Abstract
A playful yet thought-provoking children’s song begins with the phrase “I can hear a rainbow . . .” which seems preposterous until you embrace choral teachers’ imploration to “listen with your eyes and hear everything you see.” Then, because music communicates immeasurably more than an assemblage of words, you can hear a rainbow.
* The simple tune of
* Praise, anticipation, and joyful shouting are evoked when hearing
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Musical tone, mood, pitch, rhythm, meter, major or minor key all directly affect worshipers’ involvement. A printout hymn text could not even begin to describe all the factors and feelings experienced by the accompanying music.
In a deeply percipient overture, Jennifer Wakeling proposes “a general theological symbolic structure of textless music in Christian worship” because “when textless music is performed as a stand-alone act in Christian worship, it possesses the capacity to function as a symbol through which Christian meaning can be generated at experiential, reflective, and transformative levels.”
During a musical improvisation following a set of congregational songs, depending on the musical features and feeling qualities, worshipers may experience, for example, ecstatic joy, oneness with the world, being loved deeply, or intense yearning. Such experiences can constitute awareness of and openness to God’s (immediate but mediated) presence and action. (this issue, p. 53)
Such valuing of textless music curtails an obsession with cognitive approaches to faith and worship which is one of the foci of Dejan Aždajić’s profound questions about the nature of today’s church. He points to a tendency toward a disembodied, anti-liturgical orientation that prioritizes words and cognition, locating theological truth on the inside of the autonomous individual thinking subject, who remains free to either accept or reject its propositional content . . . the ensuing privatization and internalization of faith inevitably led to the denigration of external religious practices. (this issue, p. 90)
Moreover, limiting ourselves to reading printed words in worship precludes the opportunity to develop our other senses to their keenest ability through interacting with people and the worship environment. Some language patterns, for example, dance with rhymes, similes, metaphors, and other tropes that intend to be heard and embodied rather than read and contemplated.
W. H. Auden was once asked what advice he would give a young person who wished to become a poet. Auden replied that he would ask the young person why he or she wanted to write poetry. If the answer was “because I have something important to say,” Auden would conclude there was no hope for that young person as a poet. If on the other hand, the answer was something like “because I like to hang around words [e.g., biblical texts, hymn texts] and overhear them talking to one another,” then that young person was at least interested in a fundamental part of the poetic process and there was hope for him or her. 1
Aždajić challenges us to deepen our theological reflection for a more intentional incarnated emphasis with a “focus on the primacy of embodied worship, explicitly expressed within a communal context . . . an effective embodied pedagogy requires an active partaking in communities of practice” (this issue, p. 88). Indeed, the normative form of the relationship between God and us is between God and us in communion.
But too often we tend to succumb to the temptation that each person is an individual entity with a religious life before God. Gather all the individual believers together on the Lord’s Day and, voila, you create corporate worship.
The Bible, however, turns this image upside down, for God has a people first. God has Israel. God has the church. And one’s identity as an individual is through that people the body of Christ. Within the body of Christ is where one’s identity as Christian is formed. Within the body of Christ is where one learns to worship as a community.
A recurrent biblical metaphor for the church is “the body of Christ” (e.g., Rom. 12; 1 Cor. 12; Eph. 4; Col. 1). The whole of the human body (and, analogously, the body of Christ) is not only greater than the sum of the parts, but neither the human body and the body of Christ nor its parts can exist apart from each other. The church is the body of Christ.
Neither a collection of individuals nor an assembly of diverse talents makes for the church. “One Christian,” Pascal reportedly said, “is no Christian”. The church is a community of ordinary people living together in mutual forgiveness. A fellowship of people living together within the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is the church.
Aždajić states, “The particular order suggested here is worth noting. As the collective community first enacts a shared theological story, comprehension follows. Consequently, the embodied experience of co-participating results in the profound shaping of deeply held assumptions through the integration of thought and action” (this issue, p. 101). Such a sequence resembles American educational reformer John Dewey’s dictum regarding the paramount requisite of “learning-by-doing” for effective learning: “Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” 2 Dare we say, learning results in “faith-shaping.”
Charlotte Dalwood similarly asserts that doing produces being. To “be” Anglican, one must act in an Anglican manner, which one does, chiefly, by worshiping the Divine in accordance with the rubrics of one or more Anglican prayer books. An Anglican identity that does not . . . somehow find expression in and through common prayer is here understood to be a vacuous one. (this issue, p. 76)
For example, Dalwood focuses her analysis on the ways in which the Book of Common Prayer’s eucharistic rites construct certain subjects and objects as Anglican. And, thereby, the enacting of a common prayer tradition via the various Anglican Books of Common Prayer instantiates as constitutive of Anglicanism at large.
Similarly, we “hear” the colors and textures of vestments, stained glass windows, floral arrangements, visual art, dance.
We “hear” faces, expressions, body postures, attitudes of choirs singing praise and intoning lament.
We “see” voices praising God, whispers and shuffling feet of little children, rustling of paper, and even coughs and sneezes of those nearby.
In what ways can we “listen with our eyes and see with our ears” so we can overhear words talking with one another?
In what ways can we “listen with our eyes and see with our ears” so we can hear a rainbow in the name of Christ?
–pcb, e-i-c
