Sensory Studies

The Joy of the Senses

A Sermon delivered on Sunday, June 13, 2010 at Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal

by Elizabeth Rowlinson

In both the Old Testament lesson and the gospel this morning, we have stories. In the first, we heard the story of Naboth’s vineyard: Ahab, the king of Samaria, coveted the vineyard, which was part of Naboth’s family inheritance. He refused to give it to Ahab, and Jezebel, Ahab’s wife, arranged by deceit for Naboth to be killed; Ahab then took the vineyard. Along comes the fierce prophet Elijah, and tells him that the Lord will bring disaster on him. Wrongdoing, and punishment.

The gospel story is about a sinful woman who came to Jesus weeping; she kissed his feet, washed them with her tears, and dried them with her hair. Then she anointed them with precious ointment. Jesus is criticized for associating with the woman. He tells a short parable; two debtors are forgiven, and the one who is forgiven more loves more. He applies this to the woman, who has shown her love for him. And he says to her ‘Your sins are forgiven’. Repentance, and forgiveness.

I want to focus today on the second of these stories, but I’d like to look  for a moment at the first one, and stories in general. They are both basically very simple, very easy to understand and to remember, very easy to visualize. They go straight to the heart. When I was a small child, I was given a book called ‘The Old Testament Story Told for Children’; it was first published in 1925 – maybe some of you had it too. The author was one Theodora Wilson Wilson, quite a prolific author, mostly of religious books for children. She was a remarkable woman; she was a Quaker, an active pacifist during World War 1, and she later became a humanitarian and a suffragette. I still have the book, and when I looked up today’s Old Testament lesson the first thing that came to my mind was Ms Wilson’s retelling of it, and the colour illustration of Ahab talking to Naboth. And I thought perhaps today we don’t spend enough time on these simple bible stories, for ourselves and for our children. In the more sophisticated intellectual climate of today, we’re perhaps missing the power of stories to imprint themselves on our minds. It must be over 70 years since I read that version of the story of Naboth and Ahab, and it’s still  vivid in my memory.

The gospel reading too is a simple story; Jesus is dining with Simon the Pharisee, and the woman comes in bearing an alabaster box; it’s possibly the most beautiful thing she owns. She pours the perfumed ointment in it over Jesus’ feet, and we can imagine the scent flooding through the house, enfolding all of them in its fragrance; it draws them in to her act of devotion.

And perhaps the reading encourages us to pour out at Jesus’ feet the most beautiful gifts we have to offer: gifts of music, dance, light, drama; gifts that enfold all those who worship with us, so that they too are caught up in the spirit of devotion. Gifts that like the perfumed ointment, are a joy to the senses, poured out to express our love.

And today we think especially of the gift of music, as we honour our choristers and their gift of song. From the earliest days, the church has sung – Paul and Barnabas sang the psalms together in prison.  Singing engages body, mind, and spirit; it seems to be an instinctive human means of expression, whether it be of joy, sorrow, praise, love, or any other stirrings of the human spirit. I was in Greece recently, and in the museum of Delphi I was interested to see some blocks of marble from 128 BC incised with musical inscriptions; they are the earliest known written notation of melody, and they’re hymns of praise to Apollo: the first known hymn book. So when we sing our hymns, we’re part of a very long tradition.

In song we offer ourselves – no instrument, just our own voice. The twelfth century abbess Hildegard of Bingen thought that singing words revealed their true meaning directly to the soul through bodily vibrations. When you sing, there’s no boundary between the physical and the spiritual, body and spirit fuse together.

Worship expressed in song goes beyond words; when we take part, as singers or as listeners, there’s an extra dimension: we’re more fully engaged. We’re caught up in worship at a deeper level – our voices mirror our souls.

Now although the primary instrument of the church’s worship has always been the human voice, other instruments too have a long history and an honoured place in the liturgy. Playing the organ, ringing bells, are liturgical acts, and as with all liturgical acts, their purpose is to awaken meaning. The legendary St. Cecilia constructed an organ, in Auden’s words, to ‘enlarge her prayer’. And listen to Hildegard again: ‘God should be praised with crashing cymbals; with cymbals of clear praise and with all other instruments that clever and industrious people have produced For all the arts serving human desires and needs are derived from the breath that God sent into the human body.’

And several centuries later the theologian Hooker makes substantially the same point. He writes that it’s the whole person which is caught up by music in worship, not heart alone, nor mind and will alone, but all together, in praise in which the body and the senses have their part. He says ‘More than the other arts, music has this faculty to integrate contemplative reason and sensory perception; it is harmony and proportion, it speaks to the highest part of the soul, evoking the divine perfection.’

So we see that there is in music an analogy with the sacraments, which also touch our bodily nature in order to arrive at the core of our spiritual being.

So the primary reasons for including music in our liturgy are to express our spirituality more deeply, to enlarge our prayer, to enhance our worship. Like the woman with the alabaster jar of ointment, we offer it to express our love of God.

But it’s also a powerful means of Christian witness, a way of reaching out beyond the church to touch the hearts of those seeking God but perhaps unaware. We think perhaps of our broadcast evensongs on Sunday afternoons; who knows how many people turn on the radio and are drawn in by the music? Augustine wrote of the time when he was coming near to faith: ‘ I wept at the beauty of your hymns and canticles, and was powerfully moved at the sweet sound of your church’s singing. Those sounds flowed into my ears, and the truth streamed into my heart, so that my feelings of devotion overflowed, and the tears ran from my eyes, and I was happy in them.’

And every revivalist knows that the surest way of melting the stubborn sinner’s heart is to persuade him to join in the singing. For many of us music is a pathway to faith; they are inextricably linked.

And music unites us as a Christian community; when we sing together, we are one people; the individual voices blend together to form one sound. It transcends social and linguistic divisions; its power goes beyond words. John Chrysostom wrote in the fourth century: ‘The psalm which occurred just now in the office blended all voices together, and caused one single, fully harmonious chant to arise; young and old, rich and poor, women and men, slaves and free, all sang one single melody. All the inequalities of social life are here banished. Together we make up a single choir in perfect equality of rights and of expression, whereby earth imitates heaven.’ It could have been written here today.

So we have two more reasons for including music in our worship: it’s a means of witness, enabling us to reach out and draw people in; and it’s a sign of our unity – it unites us as the people of God.

And there’s one more reason, that I hope our musicians would confirm: it’s fun – we enjoy it, it gives us joy. Yet another quote from a doctor of the church, Basil this time: ‘The Holy Spirit sees how much difficulty mankind has in loving virtue, and how we prefer the lure of pleasure to the straight and narrow path. What does he do? He adds the grace of music to the truth of doctrine. Charmed by what we hear, we pluck the fruit of the words without realizing it.’

In other words, because music is such a delight, it makes it easier to believe and to do what we ought. He calls it ‘the grace of music”.

I’ve sung in church choirs for most of my life, some of them wonderful and some not so wonderful, but all of them enriching, experiences of grace. Some of my closest friendships began in church choirs; there’s an honesty about singing together – you are who you are, you can’t hide. People who sing together come to know each other rather well, even though there everyday lives may be far apart. To our young singers I say: look around you. You won’t forget the people you’re singing with, and they may become lifelong friends. I remember with joy people I sung with over 60 years ago, some of them long dead. Choir singing transcends age barriers, and it creates long, long links. In my teens I sung with a counter-tenor in his 70’s who as a child had been a choirboy of the Chapel Royal. He remembered singing at the funeral of the Duke of Clarence in 1892: that’s 118 years, covered by two people singing. I remember him with gratitude – I learned a lot from him. Some of you may be saying 60 years from now: ‘Oh, I remember so-and-so; we sang together in Mr Wedd’s choir.’ And what a wonderful way to be remembered!

So today we give thanks for the music of the church, and especially we celebrate the music of this Cathedral; we give thanks for those who are involved in our music programme, especially the choristers. We’re blessed with fine, dedicated musicians, and, like the woman with the alabaster box of ointment, we offer to God the best we have: our talents, our resources, our best efforts. We join our voices with all those who have sung God’s praises through the ages, who have left us the great musical heritage of the church. The woman’s offering was pleasing to Jesus as a token of her love; may our offering too be pleasing to God.