infinite number of new patterns, but also acts as a limit to our growth by allowing familiar patterns to give us reassuring feedback. This is why you want to listen to Classic Hits and think Eminem is gross. Stravinsky instinctively understood that music, like nature, needed constant upheaval if we were to grow and he used dissonance to create that change.

Jesus was an expert at dissonance in another way. He was a character steeped in his tradition and skilled in the art of Mediterranean oral debate who could argue the toss with the best of them in public stoushes. He also used stories that had familiar patterns, recognizable to his audience and, like a Jodi Picoult novel had a sting in the tail that created a jarring dissonance for individuals and communities.

Right now, it seems we exist within a legalistic church structure addicted to familiar patterns of belief and behaviour. Concerned with each jot and tittle of the law if the offering from Bishop Philip into the GLBT discussion is anything to go by. Not too much different to the religious challenges the Jesus faced in 1st century Palestine.

We can go along with it or challenge this addiction by creating a ruckus as radical as the one prompted by Copernicus and Galileo with their crazy idea that the Earth was orbiting the sun. Turning long held and untested beliefs upside down.

Music, science and story. A disturbing trinity that could help us review all that we do as a church, shine light on why we have developed the belief systems we have and how we need to dramatically change our focus. If we engaged this enchanting trinity, we may be able to lift our eyes to the stars to regain the sense of wonder experienced by our ancestors and have something to offer beyond the partition walls that we have built. Awesome in the best sense of the word.

The great revolutionary Albert Einstein once said, never lose a holy curiosity. I think Jesus would agree with that revised Great Commission and might add, Fear not, for you will find me in that quest.

May the mysterious three unsettle and encourage you to new creativity.