Small Group Ministry, July 2011-My Musica Sacrae

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.  – Walt Whitman

I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live.  – Psalm  104:33

All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright reed song.
If it fades, we fade.  – Rumi

Alas for those who never sing but die with all
their music in them.  –Oliver Wendell Holmes.

A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it or it could be
who's hungry and where their mouth is or
who's out of work and where the job is or
who's broke and where the money is or
who's carrying a gun and where the peace is. - Woody Guthrie

“Music is the handmaiden of faith.  Faith inevitably breaks into singing or whistling, humming or drumming, because true cheerfulness before God is not content with words or deeds of formal piety.  It bursts out into oms and alleluias, hymns, cantatas, chants.  A Baptist congregation in Houston singing “Abide With Me,” a choir in Boston performing Bach’s Magnificat, Buddhist monks in Bankok intoning Pali texts, or a rabbi in Tel Aviv chanting the Av Horachamin – all these show one great truth: Music is the friend of faith.  Even my silent Quaker friends can turn out a very decent hymn in parts.

The reason for this lies in the very nature of music.  Music is order in sound and time.  It is order in sound, whether the sound is a vibrating elastic surface has in timpani or a vibrating column of air as in an organ or a vibrating string, or a column of air as in a human voice.  But music is order in time as well.  Conductor Robert Shaw points out that music, unlike painting and sculpture is not space-art.  It is time-art. “

“Music creates a community between composer, performer, and the listener through time and history.  I never hear Handel’s Messiah without thinking of all the men and women and children who have listened to that piece and found such loveliness and reassurance in it.”

(Carl Scovel, Never Far From Home p. 94-5)

Pavarotti said, “Sometimes when I speak, I say ‘we’ because I mean me and my voice.  Absolutely we are two different things, and it must be that way.  We are sometimes separate.  I realize that this instrument is mine because God gave it to me, and I must treat it with great attention- like a piano or violin or any other instrument.  I must care for it as a priest cares for souls…..Someone once said that God kissed my vocal chords.  But I think that God kissed my soul to make me enjoy life so much.  (Scovel 96-7)

In William Styron’s book, Invisible Darkness he shares about his dark, scary battles with depression.  At one point he was putting his life in order so that he could take his own life.  Then, “Late on bitterly cold night I sat in the living room bundled up against the chill watching a tape of a movie, and at one point in a scene set in a music conservatory, there came a contralto voice singing a sudden soaring passage from the Alto Rhapsody by Brahms….This sound which like all music indeed like all pleasure, I had been unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys this house had known – the children who rushed through its room, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds… I this I realized was more than I ever could abandon….I could not commit this desecration of myself”  (114)

Spiritual Exercise #1:
Identify a piece of sacred music for you and listen to it more than once.  How does it move you?  Does it help you to realize truths otherwise hidden to you?  What does it do for your spirit?  How does it make you feel about your connections to humanity and the world? 

Spiritual Exercise #2:
Discover music that is new to you.  Go to a concert!  There are free recitals at Curtis Institute of Music, free organ concerts at Macy's, free lunchtime concerts at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Rittenhouse Square.  Poll friends for a new artist they love or find a new song on YouTube.  Borrow a CD from a friend.   Reflect on how the new music makes you feel.

Session Plan
Preparation:  During the session before “My Musica Sacrae” each participant is requested to bring music, which can be played during the “My Musica Sacrae” session and which the participant finds to be spiritual, sacred or in some way deeply moving.

Chalice Lighting

Opening Words

“How I wept, deeply moved by your hymns, songs, and the voices that echoed through your church! What emotion I experienced in them! These sounds flowed into my ears, distilling the truth in my heart. A feeling of devotion surged within me, and tears streamed down my face- tears did me good.”  From the Confessions of St. Augustine

(alt.) "Every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty- trying to communicate themselves, understood or not- miracles have happened." -Duke Ellington, from note to his First Sacred Concert             

Check in/Sharing: 

Sharing the Songs:  Participants take turns sharing their sacred or spiritual music.  After the music has been played, each participant other than the one bringing the song is given an opportunity to respond to the music.  After the others have responded, the participant who brought the music may explain why s/he chose that music, its importance and meaning.   

(Extra:  Someone can create a CD with all of the groups sacred music to play as gathering music or other special times during future Small Group meetings.)

Questions for Additional Sharing

1. What is the role of music in your spiritual life?  Are there different types of music that support your spiritual experience? 
2. Does sacred music offer you something that cannot be found in other ways?
3. Has the role of sacred music changed or evolved in your life?  In way ways?
4. Do you have suggestions for ways that music can be used to strengthen the experience of spirituality in your congregation?  (Ask if participants are willing to share their comments with the congregation leadership.

Closing Words:

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! ~ Thomas Carlyle

Extinguish the Chalice