Wondering Where Music and Laughter Come From

We have two extended family chat threads where all the living grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews read brief messages and share photos (or occasional videos and memes) from everyone else in a setting that is private to ourselves. (One is on my side of the family and the other is with the family of my wife, Elizabeth.) This practice in each extended family has its moments of fatigue, hurt and confusion of course (and more often than not, these are my fault), but both are ultimately a source of connection and joy to all of us Harrisburg Hakes.

Yesterday, my little sister Elsie shared a post—a less frequent and delightful event in my large family, where I am the oldest (and most obnoxious) of nine siblings (now much extended by our marriages and children). I got her permission to share her comment here on my blog (as well as my father’s permission because Elsie is not yet 18):

Jesse, I’ve enjoyed your comments on the Splintered Light book [by Verlyn Flieger], and am interested in reading it at some point. Here is a memory that I have that goes along with that quote and which would be of interest to you all. A few years before he passed away, Uncle Jerry sent me an email in which he said that he wondered where music and laughter came from. Since then, I had / have toyed with writing a story where music and laughter are in the form of two great waterfalls, and are kept by the Light People. Jesse, you would probably have a better idea and form of conveying those than I do, so I’ll just put it out there. I love you all very much my dear family! May God bless you richly!

I assured Elsie that I would not have a better idea than hers for conveying this idea regarding the source of music and laughter. Both Tolkien and Lewis, I am sure, would fully understand and appreciate these two great waterfalls kept by the Light People.

Also following up in response to Elsie, my sister Katie (mother of seven) shared this passage with waterfalls and song from Psalm 42:7-8 (that Katie had read the same day):

Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me. By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.

I’m tempted to write more, but I’ll just note a little here about my Uncle Jerry, my mother’s oldest brother. He was the first of the five children (my mother and her four siblings) in that family to pass away. My mother was the second of those five to die when we lost her about two years ago. My Uncle Jerry started his adult life as a high-school English teacher but eventually ended up building a large and successful swimming pool construction company. He was a generous man who lived large and who loved to laugh and who always resisted making too many claims about God (or any related matters). In some ways Uncle Jerry was a lost sheep (within a family that sometimes seemed to specialize in lost sheep). Near the end of his life, he remarried my Aunt Dotty (who he had divorced for a period of many years) and settled down, much to his mother’s delight. However, he still did not approve of those who claimed to know much about God. His comment to Elsie was typical, however. He promoted wonder. And it’s a blessing to have a little sister who values and continues that legacy. Lord have mercy on me and grant me a heart that does not falter in wonder.

Fairy Glen, Isle of Skye, Scotland (photo from online but a place that I have visited with Elizabeth many moons ago)

free of the mechanical hypotaxis of the one and the boring boisterousness of the other

The circular, “synthetic;’ and pleromatic grandeur of the Hegelian infinite and the chaotic, univocal, and unharmonizable flux of the postmodern infinite are equally dreary; but the Christian infinite, free of the mechanical hypotaxis of the one and the boring boisterousness of the other, yields a profuse and irreducible parataxis, a boundless flood of beauties, beyond synthesis, but utterly open to analogy, complexity, variations, and refrains.

Within such an infinite, the Spirit’s power to redeem discordant lines is one not of higher resolution but of reorientation, a restoration of each line’s scope of harmonic openness to every other line.

It is the promise of Christian faith that, eschatologically, the music of all creation will be restored not as a totality in which all the discords of evil necessarily participated, but as an accomplished harmony from which all such discords, along with their false profundities, have been exorcised by way of innumerable “tonal” (or pneumatological) reconciliations. This is the sense in which theology should continue to speak of the world in terms of a harmonia mundi, a musica mundana, or the song of creation.

…Let me stipulate that creation can never be understood, in Christian thought, simply as a text that conceals a more fundamental set of abstract meanings, to which all its particularities can be reduced; when I use the word “theme” here, I mean it in its strictly musical sense, to indicate a phrase or motif, a point of departure, which is neither more true nor less complex than the series of variations to which it gives rise. The “theme” of creation is the gift of the whole, committed to limitless possibilities, open to immeasurable ranges of divergence and convergence, consonance and dissonance (which always allows for the possibility of discord), and unpredictable modulations that at once restore and restate that theme.

The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth by David Bentley Hart.

Giver of life

There’s a phrase in the Nicene–Constantinopolitan Creed identifying the Holy Spirit as the “Giver of life.” This phrase often gets unpacked in ancient hymns that expand on the Holy Spirit as the source of all the glorious life in the world around us. These examples below are not the most effusive, but I noticed them today as this kind of expansion upon the key phrase in the creed. At the bottom, I’ve also placed a few passages from the Beauty of the Infinite by David Bentley Hart that remind me of this phrase as well. When I come to this phrase in the midst of prayer and worship it often overwhelms me with a sense of gratitude and wonder that isn’t reducible to words (something of joy and awe at God’s loving presence pouring out life so abundantly, graciously making and remaking as I take breath after breath amid it all—a constant gift).

And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life.

Nicene–Constantinopolitan Creed.

With the Holy Spirit every gift is good; for He doth shine forth together with the Father and the Son; and in Him doth all creation live and move.

Verily, all the riches of honor are of the Holy Spirit. And of Him too is grace and life for all creation. Wherefore, He is to be praised with the Father and the Word.

A couple of the ancient hymns from today’s Orthros service.

As God is Trinity, in whom all difference is possessed as perfect peace and unity, the divine life might be described as infinite music, and creation too might be described as a music whose intervals, transitions, and phrases are embraced within God’s eternal, triune polyphony.

…For Christian thought, …true distance is given in an event, a motion, that is transcendent: a pure prolation in which all patterns are “anticipated,” in an infinitely fulfilled way that allows for every possibility; it even makes space for the possibilities of discord, while also always providing, out of its analogical bounty, ways of return, of unwinding the coils of sin, of healing the wounds of violence (the Holy Spirit is a supremely inventive composer).

…One might best characterize the properly Christian understanding of being as polyphony or counterpoint: having received its theme of divine love from God, the true measure of being is expressed in the restoration of that theme, in the response that submits that theme to variation and offers it back in an indefinitely prolonged and varied response (guided by the Spirit’s power of modulation).

…Within such an infinite, the Spirit’s power to redeem discordant lines is one not of higher resolution but of reorientation, a restoration of each line’s scope of harmonic openness to every other line.

…In short, it is a “thematism of the surface;’ not a thematic “content” more essential than created difference: a style of articulation, a way of ordering desire and apprehending the “shape” of being, its proportions, dimensions, and rhythms. Being is a surface of supplementarity, an expressive fabric forever filling itself out into ever greater adornments of the divine love, a porrection of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to creation and, thereby, to the Father.”

The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth by David Bentley Hart.

true beauty is not the idea of the beautiful

David Bentley Hart (The Beauty of the Infinite, pp. 176-177):

The harmony of Father and Son is not the absolute music of an undifferentiated noise, but the open, diverse, and complete polyphony of Father, Son, and Spirit.

…The most elemental statement of theological aesthetics is that God is beautiful: not only that God is beauty or the essence and archetype of beauty, nor even only that God is the highest beauty, but that, as Gregory the Theologian says, “God is beauty and also beautiful, whose radiance shines upon and is reflected in his creatures” (Oration 28.30-31).

…God’s beauty is delight and the object of delight, the shared gaze of love that belongs to the persons of the Trinity; it is what God beholds, what the Father sees and rejoices in the Son, in the sweetness of the Spirit, what Son and Spirit find delightful in one another, because as Son and Spirit of the Father they share his knowledge and love as persons. This cannot be emphasized enough: the Christian God, who is infinite, is also infinitely formosus, the supereminent fullness of all form, transcendently determinate, always possessed of his Logos. True beauty is not the idea of the beautiful, a static archetype in the “mind” of God, but is an infinite “music,” drama, art, completed in–but never “bounded” by–the termless dynamism of the Trinity’s life; God is boundless, and so is never a boundary; his music possesses the richness of every transition, interval, measure variation–all dancing and delight. And because he is beautiful, being abounds with difference: shape, variety, manifold relation. Beauty is the distinction of the different, the otherness of the other, the true form of distance. And the Holy Spirit who perfects the divine love, so that it is not only reflective but also evocative–calling out to yet another as pure delight, outgoing, both uncompelled and unlimited–also makes the divine joy open to the otherness of what is not divine, of creation, without estranging it from its divine “logic”; and the Spirit communicates difference as primordially the gift of the beauty, because his difference within the Trinity is the happiness that perfects desire, the fulfillment of love; for the Spirit comes to rest in the Son, there finding all the joy he seeks, reinflecting the distance between Father and Son not just as bare cognizance, but as delight, the whole rapture of the divine essence.

the unimpeded movement of the most perfect impulse towards the most perfect object

From “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages” by C.S. Lewis, first delivered as a lecture in 1956, the piece was published posthumously in the 1966 collection of essays called Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature:

Go out on any starry night and walk alone for half an hour, resolutely assuming that pre-Copernican astronomy is true. Look up at the sky with that assumption in mind. The real difference between living in that universe and living in ours will, I predict, begin to dawn on you.

…You will be looking at a world unimaginably large but quite definitely finite. At no speed possible to man, in no lifetime possible to man, could you ever reach its frontier, but the frontier is there; hard, clear, sudden as a national frontier.

…We find (not now by analogy but in strictest fact) that in every sphere there is a rational creature called an Intelligence which is compelled to move, and therefore to keep his sphere moving, by his incessant desire for God.

…The motions of the universe are to be conceived not as those of a machine or even an army, but rather as a dance, a festival, a symphony, a ritual, a carnival, or all these in one. They are the unimpeded movement of the most perfect impulse towards the most perfect object.

your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s

On Old Ideas, Cohen sang of wanting to write “a manual for living with defeat.” Cohen says:

I wish I could really come up with something ’cos we are all really living with defeat and failure and disappointment and bewilderment, these dark forces that modify our lives. Everyone is engaged in a mighty struggle for self-respect, meaning and significance. The first step would be to recognise that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s. I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social or spiritual.

From this interview with Neil McCormick.

broken Hallelujah

A couple lines from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” I heard it recently from a friend and teacher. With several versions during Cohen’s long career and recordings by some 50 artists, the lyrics seem to vary slightly each time.

It’s not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light
No, it’s a cold, and it’s a very broken Hallelujah

…There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

sounds of the harp

Beowulf, translated by Frederick Rebsamen, lines 99 to 107:

They lived brightly   on the benches of Heorot
caught up in laughter   till a creature brought them
fear in the night   an infernal hall-guest.
Grendel circled   sounds of the harp
prowled the marshes   moors and ice-streams
forests and fens.   He found his home
with misshapen monsters   in misery and greed.
The Shaper banished him   unshriven away
with the kin of Cain   killer of his blood.