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Is it possible to come up with a description of Episcopal or Anglican music? Is it really distinct from the music of other churches? other religious traditions? other music?

Before answering this specific question, perhaps its scope ought to be widened: is it possible to come up with a definition for music itself? So many definitions of music, including that of the Oxford English Dictionary include words like beauty or words to that effect. Southern Harmony calls music a "succession of pleasing sounds".

I don't think that this really holds up in a post-modern milieu. The similarities between Lauridsen and Lordi essentially end under the umbrella term (terme générique parapluie) "music".

And we must be careful defining music as noise, for as John Cage proved in a work that turned the umbrella inside out (paraparapluie), 4'33", a piece of music need not have any sound at all.

The list of Anglican church choirs who perform this Cageian masterwork is surely a short one, but the contemporary Anglican liturgy is no stranger to silence. But how modern is the advent of silence in the liturgy?

Aside from the verse about the Lord being in his holy temple from Habakkuk 2:20, the American 1928 Book of Common Prayer contains no mention of this absence of noise. Rubrics in the 1979 book, however, allow for it in several places, including after each lesson.

Now if rubrics generally reflect changing practices between publication, there must have been an increase in mainstream Episcopal liturgical silence between 1928 and 1979. And if this is an example of the church naturally filling its role as a counter-cultural institution, it could have been responding to an increasing level of noise in our culture.

So if music is not a "succession of pleasing sounds" or even a succession of sounds, then perhaps music, at it's essence, is simply a succession.

In the Anglican tradition an integral succession is the Apostolic one. And the Apostolic succession contains the resonance of that hymn the disciples sang in the upper room.

In this way the Episcopal Church itself is music.

And its liturgy, and that of our lives, the succession of each journey, gathering, procession, reading, singing, preaching, believing, praying, greeting, eating and departing -- and especially the succession of silences within them -- is music.

He Who is infinite light is so tremendous in His evidence that our minds only see Him as darkness. Lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt. (The Light shines in darkness and the darkness has not understood it.)

If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence.

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1972) p. 131.

Labels: church music, liturgy, Thomas Merton

Merton Monday, the second Monday of every month on Sinden.org, features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton:

Praise is cheap today. Everything is praised. Soap, beer, toothpaste, clothing, mouthwash, movie stars, all the latest gadgets which are supposed to make life more comfortable--everything is contantly being "praised." Praise is now so overdone that everybody is sick of it . . .

Are there no superlatives left for God? They have all been wasted on foods and quack medicines. There is no word left to express our adoration of Him who alone is Holy, who alone is Lord.

So we go to Him and ask help and to get out of being punished, and to mumble that we need a better job, more money, more of the things that are praised by the advertisements. And we wonder why our prayer is so often dead--gaining its only life, borrowing its only urgency from the fact that we need these things so badly.

Merton, Thomas. Praying the Psalms, Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1956.

Labels: praise, prayer, Psalms, Thomas Merton

Merton Monday, the second Monday of every month on Sinden.org, features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton:

The Church indeed likes what is old, not because it is old but rather it is "young." In the Psalms, we drink divine praise at its pure and stainless source, in all its primitive sincerity and perfection.

Merton, Thomas. Praying the Psalms, p. 7. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1956.

I think it would be an apt reversal of Merton's thinking to say that what is young ("Praise music") is "old". Tired, worn-out, inauthentic.

You gotta love the Psalms. The source.

Labels: Psalms, Thomas Merton

Merton Monday, the second Monday of every month on Sinden.org, features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton:

Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 104. New Directions Publishing.

Labels: Thomas Merton

Psalm 85:8-13
Isaiah 35:1-10
Luke 5:17-26

Summarizing today's lessons goes like this:

• righteousness and peace will kiss each other
• faithfulness will spring up from the ground
• righteousness will look down from the sky
• the desert shall rejoice and blossom
• the eyes of the blind shall be opened
• the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped
• the lame shall leap like a deer
• the tongue of the speechless sing for joy

Listen to the Pharisees when they say "We have seen strange things today".

Or Listen to Thomas Merton, who makes his regularly scheduled appearance on . . .

Merton Monday, the second Monday of every month on Sinden.org, features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton:

That which is oldest is most young and most new. There is nothing so ancient and so dead as human novelty. The "lastest" is always stillborn. It never even manages to arrive. What is really new is what was there all the time. I say, not what has repeated itself all the time; the really "new" is that which, at every moment, springs freshly into new existence. This newness never repeats itself. Yet it is so old it goes back to the earliest beginning. It is the very beginning itself, which speaks to us.

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 107. New Directions Publishing.

Labels: Advent 2006, Thomas Merton

Merton Monday, the second Monday of every month on Sinden.org, features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton:

You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt. You cannot believe in God unless you are capable of questioning the authority of predjudice, even though that prejudice may seem to be religious. Faith is not blind conformity to a prejudice--a "pre-judgement." It is a decision, a judgement that is fully and deliberately taken in the light of a truth that cannot be proven. It is not merely the acceptance of a decision that has been made by somebody else.

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 105. New Directions Publishing.

When reading this particular passage of Merton, we cannot but help think of an organist who is facing religious-seeming prejudice in Virginia.

To our overseas readers we should point out that Virginia, while north of North Carolina, is squarely in the South, and as such, is, shall we say, not very progressive.

We've mentioned Brett before, but we don't want to make it too easy for you to pick out exactly where he works, since he hasn't named his congregation in his blog: Out and About in the South.

Labels: Thomas Merton

Yesterday was the second Monday of the month, and as such it was supposed to be Merton Monday, a new regular feature on Sinden.org that features an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton.

To hope is to risk frustration. Therefore, make up your mind to risk frustration.

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 104. New Directions Publishing

Labels: Thomas Merton

Today marks the beginning of a new regular feature on Sinden.org: Merton Monday. The second Monday of each month will feature an excerpt from the writing of Thomas Merton.

We are so convinced that past evils must repeat themselves that we make them repeat themselves. We dare not risk a new life in which the evils of the past are totally forgotten; a new life seems to imply new evils, and we would rather face evils that are already familiar. Hence we cling to the evil that has already become ours, and renew it from day to day, until we become identified with it and change is no longer thinkable.

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 106. New Directions Publishing

Labels: Thomas Merton