Hello everyone! As you might have noticed, you are receiving this email in a new format. I’ve decided to switch my newsletter over from Gmail to Substack for three main reasons: a) the ease of use and formatting; b) the facilitation of sharing content and enabling new subscribers; and c) to give Google just slightly less personal data. You will see there is an option to become a paying subscriber. While I have no intention to put anything behind a paywall, if you would like to be a patron of the arts and support a hymnwriter who will soon be leaving his church and therefore have to start paying a mortgage and/or rent on a surprisingly paltry assistant professor’s wage, I want to give you that option (I know, big of me). Please share with anyone you think might be interested in new texts! I might also branch out into some other unfinished thoughts on worship, the arts, literature, poetry, capitalism—all the things I’m thinking on in this season. Finally, you can still respond directly to these emails by simply replying—and I love hearing from people! So, without further ado.
Hymnwriters and liturgists tend to be a people enamored by words. Usually their own faith has been fundamentally shaped by liturgical texts and congregational songs, which also often led them on the past of discovering their own vocation. I know this is true for me. And the Christian narrative gives credence to the numinous power of words from beginning to end: God creates worlds with words (“Let there be light!”); Jesus is named the Word of God who can heal with a simple word (“Your faith has made you well.”); and the Divine speaks through the prophet Isaiah to tell the people of Israel, “So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Is. 55:11). God’s word does something.
Liturgical scholars borrow language from their performance theory colleagues to call this type of word-doing “performative utterances” or “illocutionary acts,” and it is not limited to divine acts. While obviously of a different kind and scale, human words also do something. When a minister says, “I now pronounce you married” or I say to my friend, “I promise I will come over tomorrow,” these words have done something real. Or, on the shadow side, when a parent tells their child, “You’re good for nothing!” these words too have done something all too real.
In her essay “Telling is Listening” in the collection The Wave in the Mind, Ursula K. LeGuin (one of my personal favorites) describes communication not as a mechanical movement of information pellets from one person to another, but as an organic “sphere of entrainment” where both listener and hearer are transformed in the process of communication. As she sums up,
Mutual communication between speakers and listeners is a powerful act. The power of each speaker is amplified, augmented, by the entrainment of the listeners. The strength of a community is amplified, augmented by its mutual entrainment in speech.
This is why utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer…
“Words are events, they do things, they change things.” This is a succinct definition of the illocutionary act, the performative utterance.
Yet, in Brazillian philosopher Rubem A. Alves’s The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet, he argues that too often Western Christian interpretations take this dynamic power of words that has been passed down to us and reduces it to lifeless sets of doctrinal statements and dogmatic assertions. Words become rote and employed for defending positions and claiming certainties rather than opening us up to wonder and possibility. Alves suggests that we need to cultivate a more poetic and less prosaic approach to living and understanding faith (what some scholars call theopoetics).
Combining these ideas, I tried to imagine God not as a dictator barking orders but as a poet, carefully and creatively choosing and speaking words to create the good, negate harm, save what has been damaged, and form all life—the entire cosmos—more into the likeness of Christ.
God, the poet of creation,
making every word
from a simple “Let there be”:
rhyming lines of cosmos
out of formless chaos,
singing highest mountain,
chanting deepest sea.
God, the poet of negation,
hushing all our hate
with a gentle “you shall not”:
setting loving limits
to our lavish living,
silencing oppression,
thwarting evil’s plot.
God, the poet of salvation,
urging us to life
with a constant “come to me”:
wooing us with wonder
from our weary sorrow,
naming us beloved,
calling captives free.
God, the poet of formation,
syncing restless hearts
to the beat of ‘blest are you”:
honing holy people
from our mess of motives,
altering our failures,
making all things new.
© 2023 GIA, Inc.
This one felt like it needed a specific type of tune, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what that meant. Luckily, such an assignment is perfect for the gifts of Sally Ann Morris who composed a rollicking melody that helps propel the text forward. Here’s my ham-handed attempt at it. You’ll notice how the tempo progressively slows; this is my own unique interpretation!
As always, you can purchase the music here at GIA Unbound.
Wonder-ings
I’ve been thinking a good deal about what I pay attention to in the midst of so much ugliness and hatred in the world. It often leads to a question like, “What’s the point of art or beauty in a world on fire?” This quote from Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather gave me a timely rejoinder:
Is gardening an art form? If it is it’s the kind of art I like, bedded in the material, nearly domestic, subject to happenstance and weather. Most of the winter had been very bleak…The days were short and grey and riddled with bad news. I developed a habit of spending Sundays with seed catalogues and lists of old roses, plotting floral fireworks that wouldn’t go off for months. Such consolations are nothing new. In her diary of 1939, Virginia Woolf records hearing Hitler on the radio. Her husband Leonard was in the garden he’d painstakingly constructed at Monk’s House, their damp green cottage in Rodmell, East Sussex. “I shan’t come in,” he shouted. “I’m planting iris, and they will be flowering long after he is dead.”
Amen.
William Butler Yeats also joins in on the call to attend to the small and often overlooked:
“The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our seses to grow sharper.”
Which brought to mind one of my all-time favorite quotes from the incomparable Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead:
It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. That is what I said in the Pentecost sermon. I have reflected on that sermon, and there is some truth in it. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
May we have the courage to see the transfigured and transfiguring beauty of the world.
Peace,
Dave