Sunday, April 21, 2019

Sprung in completeness where His feet pass - This Is The Day

I have reached the point in my life when I can see what has mattered, what has become a part of its substance – I might say a part of my substance. Some of these things are obvious, since they have been important to me in my career as a student and teacher. But some of them I could never have anticipated. The importance to me of elderly and old American hymns is certainly one example. They can move me so deeply that I have difficulty even speaking about them. The old ballad in the voice of Mary Magdalene, who “walked in the garden alone,” imagines her “tarrying” there with the newly risen Jesus, in the light of a dawn which was certainly the most remarkable day-break since God said, “Let there be light.” The song acknowledges this with fine understatement: “The joy we share as we tarry there / None other has ever known.” Who can imagine the joy she would have felt? And how lovely it is that the song tells us the joy of this encounter was Jesus’s as well as Mary’s. Epochal as the moment is, and inconceivable as Jesus’s passage from death to life must be, they meet as friends and rejoice together as friends. This seems to me as good a gloss as any on the text that tells us God so loved the world, this world, our world. And for a long time, until just a decade ago, at most, I disliked this hymn, in part because to this day I have never heard it sung well. Maybe it can’t be sung well. The lyrics are uneven, and the tune is bland and grossly sentimental. But I have come to a place in my life where the thought of people moved by the imagination of joyful companionship with Christ is so precious that every fault becomes a virtue. I wish I could hear again every faltering soprano who has ever raised this song to heaven. God bless them all.   Marilynne Robinson:  Wondrous Love

I won't ever forget how surprised I was when I heard that protestant hymn being played on the organ at my mother's funeral.   It is one of the odd things about it that my sister, never a musician, never able to carry a tune or tap a rhythm took charge of planning it - I'm the only musician in my generation of my family - and she hired a friend of hers who played organ at a Congregational church to play for it.   When, months later, I said I'd been surprised to hear it my sister claimed that it was one of our mother's favorites, which was news to me.  I have to share Marilynne Robinson's experience of the song, I'd figured it figured a protestant would turn one of the most sublime moments in the Gospels into a waltz rhythm. You can actually play 3/4 so it doesn't turn into one, it almost inevitably will now that that damned dance was invented.  Or maybe all of those people who love the song can hear something in it I can't, which is always possible.  Here's a demonstration from Mahalia Jackson.



The eminent Catholic theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson has pointed out that when that passage of the Gospel of John that starts with Mary Magdalene going to the tomb and finding it empty is read at mass, the lectionary breaks off right before with Peter and the other, unnmaned, follower of Jesus.  As in the song, Mary of Magdalene is in the garden, alone and sees a man she, at first mistakes as the gardener only to find it is Jesus risen from the dead.  I think she is right that it was done to minimize the role of Mary Magdalene as an Apostle to the Apostles, Jesus sends her out to tell the rest of them that he has risen.   That would, of course, mean that she was authorized to preach, something which the men objected to.   Eliazabeth Johnson also points out, since the men went to the bother to write against it, they prove women in the early Church were preaching, one imagines on the strength of Jesus's commission to Mary Magdalene, their argument for why they should.  Who knows what would have happened if she hadn't told the rest of them.  Who knows what will happen now that women aren't waiting for permission from men, other than Jesus, to fulfill his mission given to Mary Magdalene, something I know my mother longed to hear.

The song I do know was my mother's favorite hymn for funerals because she specifically had everyone sing it at my father's funeral,  was Morning Has Broken, words by the Scottish convert to Catholicism, Eleanor Farjeon sung to the traditional Scottish melody called Bunessan.  Not, by the way, as most people seem to believe now,  by Cat Stevens. 

For my mother it was a hymn to the resurrection and the praise for The Creation, appropriate for the occasion.  Unfortunately, since I associate it with the funerals of not only both of my parents but, also, of a young niece  I can't hear it or even read the words without crying,  I'm very sure I could not even play it in public.  Maybe it's a good song for Easter.  I can't find a recording of it that I care to post, usually it's the piano or organ intro that messes it up, who needs the instrument player showing off when you've got words like those?

I'm about the same age as Marlynne Robinson but I'm not as far along as she is, I had that over long, sciency lefty agnostic period and a lot of baggage to sort out and junk.   I think I'm beginning to get some things figured out, a lot of that was giving up notions taught into me, some of those by my education with all of the prejudices and snob content of the English language academic culture, part of it was finally, online, reading the primary materials of my scientistic - secularist - lefty youth and adulthood and seeing that a lot of what was claimed for it in secondary and lower levels of its presentation were false and elevated a lot of it way past what was really there.  A lot of it I can attribute directly to reading the computer science apostate, Joseph Weizenbaum who convincingly knocked down the imaginary and phony walls between belief and knowledge, science and imagination, the logical transmission of fact and persuasion.  It's ironic that a good part of my conversion to Christianity is the product of reading the scientific apostasy of an atheist, bless him, I expect he's in heaven. 

It would be a rare Easter if some atheist doesn't challenge me asking if I believe in the Resurrection.  The answer is I do.  I think it is part of the Creation of the Universe, I believe it is part of the continuing Creation through and in Him, with Him, in the unity of the Holy Spririt, through the culmination of Creation in that unity, not in some inadequate verbal description of all of this, not in some medieval or Renaissance picture, not in some even worse 19th century or 20th century mass 3-color printed image or some - worst of all - Hollywood Technicolor epic or the fevered constructions of some TV hallelujah peddler-theme-park huckster and the architects they hire, not even in the pious imagination of some simple pietist or the extravagant rigor of the most wonderfully brilliant and sincere theologian.   There is no greater testimony to it than itself. 

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.

Sweet the rain’s new fall,
Sunlit from heaven,
Like the first dewfall
On the first grass;
Praise for the sweetness,
Of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness
Where His feet pass.

Mine is the sunlight,
Mine is the morning,
Born of the one light
Eden saw play;
Praise with elation,
Praise every morning,
God’s re-creation
Of the new day.

Eleanor Farjeon

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