There is contention brewing in the Anglican Church in Australia, and refreshingly, it doesn’t have to do with the debates over human sexuality. It has to do with, are you ready for this? Music. It seems that the Very Reverend Phillip Jenson, Dean of the Cathedral in Sydney and his Brother, the Bishop who appointed him—both ardent Evangelicals of the British sort—have made some rather harsh (and ironic, seeing as he is the head of a Cathedral) pronouncements about cathedrals, church buildings and music in liturgy. ‘There is no discussion in the Bible about buildings,” he says.” So we must not make too much of them, they are not central to God’s purpose, not important, not the church of God, not a replacement for the Temple.” And about Church music he opines: ‘Using the language and categories of worship in church is untenable...It is no accident that feelings of epiphany (transcendence) occur when certain human activities are undertaken, especially music’, and that they can induce these feelings ‘regardless of the content or the religious context. We need to help people to see that nice feelings are nice. But they don’t represent contact with God.”

            One of his critics, Peter Phillips (Director of the Tallis Scholars Choral Group and regular contributor to The Spectator Magazine) challenges this position quite accurately, in my opinion. “Is it then merely to be nice that the men who wrote the Bible, and especially the Psalms, never cease to refer to how often and how passionately one should sing one’s praises to the Lord, from sheer joy? . . .One wonders whether Jesus and his disciples sang when they were at prayer together: by the law of averages some of them must have had reasonable voices. . . . The argument against trained choirs is that they exclude the unmusical; the argument in favour of them is that (as the 12th-century Abbot Suger put it) ‘we can only come to understand absolute beauty, which is God, through the effect of precious and beautiful things on our senses’. In this way of looking at things the better the music and the more trained the performance, the nearer we come to God, as much for the people who are listening as for those who are singing.

He then asks, “Why is it that music is always the first art to be used as a weapon by doctrinaire people? Are they frightened of its unique ability to express the inexpressible? Evangelicals dislike abstraction and mysticism. They seem to need everything to be explained in down-to-earth language, so no one can say that someone else is trying to exclude them. Music has the power to hint at meanings which cannot be put into words, to tear into us in a way we cannot resist. This really won’t do for those who want to root everything down into the earth. For the rest of us, keen to have experiences which are larger than ourselves, which can make our imaginations fly, upwards is the only way to go. I will take my stand with Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856): ‘Without music no discipline can be perfect, nothing can exist without it. For the world itself is composed of the harmony of sounds, and heaven itself moves according to the motions of this harmony.’ And I would add that there is no better music to conjure it up than unaccompanied Renaissance polyphony.” (http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/arts/452156/beyond-words.thtml)

Mr. Phillips deserves a “Bravo!” in my opinion. I love music, almost all kinds of music (except Rap and Heavy Metal which I’m not sure really are music) and I especially like Classical and Choral music. I’m not really sure why that is, as there was little music in our house as I was growing up. I expect that I discovered as I was introduced to it that it touched something within me that let me comprehend the mystery of the world in a special way.

The pianist Vladimire Horowitz once was asked, “What is music?” He said that music was made up of little dots on a page, some black and others white. He admitted that almost anyone can learn to ‘read the dots’, and even play them quite closely on some instrument, pretty much as an expert stenographer can transcribe shorthand. But, he warned, this is not music. One must first discover what is behind the dots for there to be music. Then one must play in one’s own fashion, with spirit and imagination—maybe even play it a little differently from time to time, and certainly not be satisfied merely to replicate it. Only then can there be music.” (quoted in Synthesis: Last Epiphany 2008). 

I can remember what this experience Horowitz is describing is like. I took band from the sixth grade through High School and can remember learning to connect the dots. All of us aspiring musical stars were introduced to whole notes and half notes, rests, sharps and flats. We learned by rote: tap, tap, tap, rest. Toot, toot, toot, rest. Eventually we learned more difficult things: double flammadiddles and the intricacies of 6/8 time not to mention 7/8 time. For years we played something that resembled music, but as anyone who has ever suffered through a Junior High concert knows, it was not music. But then one day something happened. As I recall it took place as we learned a Waltsy Sousa March. Suddenly those of us who had played together for many years were in the space beyond the page. We were making music, playing what lay beyond the dots as Horowitz puts it. And it was glorious and transfiguring. Oh, not mountain top glorious and transfiguring to be sure, more like Junior in High School glorious and transfiguring—but it was a moment to be savored and remembered, a moment that would encourage us to press forward making music of all kinds. Music that in some small way brought beauty into the world making it a better place.

At the hands of a master this experience can reach the mountaintop. Last fall Mary’s sister took us to hear Itzhak Pearlman, the great violinist, play with the San Antonio Symphony. He came on stage, walking with his polio shriveled legs bound in heavy braces and supported by two crutches—each step a painful labor. He was able to climb upon the podium they’d set for him, get in his chair, and cast off his crutches, take his violin from the concert master and begin. And for the next moment in time, we were lifted into eternity as he played. When he finished there was a moment of hushed silence then a standing ovation that went on and on and on, through numerous curtain calls to the point he finally tossed out a towel and ultimately had to leave as we were still clapping. “Please Master, let us build booths and remain here forever in this moment.” Such was the power of his music. It was a truly spiritual experience. But that is the power of the mountaintop, after all, the power to lift us to the transcendent, the power of Epiphany. The authors of a book called The Spiritual Brain have written: “When spiritual experiences transform lives the most reasonable explanation and the one that best accounts for all the evidence is that the people who have such experiences have actually contacted a reality outside themselves, a reality that has brought them closer to the real nature of the universe.” (Quoted in Synthesis, Last Epiphany 2008)

Today is the last Sunday After The Epiphany, a day when words transcendence and Epiphany take center stage. We go this day to the top of the mountain with Jesus, Peter, James and John, to witness with them Jesus’ Transfiguration. We join in a moment of transcendence and Epiphany, and feel the disciples awe and struggle with them to put into words the inexpressible event they have seen and heard. They see Jesus transformed, transfigured, the see the God behind the flesh, they glimpse the glory behind the dots. Of course they want to stay, but like the audience at the symphony, they can’t. They have to leave, leave to discover that the glory they have seen has will travel with them, to transform the hard wood of a cross into a beautiful instrument of salvation, to fill the emptiness of a tomb with the eternal presence of God, to transfigure a simple meal of fish and bread alongside a road to an obscure place into a communion with the holy. They need to go down, to move beyond the dots that will mark their ministry and journey to encounter the holy in the midst of their lives.

            As we end our season of Nativity and Epiphany and make the turn towards Holy Week, Cross and Empty Tomb, let us remember as we journey that we walk on holy ground much of our lives without even acknowledging it. God reveals God’s self in transforming encounters, in splendors of creation in still, small moments and in the seemingly mundane moments of life as well as in the numinous experiences that leave us breathless and stunned, such as hearing the music beyond the dots. (SEA in Synthesis—Last Epiphany 2008, adapted)