Broken Hallelujahs: the Creative Character of Surrender
Introduction
If
you had peeked inside my bedroom any day after school when I was a young
teenager you would have seen me playing one of these (hold up Beatles
album)…and again after dinner and before bedtime. Music was such a big part of
my life as I grew up. I was an only child in a troubled home, and to get away
from it I retreated to my room to listen to music. It gave me solace and took
me away into a different place. A place that even now, I can remember, because
of how I felt when I heard the music playing. I knew more than the lyrics and
every chord - I was a Beatlemaniac who knew that George Harrison was into
Indian mysticism when he recorded “Within You, Without You” (although I didn’t have the slightest
idea what that mysticism was). I knew that Paul McCartney had written “Martha
My Dear” and had named it after his old English sheepdog. And when “Hey Jude”
was first played on a radio station – almost certainly WBBQ - in Augusta, I
made sure to be in my room to hear it, with the stereo speakers pressed up
against my ears as tight as I could hold them.
I
also loved Motown, and my cousin Donna and I used to mime and dance to all the
Supremes songs, and dance the watusi, the jerk, the mashed potato. At
the same time we would sing gospel music in the local Pentecostal and holiness
churches as a trio – she sang soprano, I harmonized, and my cousin Harold
tearing up the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis – who after all was the evangelist
Jimmy Swaggart’s cousin! The sacred and profane never clashed for me, and so
today I want to talk about how for many musicians ‘feel the spirit’ as they
compose and perform their music.
The title ‘Broken Hallelujahs’ is taken from
the book published in 2011 by Christian Scharen,
subtitled ‘Why Popular Music Matters to
Those Seeking God’. I feel honored to follow
the theme of music that Leon Spencer introduced to us two weeks ago. Over the
past year and a half of serving this congregation, there may have been sermons
that I felt were necessary to preach; some that I thought the congregation may
have felt they wanted to hear; but today this is one sermon that I am excited
to preach because I want to challenge all of us to listen with our hearts and
not our minds!
History of popular music
In 1958,a
Catholic youth center newsletter urged kids to ‘smash the records you possess
which present a pagan culture and a pagan way of life.’ (Detweiler,126) More
and more white teenagers of that time were listening to black music, blues that
came from musicians like John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters.
There
were plenty of white Christian people in our part of the world who thought that
rock and roll was the music of the devil, and there were other people in the
music business who made it more palatable when it was sung by white artists
like Elvis Presley!
But music
is at it most powerful when it has no racial boundaries; According to Brian
Ward in his book Just my Soul Responding:
Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (U of California
1998), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
addressed a gathering of black DJs in Atlanta in 1967, saying : "In a real
sense you have paved the way for social and political change by creating a
powerful, cultural bridge between black and white.... You introduced youth to
that music and created a language of soul and promoted the dances which now
sweep across race, class and nation."
Artists as spiritual seekers
Music
contains a multitude of spiritual expressions – many artists inhabiting the black
music genres, for instance, grew up singing in gospel choirs. While their
church attendance may no longer be as steady, their spiritual roots go deep.
(Detweiler 130)
The
folk music of Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul, and Mary had lyrics that cried out
for justice and peace, and their music was performed passionately.
That
passion carried over into the message of love expressed in the Flower Power
music of the later 60s, and is still going strong in the music of the decades
since then. Many musicians find their music is a powerful way to express their
beliefs, convictions and search for meaning.
You may
know who the Beastie Boys are, and you may not
appreciate their music, so it may surprise you to know that Adam Yauch
organized the Tibetan Freedom Concerts to raise support and awareness of the
plight of Tibetan Buddhists. As a practicing Buddhist he manages to slip
dharmic slogans into Beastie Boy songs about parties, rebellion, and not
growing up: “every thought in the mind is a planted seed” (Detweiler). Adam
Yauch died from cancer last May at the age of 47.
My
husband Wil is a big fan of Bruce Springsteen, who has written songs with the
themes of alienation, unemployment and despair found in the white working-class
urban experience. His song ‘Born in the USA’ was not the big celebratory anthem
that Ronald Reagan tried to say it was – in 1984 it was actually a song that
told the story of a Vietnam vet who can’t find the American dream in his
hometown.
What
makes Bruce so revered as a singer-songwriter is that he has never forgotten
his roots in New Jersey, and that was brought home to him in the
fall of 2001. Springsteen told Rolling
Stone magazine that he hadn't thought about the possibility of doing
an album about the tragedy of 9/11 until a car stopped next to him a few
days after the attacks, and the driver (a fan, someone he didn't know) said
simply, "We need you now."
He produced ‘The Rising’ by
the next August, and the album’s songs give a patchwork impression of how the
attacks affected a variety of people. The title of one song, ‘Empty Sky’, “taps
the many emotions triggered by the view of the Manhattan skyline after the Twin
Towers fell. Its lyrics describe those who lost relatives and friends on
9/11.”
I woke up this morning
I
could barely breathe
Just an empty impression
In the
bed where you used to be
I want a kiss from your lips
I want
an eye for an eye
I woke up this morning to the empty
sky
Many
music artists today are spiritual seekers. Sometimes the music that resonates
most with us has conflicted song lyrics that mirror competing beliefs within a
musician (Detweiler, 130).
Leonard
Cohen is a good example of this; he’s a deep thinker who writes and sings about
the human condition of brokenness – he does it so well because he’s been there
and can still find value in the experience. One of his lyrics (“Anthem”) says,
“there are cracks in everything – that’s how the light gets in”.
Cohen
felt pulled much of his life by the “ritual and roots of Judaism” (Scharen).
His early success faded and personal relationships failed, and by the end of
the 1970s Cohen was suffering from depression when he “re-engaged” with his
Jewish roots. He said that he felt silenced in all areas of his life, and the
only thing that helped was to write down his prayers “to apply to the source of
mercy”. So he wrote a book called Book of
Mercy, which contained one prayer for each of his 50 years of life.
His next
project was an album called Various
Positions. He tells a story about what he was like while working out the
lyrics for ‘Hallelujah’; he describes himself as being in his underwear,
crawling along the carpet in a shabby hotel room, unable to get a verse just
right.
Once he
had gone through the agony and triumph of creating his songs, he realized that
the fading of his initial popularity actually gave him freedom from the ego’s
expectation – but he had a hard time getting the record label to trust his
commercial viability. The president of Columbia Records said, “Look Leonard, we
know you’re great but we just don’t know if you’re any good” (Scharen). The
album was released in the US 6 years after its European release, and has some
of his best-known songs including ‘Hallelujah’, which is Hebrew for Praise God.
Two cover versions of the song were Top 10 hits, one by a contestant on
‘American Idol’.
The song
draws upon a variety of Biblical images and figures – King David, Samson, the
Creator, the Book of Exodus. Its message is that ‘we’re able to raise a broken
Hallelujah – Praise God! - because of what God has done for us’ and not what we
can do ourselves, because there is no perfection in this world. We all have broken
hearts and broken lives, but that is no excuse for anyone; on the contrary, we
need to stand up and say Hallelujah under those circumstances (Scharen).
Another
Cohen song, ‘If It Be Your Will’, captures this mood and brokenness becomes
part of a prayer: “If it be your will that I speak no more, and my voice be
still as it was before, I will speak no more, I shall abide until I am spoken
for, if it be your will.” (Scharen) The
lyrics borrow from the Kol Nidre, which is a prayer recited for the Jewish holy
day of Yom Kippur: “May it therefore be your will, Lord our God and God of our
fathers, to forgive us all our sins, to pardon all our iniquities, to grant us
atonement for all our transgressions.” (Scharen) For the
documentary about Leonard Cohen, I’m Your
Man, the narrative flows through a concert featuring not only Cohen but
musicians like Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave and U2. But a little-known
transgender artist named Antony stole the show with his rendition of ‘If It Be
Your Will’. [VIDEO]
The music
of the Icelandic group Sigur
Rós has been called ‘postrock’ and described as ‘the soundtrack of heaven or
music from God’. Yet the group members are not professing religious believers;
but they use historically religious forms, such as a sung mass performed in a
church with Latin words, in songs like ‘Credo’. And in a 2005 interview, they
said, “We are not trying to be spiritual or anything. We are making music that
moves people. Trying, you know, we want to do that. You know, that people get
something out of it. Maybe that is spiritual!”(Scharen) They also invented
their own language, which they call ‘Hopelandic’ to convey
ideas about life…listeners cannot understand but they interpret beginning with
feeling, not thinking. The song you heard if you came in during the prelude is
called Ára Bátur (‘Row
Boat’), and some of the lyrics are:
“You tried everything. Yes, a thousand times, experienced
enough, been through enough, but you it was who let everything into my heart,
and you it was who once again, awoke my spirit.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rcvFWFOsIE
)
The music
of Sigur Rós can create a mood
that is ethereal, angelic. And it has been used in movies such as 127 Hours and Vanilla Sky. There is nothing else like it; it has a fragile majesty
(to use a phrase Jonsi from Sigur Rós used for the music of Washington
Phillps). It soars and if we surrender to it we can be lifted up, we can soar
with it. Their fans on Facebook have one site called ‘Sigur Ros is my religion’
with the rationale “because everyone knows that listening to any album of
theirs is, in fact, a spiritual experience.” (Scharen)
Like the language of
Hopelandic invented by Sigur
Rós, many artists try new things. The
imaginative and adventurous nature of exploration, of playing the notes in a
way that has never been done before, makes music new. In that way, creativity
emerges, because with every new piece, a musician can return to being a
beginner. Leonard Cohen once said, “If I knew where the good songs came from,
I’d go there more often!” “To let go of all preconceptions and fear of failure,
that's the key to creativity” (Jonah
Lehrer). Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, a veteran
performer, says that he strives for that “state of the beginner”: "One
needs to constantly remind oneself to play with the abandon of the child who is
just learning the cello," Mr. Ma says. "Because why is that kid
playing? He is playing for pleasure." (Lehrer)
And when
we hear music that pleases us, we want to join in, beat the rhythm, we have an
instinctive, emotional reaction to it. It “sets off our imagination and takes
us to a different place” – we surrender to it.
C.S. Lewis once said that “we must in some form surrender to a
work of art if we are to understand whether it’s any good” (Detweiler) What did
he mean by that? I think surrender is when we lay aside all our preconceptions
and judgments. We sometimes use the criterion of taste, is it to our taste, is
it in good or bad taste. We can be what Christian Scharen calls ‘cultural Puritans’ who have constricted imaginations. Scharen
says that God gets terribly small when we use a checklist as a way to make
judgments instead of seeking to understand another. When we surrender we let
the artist’s point of view take center stage. We surrender what limits us,
whether it be our age, class, gender, our likes or prejudices – surrendering
makes us vulnerable, in just the way as we give over our hearts to those we
love.
And so I come to the last and maybe most challenging example of
music and the creative character of surrender: the song ‘Jesus Walks’ by Kanye
West. The music video shows us people who are swept up into drug deals, poverty,
violence, incarceration – all issues of race and class that plague this
country.
Kanye West claims that Jesus walks with all these people. That
is the heart of the Gospel, the good news that Jesus preached and lived.
[VIDEO]
The sample music behind Kanye’s rap is “Walk with me” from the
ARC Gospel Choir, whose members are recovering from addictions. Kanye has the
presence of mind to criticize the media, because the powers that be of the
music industry welcome songs about guns and sex, but if he sings about God they
won’t play his music. “Dangerous topics
fraught with tensions and challenges…are where people live” (Scharen)…people
who have lost all hope but still want God to show them the way, are all around
us. Kanye West was able to step inside their shoes and express their
brokenness: this ability to sing for the outcasts of our society could be what
the Apostle Paul was writing about in his Letter to the Romans (8:26): “God
does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching
groans.” (Scharen)
The
author Christian Scharen looks to the Second Book of Corinthians in valuing the
spiritual aspect of what these songs are telling us: “God has opened our ears
so that we can listen to what God is listening to – bending an ear to the cries
of love and loss, sorrow and suffering, and moving in the midst of them to
witness and join God’s work of new creation” (2 Cor 5).
This
coming week is one when surrender is very much on the minds of Christians.
Today is Palm Sunday, marking the triumphant entry of Jesus and his followers
into Jerusalem. By the end of Holy Week Good Friday recalls the surrender of
Jesus to his fate and the bewilderment of his followers when he is crucified.
By this time next Sunday the joy of Easter morning marks a new beginning, new
possibilities. Out of the depth of surrender and death comes hope and new
life…an age-old motif.
But no
matter what your religious perspective, music can help in the work of new
creation, when we truly listen and surrender to its fragile majesty, when we
create a space for our hearts to respond in love to the world and to the
possibilities all around us. Music still makes me feel like that young teenage
girl in her room, finding solace in a song that was written not for me, but for
and by someone who found powerful expression in surrendering to the creative
process. Some of the music we’ve explored today is transcendent in its beauty,
some of it is eye-opening and challenging. All of it requires us to surrender
to our feelings, something not usually asked of us in our UU worship services!
But if we don’t acknowledge the emotion behind the music, how can we possibly
hope to understand the “contemporary spiritual search for meaning and purpose”
(Scharen)?
May it be
so, Blessed Be, AMEN.
Sources:
The Beatles, “Here Comes the
Sun” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6tV11acSRk
Cohen, Leonard. “Poem 50” from Book of Mercy (1984).
Detweiler,
Craig and Taylor, Barry. A
Matrix of Meanings (2003).
Lehrer, Jonah. “How To Be
Creative.” The Saturday Essay. The Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203370604577265632205015846.html
Scharen,
Christian. Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular
Music Matters to Those Seeking God (2011).
Sigur Rós. “Ára Bátur” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rcvFWFOsIE
Springsteen,
Bruce. “The Rising” lyrics, http://classicrock.about.com/od/artistsnz/tp/The-Rising.htm
Ward,
Brian. Just my Soul Responding: Rhythm
and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (1998).
West, Kanye. “Jesus Walks” •http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYF7H_fpc-g
