Thought it would be a good idea to begin a series of posts about music by making a couple of general observations about music.

The first – it takes three people to have music – a composer/arranger – a performer – a listener – or – a creator – a re-creator – a receiver.  I am able to assure you from personal experience that sometimes all three of those people are one person.  When I am composing or arranging I always imagine the music, offer a presentation in my mind, which I also hear.

The second – three elements are present in all music – melody, harmony, and rhythm.

Often melody is referred to as a tune but some melodies are not very tuneful.  I was taught that a melody is a succesion of pitches with a beginning and an end over a continuous period of time that is able to be comprehended by the mind as a whole.  It is important to understand that a melody that is composed of a series of non-definite pitches (think percussion instruments) is every bit as much of a melody as a series of definite pitches that we remember as a wonderful tune.

Rhythm is the horizontal relationship of the pitches in time, while harmony is the vertical relationship of the pitches as they progress through time.

Sometimes all three elements are contained in a single melodic line.  Sometimes the music is constructed with all three elements in a very complex relationship – both horizontally and vertically.

Composer John Cage is very famous for his Silence 4:33 – a work for piano where the performer is instructed to sit at the piano keyboard for 4 minutes and 33 seconds without playing a single note.  Of course each presentation of this work is very different as a result of the other sounds that are audible – or become audible – to the receivers – the listeners – the audience.

My goal for this post is simply to stimulate your thought processes about how you understand music.  It has been my experience that often our preconceived definitions limit the possibilities for music making – which, in turn, also limits the power of music to communicate through sound and silence.

Please tell me about your understandings of music and its power to communicate.

Remember – this blog is now found at http://humanbeingsanon.com.  I hope you will join the conversation of this community.

It is with joy and a new-found sense of energy that I begin a new journey for this blog.  Before I forget – you may now find this blog at http://humanbeingsanon.com.

I am currently experiencing the freedom and wonder of retirement.  I retired at the conclusion of 2012 and feel that I am now ready to move forward with this writing and with a number of projects that have been on hold for quite some time.

At my retirement I was gifted by friends with a copy of a book that I have referred to on numerous recent occasions as “the best book I have ever read!”  Published in 2000, it is not a newly published work but one that had not crossed my path before.  Some of what I will write about in the coming weeks and months will be responses to lessons I learned from this brilliant volume.  Written by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander it is titled The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life.  Originally published by the Harvard Business School Press, it is now available from Penguin Books.  I recommend it as a “must read” for anyone who is not already familiar with it.  There are many valuable lessons to be learned within its brief 210 pages.

I also plan to do some writing about music – especially the way that music is able to communicate in ways that the limits of words prohibit.  This writing has been triggered by the blog of a good friend and colleague whose writing may be followed at http://jimrigby.org.  A few days ago he posted the following: “A man has gone back and changed certain sad songs to happy just by moving them from major to minor key. He also took a happy song like Hey, Jude and completely changed it’s feel by shifting it to minor key. What is it in the brain that hears certain music as sad, and other music as happy?”  Jim’s post was written after experiencing an NPR piece on music which may be heard at http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=173832177&m=173843031.

It is my sincere hope that people will read and join the conversation by leaving comments and responses.  I look forward to building a community of people with diverse interests and backgrounds so that we might all learn from one another.  It is my intention to generally make a new post every other day, and I very much look forward to the coming weeks and months as we explore some possibilities for transforming our lives in community.

Dr. Gerald May* offers the following quote from Francis de Sales:  Love is the life of our heart.  According to it, we desire, rejoice, hope and despair, fear, take heart, hate, avoid things, feel sad, grown angry, and exult!

He then follows with these observations:

Love is the most important quality of human life, and the least comprehensible.  I am a little embarrassed to think how much time and energy I have spent trying to understand love.  Perhaps I believed my concepts and definitions of love would help me “do” it better or make it more safe.  No such luck.  I do not think we can ever adequately define or understand love.  I do not think we were ever meant to.  We are meant to participate in love without really understanding it.  We are meant to give ourselves, live ourselves into love’s mystery.

It is the same for all important things in life; there is a mystery within them that our definitions and understandings cannot grasp.  Definitions and understandings are images and concepts created by our brains to symbolize what is real.  Our thoughts about something are never the thing itself.  Further, when we think logically about something, our thoughts come sequentially – one after another.  Reality is not confined to such linearity; it keeps happening all at once in each instant.  The best our thoughts can do is try to keep a little running commentary in rapid, breathless sequence. (19)

Love – like worship – is a practice – something we do – a mystery that we are not intended to ever fully understand in our cognitive nature.

*http://www.amazon.com/The-Awakened-Heart-Gerald-May/dp/0060654732/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347720820&sr=8-1&keywords=the+awakened+heart

Anyone who has read many of the posts on this blog are aware of my fondness for Addiction and Grace by Gerald G. May, M.D.  The following is from another wonderful volume by Dr. May titled The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need*:

“And we are put on earth a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love” – William Blake

There is a desire within each of us, in the deep center of ourselves that we call our heart.  We were born with it, it is never completely satisfied and it never dies.  We are often unaware of it, but it is always awake.  It is the human desire for love.  Every person on this earth yearns to love, to be loved, to know love.  Our true identity, our reason for being, is to be found in this desire.

I think William Blake was right about the purpose of humanity; we are here to learn to bear the beams of love.  There are three meanings of bearing love: to endure it, to carry it, and to bring it forth.  In the first, we are meant to grow in our capacity to endure love’s beauty and pain.  In the second, we are meant to carry love and spread it around, as children carry laughter and measles.  And in the third we are meant to bring new love into the world, to be birthers of love.  This is the threefold nature of our longing. (1)

*http://www.amazon.com/Awakened-Heart-Gerald-G-May/dp/0060654732/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346764241&sr=1-1&keywords=the+awakened+heart

The following is from one of the best books I have ever read and offers some very important and vital information.  The book is Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak*:

Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about – quite apart from what I would like it to be about – or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

That insight is hidden in the word “vocation” itself, which is rooted in the Latin for “voice.” Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live – but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life. (4-5)

Verbalizing is not the only way our lives speak, of course. They speak through our actions and reactions, our intuitions and instincts, our feelings and bodily states of being, perhaps more profoundly than through our words. We are like plants, full of tropisms that draw us toward certain experiences and repel us from others. If we can learn to read our own responses to our one experience – a text we are writing unconsciously every day we spend on earth – we will receive the guidance we need to live more authentic lives.

But if I am to let my life speak things I want to hear, things I would gladly tell others, I must also let it speak things I do not want to hear and would never tell anyone else! My life is not only about my strengths and virtues; it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow. (6)

Great words to ponder on this Labor Day weekend.

*http://www.amazon.com/Let-Your-Life-Speak-Listening/dp/0787947350/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346441573&sr=8-1&keywords=Let+Your+Life+Speak

With this post we take a short break from the regular subject matter of this blog to pay a tribute to my maternal grandmother.

Edna LaVaughn Sargent Wattenbarger was born on August 28, 1896 and died in January of 1989.  In many ways she was the most significant influence on my early life and development.  Together with my grandfather – George Warren Wattenbarger (some folks insist that he spelled his middle name “Warrn”) – they taught me much about life from the very beginning of my days.  I was born in their home – the parsonage for the Methodist mission church in Bunch, Oklahoma – in the Cookson Hills in the northeastern part of the state surrounded by the beautiful and wonderful Native American people whom they faithfully served and greatly loved.

I was baptized by my grandfather in the Sallisaw Creek which ran behind the white mission church and the home – although I have no real memory of that event I have many other memories and pictures that help me remember the wonderful times in Bunch.  It is where I first got my love of trains – as two times each day I would be in front of the house to watch the Kansas City Southern Belle passenger train speed by.  It is where I was first introduced to my spiritual journey – a beginning with a large influence from the Cherokee peoples who were a large part of the community that my grandparents served.

LaVaughn was licensed to preach by the Oklahoma Conference of the Methodist Church – we believe that she was the first woman to be honored with the distinction.  She also provided the first piano that was to assist in my young musical education as a piano student.

Toward the end of her life she lived in our home – both in Oklahoma and in Kansas – where she always provided a loving and warm environment.  She was a very very special woman and I am grateful for all the influence she had on my growing up years and my life.

Grace and peace

The idea for a book with the title Human Beings Anonymous started with one of the times I was working my way through Addiction and Grace*by Gerald G. May, M.D.  An earlier working title was Living as Mustard Seeds in Cracked Clay Pots which is still a valuable working premise for developing meaningful practices, but not, at least in my opinion, a title.

In my experience, sadly, I very much agree with the statements of Gerald May that follow:

I am not being flippant when I say that all of us suffer from addiction.  Nor am I reducing the meaning of addiction.  I mean in all truth that the psychological, neurological, and spiritual dynamics of full-fledged addiction are actively at work within every human being.  The same processes that are responsible for addiction to alcohol and narcotics are also responsible for addiction to ideas, work, relationships, power, moods, fantasies, and an endless variety of other things.  We are all addicts in every sense of the word.  Moreover, our addictions are our own worst enemies.  They enslave us with chains that are of our own making and yet that, paradoxically, are virtually beyond our control.  Addiction also makes idolators of us all, because it forces us to worship these objects of attachment, thereby preventing us from truly, freely loving God and one another.  Addiction breeds willfulness within us, yet, again paradoxically, it erodes our free will and eats away at our dignity.  Addiction, then, is at once an inherent part of our nature and an antagonist of our nature.  It is the absolute enemy of human freedom, the antipathy of love.  Yet, in still another paradox, our addictions can lead us to a deep appreciation of grace.  They can bring us to our knees.

Grace is the most powerful force in the universe.  It can transcend repression, addiction, and every other internal or external power that seeks to oppress the freedom of the human heart.  Grace is where our hope lies. (3-5)

The coming series of posts will focus on The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and other related fellowships as they inform our understanding of living as Human Beings Anonymous.  These steps, these formative practices, point toward practices that make it possible to open our lives to the possibility of grace, practices that are positive formative influences for helping us to become whole and healthy human beings, and practices that teach us that the only way to keep it is to give it away.  They help us learn and believe that “grace is where our hope lies.”

*Gerald G. May, M.D.  Addiction and Grace.  San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988.

“A form exists within the clay you are holding in your hands, and you are to discover it.  As you work with the clay, let it work with you.  Give yourself time, concentrate, and you will encounter a form taking shape.  You will be able to feel it, to sense it, to know it.  When that happens, you can take off the blindfold and work from there.”

Maria Harris* honors one of her mentors, Mary Tully from Union Seminary in New York, by telling the story of an experience where Tully instructed the students to blindfold themselves and then gave the above instructions for working with the clay.  Harris then offers the following informative words:

Through the years I have often done that same exercise with others and realized that Mary Tully was right.  The form is there, waiting to be found, created, and re-created.  The power of the clay image is that it teaches us the nature of forming, informing, formation, and formgiving in education.  The work is ongoing, in mutuality with material, and open always to further meaning.  The molding of clay is a concrete metaphor illuminating the work of education as the fashioning and refashioning of the forms that human life offers, the forms we shape as artists at the same time we allow those forms to shape us.  For as human beings we are always extending our hands into life and into experience in order to give them form.

The work of education is giving flesh to and embodying, form.  But form is not an arbitrary organizational element – one among many.  Rather, as every artist knows, form is the actual shape of content.  Form is a marshaling of materials in relation to one another.  It is a setting of boundaries and limits.  It is a discipline, an ordering and a fashioning according to need.  As we examine the need in the church for a broader, more complete, and more extensive understanding of education, we realize that one way to understand it is as the fashioning of form.  Education in the church means taking those forms which ecclesial life presents to us, places in our hands, as clay to be molded.  Education is the work of lifting up and lifting out those forms through which we might refashion ourselves into a pastoral people. (41)

*Maria Harris.  Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church.  Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989.

Those words provide the title for the opening chapter of Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church*by Maria Harris.

The following is from this opening chapter, and provides a valuable springboard for the coming series of posts.

Harris begins her superb volume with these words:

No image has so captured our Christian imaginations in recent years as has the image of ourselves as a people.  Although various models of the church, such as herald, servant, institution, and congregation, continue to influence us, the dominating self-understanding is increasingly the church as a people.  Perhaps this one emerges as most compelling because it takes our humanness seriously.  Being a people, a community of persons, means that all of us are flesh and blood, heirs to both the heights and the depths of everything that goes into being human.  It takes the incarnation seriously and suggests that we have allowed into our spirits the truth that the Word has become flesh (John 1).  And because we have accepted that, we have also allowed into our spirits the truth that the Word continues to become flesh, today, in us.

The Word continually becoming flesh, in us, completes the image.  For not only are we coming to understand ourselves more and more as a people; we now realize that we are a people with a pastoral vocation.  The truth of our baptism and confirmation is confronting us regularly, and we are beginning to see that being incorporated into this people carries responsibilities with it.  No longer is it enough to be passive members, receiving a world told us by someone else, filing that word away to be taken out for a reading now and then.  No longer is it enough to leave the work of the church to pastors and ordained leaders, as if the total responsibility was theirs.  Instead, we are realizing that the word of God is addressing us, saying something to us, making demands on us, and asking us to live that word in our lives.  We are a people called by the gospel, called to make a difference in our world.

We are called to care for ourselves, for one another, for the earth which is our home.  We are called to take seriously our relation to God and to all God’s creatures, both within and beyond the church.  We are called to end our isolation from others by living each day of our lives rooted in love, rooted in the Christ.  And we are called to believe that in doing so, we fulfill our destiny as a people of God.

The mission of the people who are the church is to go into the world and to be in the world as Jesus was, as the revelation of God.  The mission of the people who are the church is to reveal God as present to the world, as a God who cares for the world and is in an ongoing relation to the world.  The mission is to reveal a God who works through active and practical ministry in the world – a world so loved that, in the words of John 3:16, the only-begotten Son of this God was given as a gift to the world. (23-25)

*Maria Harris.  Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 1989.

From the wisdom of Calvin Miller*:

One winter I was leading a student conference in Canada when I met the son of a prestigious physician.  He was wearing a heavy and handsome winter coat.  “Nice coat!” I said.

“Thank you,” he replied.

In further discussion, I discovered that it had been purchased at a secondhand store for twenty-five cents.  “Why did you buy a secondhand coat?” I asked the son, out of earshot of his famous father, “Your father is rich!”

“Because my father also buys secondhand coats,” the young man answered.

I listened long enough to discover that the physician had reevaluated his whole economic position and had led his sons in the same new direction.  They honored the lordship of Christ by dressing in other people’s castaways.  They used the money they might have spent on new clothes to travel to Third World countries to practice medicine.  Fettered to this great commitment, the doctor had yet liberated himself and his sons.  Such freedom as they know is only gained as we break our ties to our material ambitions and yield to the Savior. (128-129)

*Calvin Miller.  A Hunger for The Holy: Nurturing Intimacy with Christ.  West Monroe, LA:  Howard Publishing Co., Inc., 2003.