Chant: Easter Again

Chant Exsultet Easter

“When a prayer or a psalm or a passage from the Gospels is chanted, we hear the words again. We hear them in a new way. We remember that they are not only meaning but music and mystery. The chanting italicizes them. The prose becomes poetry. The prosaic becomes powerful.”  Frederick Buechner,  Originally published in Whistling in the Dark, Frederick Buechner quote of the Day,  October 8, 2017

Buechner reminds us about using this ancient voice in praising and praying to God and speaking to each other.  It is changing the way we address God and each other. The words become notes. The message we chant sounds different. The sounds of chant are soothing, comforting. The music takes us to another place. The sounds open our world to another dimension. Chanting slows down the words of the message. The squirrels running in the cage in our head slow down and become a bit quieter.

The chant that deacon’s most often sing is the Exsultet which follows bringing the newly lighted Christ candle back into the church at the Easter Vigil. Even before Lent begins, this music becomes part of my body even if I am not the deacon designated to sing this lengthy canticle.  Jason Pennington, the music director at one of my previous churches, describes the Exsultet as “one of the most difficult chants of the Church’s treasury of song, sung  at the opening of the Great Vigil, at the culmination of the events of the holy triduum as all of the congregation is holding their candles in the shadow of the one Paschal, the choir not yet allowed into the stalls, standing in the nave with the faithful as that most beautiful of canticles is intoned, the Exsultet, promising us all the immeasurable gift of salvation.”   

I keep a note from Jason from our last Easter together when I was having some mobility issues and standing for a length of time was more difficult. “She was facing excruciating physical pain to stand for the lengthy canticle as she drew each breath to acclaim its message of life.  She paced it well, taking her time and savoring every single phrase as if it were the very first. This was a beautiful gift of ministry, a Holy Spirit gift that put ministry before self. And isn't that exactly the lesson to have been learned at the Mandatum not two nights before: ‘I give you a new commandment, that you should love one another.’  Joanna's lovely, quiet chanting voice was tremulous with pain, yet was filled with joy. This was Easter.”

I keep Jason’s note to help remind me and others that chanting is always an offering, not a performance.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com    

MLK: Next Right Thing

MLK: Next Right Thing

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

This past week my husband and I have been remembering 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr in Memphis, April 4, 2018, and the events leading up to it and afterwards. We were both senior medical students in Memphis during those troubled times when the world seemed to be falling apart. King left us so many legacies.

Today I am thinking most about how he started out in the civil rights movement becoming a leader in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott which began in December1955 after Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the front of a bus and lasted for 385 days. King was 26, the new pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. He supposedly was selected by the African American community to lead the bus boycott because he was new and had not been intimidated by the white community nor had he aligned himself with the various factions in the black community. During the boycott, King was arrested and his home was bombed.  King’s articulate and nonviolent leadership brought him into national prominence.

King also wrote in his book, Stride Toward Freedom, about a spiritual experience as he sat one midnight at his kitchen table after another bomb threat. As he was ready to give up, he felt a divine inner presence that took away his fears and uncertainly, ready to face whatever came that sustained him for the rest of his life. I think this is one of the experiences he is speaking about when he refers to “going to the mountain and hearing the truth.”

King did not decide to go to Montgomery to lead a bus boycott or become the leader of the civil rights movement. He most probably went to be a good minister like his father and have a family, but a situation arose, he was chosen, and he stepped in. Certainly, his family background of three generations of ministers and all his training as a minister allowed him to be that leader, but that had not been his goal.

I see this as a message to all of us that we may be trained to be one thing, but we may be called to do something else that we never realized that we had been trained to do all along. Each of us, like Martin, will be called at some time to speak our truth. We most probably will not think we are prepared. We may be given a job because we are young or old and inexperienced, or no one else wants the job.

Tonight, I am thinking of the young high school students who are today leading a fight for gun control after an attack at their school.

 My experience is that this is one of the ways God works, and the lives of King and these students exemplify it.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Nouwen: New Wine

Nouwen: Crushed Grapes make New Wine

“Sometimes our sorrow overwhelms us so much that we no longer can believe in joy. Life just seems a cup filled to the brim with war, violence, rejection, loneliness, and endless disappointments.

At times like this we need our friends to remind us that crushed grapes can produce tasty wine.” Henri Nouwen, Henri Nouwen Society, Daily Meditation, from Bread for the Journey, by Henri Nouwen, 1997 HarperSanFrancisco.

The Freeman Playground in Downtown Helena honoring the life of Freeman Ellis Staley who died in his 10th month of age

Our God does not promise that we will not experience sorrow or tragedy, but God does promise that God will be with us through our despair and that out of every Good Friday experience comes a resurrection, an Easter. When we, our friends, or those we come to comfort are in the middle of sorrow and pain, these words are not comforting. We are called at first to be the love of God just by our presence to those who grieve. There are not words to comfort, only our love and presence, which can be a healing presence.

 As the sorrow eases, we can slowly give this promise of an Easter experience where crushed grapes turn into wine. I see people whose son committed suicide develop programs for suicide prevention so that others will not have to go through their experience. I see those who have experienced the death of a loved one now be the first ones to reach out to others whose loved one has died and just go and sit beside them for hours.

Parents whose child has been killed in a tragic accident build a playground or a trail so that other children will have a safe place to go. A family whose teenage daughter dies in a car accident begins a program for the arts for teens in public schools since art made such a difference in their daughter’s life.  A group who develop a friendship in a grief recovery group develop a funeral team at their church to care for families before, during, and after the service.

 All of us are a product of our wounds. We have a choice. We can learn and work and live through our wounds and over time at some point experience another Easter and taste a new wine, or we can stay isolated and buried in our Good Friday tomb. My experience is that Christ stays there with us as long as it takes, ready to roll away the stone as new life emerges.

Joanna   joannaseibert.com