Let the one who has ears to hear

There’s a great deal of racket in our lives right about now, so as the world works itself into a noisy frenzy, let’s look for auricular refuge. 

Each week during Covid-tide, Robert Fripp has been releasing Music for Quiet Moments. 

Two years ago the electronic musician r beny played around with a device called the Elektron Digitone and came up with something really lovely. 

I am a fan of the Field Recordings podcast which offers recordings of people in … fields. “Fields” being defined rather broadly. 

Here you may listen to wood warblers, and other creatures, in the Brecon Beacons of Wales. 

This sounds a lot like fishing with my father, also from the U.K., a man sitting by a pond for a long time waiting for a carp. 

Moby created several hours of quiet ambient music for himself but ultimately decided to make it available to us. 

The Naturespace app is happy place on my phone. The quality of their nature recordings is as my kids say perf. 

Ambient Church, a wonderful multimedia show from a couple of years back. (Not sure it has much to do with church, except architecturally.) 

And finally, Craig Mod has for a few years now been making brief binaural ambient recordings of his walks in Japan. Gotta have headphones for these — really, for everything I’m sharing today but especially for these. 

Currently reading: The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, Alan Jacobs

Currently reading: Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, is a book about a group of small, vocal animals who lived once upon a time on the banks of the stripling Thames in Oxfordshire. There is one rather famous chapter in the book called “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” and the way the chapter begins is roughly this. A family of otters discovers that a small, fat, otter child named Portly is missing. Rat, who is a water rat, and Mole, who is a mole, decide to go search for him in Rat’s boat, and off they go one morning just before daybreak.

Strange things begin to happen. Rat suddenly hears a scrap of music such as he has never heard before, and then before he knows it, it’s gone. “So beautiful and strange and new,” Rat sings (and since these are British animals you have to imagine the British accent). Rat also has a rather flowery way of expressing himself. “Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever.”

At first his friend Mole can’t hear anything — “only the wind playing in the weeds and rushes,” he says — but then when it comes again, he does hear it; and then, as Grahame writes, “breathless and transfixed, he stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on Rat’s cheeks, and bowed his head and understood.”

Religion is listening the way Rat and Mole listened — which is listening with more than just your ears, of course, which is listening with your hearts, with your intuition, with whatever is that part of you that longs, like a castaway, to hear news from across the seas. Worship is a response to that news, hearing it even in the ancient words of our forbears who themselves were listeners, who heard and then spoke of what they heard — Shema ’Yisrael, adonai Elohenu, adonai echad. Ecce agnus Dei qui tollit peccatum mundi.

Maybe it’s misleading to speak of religion as listening to something, maybe listening through would be more accurate — listening through the silence, through the prayer, through the music, through the sound of the wind in the rushes or through the sound of your own life, for whatever is to be heard through these things. It is listening the way a child listens or the way an animal listens for all I know, without any presuppositions about what you are going to hear or what you are not going to hear.

When you hear something like what Rat and Mole heard, what do you call it? Rat called it music that struck him dumb with joy and at the same time sent tears running down his cheeks. As for me, I would call it the sense that not the world certainly, not existence, but whatever it is that existence itself comes from, the power and ground out of which our lives spring, wishes us well, you and me, wishes to restore us to itself and to each other. It is the power that ultimately all theology is about. It is the power that stirs inside us at those rare moments when we make the effort of real speech with each other, and with it.

—PCE+

From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends. 

—Hilaire Belloc, “Dedicatory Ode,” stanza 22

Currently reading: Silence: A Christian History, Diarmaid MacCulloch

The Resurrection of the Body

“There are so many evidences of the immortality of the soul, even to a natural man’s reason, that it required not an article of the creed, to fix this notion of the immortality of the soul. But the resurrection of the body is discernible by no other light, but that of faith, nor could be fixed by any less assurance than an article of the creed. Where be all the splinters of that bone, which a shot hath shivered and scattered in the air? Where be all the atoms of that flesh, which a corrosive hath eat away, or a consumption hath breathed, and exhaled away from our arms, and other limbs? In what wrinkle, in what furrow, in what bowel of the earth, lie all the grains of the ashes of a body burnt a thousand years since? In what corner, in what ventricle of the sea, lies all the jelly of a body drowned in the general flood? What coherence, what sympathy, what dependence maintains any relation, any correspondence, between that arm which was lost in Europe, and that leg, that was lost in Africa or Asia, scores of years between? One humour of our dead body produces worms, and those worms suck and exhaust all other humour, and then all dies, and all dries, and moulders into dust, and that dust is blown into the river, and that puddled water tumbled into the sea, and that ebbs and flows in infinite revolutions, and still, still God knows in what cabinet every seed-pearl lies, in what part of the world every grain of every man’s dust lies; and sibilat populum suum, (as his prophet speaks in another case) he whispers, he hisses, he beckons for the bodies of his saints, and in the twinkling of an eye, that body that was scattered over all the elements, is sat down at the right hand of God, in a glorious resurrection.”

—John Donne, in Sermon LXXXI, preached at the Earl of Bridgewater’s house in London, at the marriage of John Egerton’s daughter, the Lady Mary, to the eldest son of the Lord Herbert of Castle-Island, 19th November, 1627

Cities and the City of God, part 2

I love San Francisco. Our beautiful city and other cities being frequently on our minds, I thought a brief biblical theology of the City might be of interest. What follows is the second part of a three-part essay. Part 1 is here. —PCE+

Run your fingers over the leitmotif of ‘city’ in the biblical textum, and you see that it is one of many cultural attainments recorded and attributed to the line of Cain. We read about not only urbanization that starts with Abel’s brother but also something of nomadism and its origin in the line of Cain; and animal husbandry; and the invention of musical instruments; and metallurgy. As far as scripture is concerned, technology and the arts in all of their variegated manifestations come out of the line of Cain. 

When we look at that list and put it all together, and we see that cities are just one cultural artifact among them, we get the point that Cain’s fratricide of his brother Abel notwithstanding, the Bible’s attitude toward cities is not cancel culture.

The Bible is aware that there are reasons a reader might be tempted to consign cities to the trash heap, to write them off. But they are not written off in scripture. This is a matter of use and abuse, a matter of what’s the purpose that they are designed to serve. Those musical instruments, the same ones invented here in the line of Cain, will later be used by David to sing God’s praise. Just so the cities even of Cain, ultimately the cities of Canaan, will be used in the sovereign purpose of God for redemption. 

What makes a city? Why did Cain invent a city anyway? It wasn’t that there was a massive population that needed to be accommodated. In the Hebraic imagination what makes a city a city is that it is intended as a permanent settlement. That’s all. The city is a place where you get to reside; it’s not a temporary encampment. What makes a city a city, Cain’s purpose in founding a city, is his answer to the curse of being thrust out from the presence of God into a world in which anyone can kill you. Cain saw this when he took his brother out into the field where no one was watching, out beyond the long arm of the law, out into the rural areas and wilderness, beyond the perimeter of civilization. And so the invention of the city is a refuge from that danger which was so acute in the mind of Cain. The city was a refuge from his wandering and from his exposure.

There’s a parallelism here that’s easier to notice in the original Hebrew than in the way it comes into English. There’s play on words: Cain builds a city and has a son. In Hebrew a son was called a ben because you ‘built’ him. A son was a monument to parental effort. In our own culture, such a concept is I think still familiar to us. So there’s a kind of parallelism here. Cain, who has murdered his brother, suddenly aware of the brevity of life, seems to be compelled to make his mark and achieve a self-made immortality. And so he begets a son and builds a city or he builds a son and he builds a city. The same could be said of Babel in the eleventh chapter of Genesis.

I’ve made elsewhere the waggish observation that the best way to read the Bible is to put a cushion on the floor and do a headstand; reading the Bible upside down (or thinking about reading it that way) keeps you in mind that the Bible means to overturn or contradict our usual assumptions about how the world works. Contrary to bucolic expectations, God’s purpose is not to anathematize the city, to sponsor a flight into the wilderness or a monastic movement of withdrawal. 

That’s what we expect from the Bible, but it is not what we get. Instead God intends to give to his people that which fallen people seek in the city but will never find there. They want security in the city but they will never find it there. They want community — they feel acutely lonely and exposed and alienated — but it won’t be found in the City of Man.

God has a City for God’s people. Hebrews chapter eleven says of Abraham that “by faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.” And what was God’s promise? “For he was looking forward to the city with foundations whose architect and builder was God.” Everything that men and women want in the earthly city is something God has for his people in the heavenly city.

And that city can be ours even in measure in this life. God’s intention for the cities of Canaan was not obliteration; it was dispossession. It was for the Israelites to go in and take those cities and bring them under new management, liberating them from service to humankind to now service to the Creator of humankind. What we see God do with cities in biblical literature and in history, is take what was a weapon in the hands of Satan and run him through with it.

Deuteronomy 6, “When the Lord your God brings you into the land he swore to your forefathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you — a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant — then when you eat and are satisfied be careful that you do not forget the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”

To be continued.

Father's Day

“The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”
— The Rev'd Theodore M. Hesburgh