Take Heaven!
a sermon given by the Rev. Claire Phillips-Thoryn
on the First Sunday in Advent, December 2, 2007
at The First Parish in Lincoln
To listen to this sermon click here.
Advent Readings:
Jeremiah 29: 11-13
For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart,
Isaiah 2 - The Future House of God
In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples shall come and say,
‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.’
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
O house of Jacob,
come, let us walk
in the light of the Lord!
Second Reading:
This reading is titled: “A Letter to the Most Illustrious the Contessina Allagia Dela Aldobrandeschi, Written Christmas Eve Anno Domini 1513.” It was published in the 1930s by Grenville MacDonald. MacDonald probably wrote the piece himself as a Christmas greeting, but, perhaps to give his Christmas wishes more historical gravitas, he attributed it to the ancient Franciscan monk Fra Giovanni. Whether it was written 500 years ago or 80 years ago it still is a beautiful, and true reflection on the season of Advent. 1 The letter reads:
There is nothing I can give you which you have not got; but there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take. No Heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it to-day. Take Heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!
The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see; and to see, we have only to look. Contessina I beseech you to look.
Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendour, woven of love, by wisdom, with power. [Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the Angel’s hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty: believe me, that angel’s hand is there; the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing Presence. Our joys, too: be not content with them as joys, they too conceal diviner gifts.]
Life is so full of meaning and of purpose, so full of beauty—beneath its covering—that you will find that earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then to claim it: that is all! But courage you have; and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.
And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you; not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem, and with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.
“When you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.”
“No Heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it to-day. Take Heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!”
A professor of mine in Divinity School, Chris Queen, who practices and teaches Buddhism, told a story about rush hour traffic in Harvard Square a month before Christmas. Maintenance trucks were blocking lanes as workers hung holiday lights from trees and buildings. The roads were gridlocked. He described an air of desperation as drivers angled for advantage. He tried to stay calm and remembered Thich Nhat Hanh’s traffic-jam meditation. You focus on the brake lights of the car in front of you and think:
“These [brake lights] are the eyes of the Buddha, reminding me to sit calmly, follow my breath, knowing that I’m not going anywhere soon, so take advantage of this moment of peace.” Then he noticed a “bumper sticker just below the eyes of the Buddha on the rusty Toyota” in front of him. It said, “Consciousness: that confusing time between naps.” 2
The Christmas season is, spiritually, meant to be a time of heightened consciousness, of clarity rather than confusion. We light the first candle of Advent to symbolize hope—watching and waiting. Advent is, metaphorically, a season that takes people from where they are and moves them toward where they want to be. Living this metaphor is a way for us to have the spiritual experience of a long, slow, thoughtful walk towards a powerful yet peaceful event. This metaphor is hard to put into practice however—by this point many of us have already bolted from the starting line and are running full speed ahead, dodging the traffic on the streets and at the mall. It can be hard to stay calm, hopeful, watchful, waiting, when you have so much to do and there are so many brakelights in our way!
But surely, even amidst the rush, we would notice true beauty when it was before us. “Life is so full of meaning and of purpose, so full of beauty—beneath its covering—that you will find that earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then to claim it: that is all!”
Last spring, a Washington Post reporter named Gene Weingarten created an experiment. He asked the classical violinist Joshua Bell to play for an hour during the morning rush hour at a major commuter subway stop in Washington DC. Joshua Bell is no ordinary violinist. Last April, at only 39 years old, he was awarded the Avery Fisher prize, naming him the best classical musician in America. Bell was a child prodigy—he received “his first music lessons when he was a 4-year-old in Bloomington, Ind. His parents…decided formal training might be a good idea after they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, moving drawers in and out to vary the pitch.” 3 Bell sells out concert halls and commands a performance price of somewhere around $1,000 a minute. As Bell’s success as a violinist grew, he was able to buy his current violin, a Stradivarius created in 1713, worth three and a half million dollars, considered to be one of the best violins ever made. One composer said that Bell “plays like a god.” Interview magazine once said his playing “does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.”
So, he’s not bad at the fiddle. And, as Weingarten writes, “the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities—as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?” To find the beauty, all the commuters had to do was to claim it. Take heaven! Take peace! In fact, Weingarten was worried that such a large crowd might gather that it would terribly disrupt the pedestrian traffic, Bell would be recognized, security guards would be needed to stop the riot. Bell put down his case, put a few starter dollars in it, and then he began to play.
Bell decided to begin with “Chaconne” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It’s a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. […]”
[Bach’s fellow composer] […] Johannes Brahms…[said of the Bach Chaconne]: “On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”
Bell played. The whole thing was videotaped by a hidden camera, and you can view parts of it on The Washington Post website. As a person totally uninformed about classical music, I can say his playing is exquisite. His whole body is moving to the music, his solo violin almost sounds like two violins playing a duet. Bell played for forty five minutes, during which about 1100 people passed by.
Of those 1100 people, seven people stopped and listened, at least for a minute. 27 people gave money, which added up to $32.17. Weingarten writes:
You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.
Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not really there. A ghost.
Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.
This story makes many people wonder what they would have done, stepping off the escalator at L’Enfant Plaza to the sounds of Joshua Bell. In the Gospel of Luke there is a story about two disciples on the road to Emmaus, just after Jesus has been crucified, who meet up with a stranger while walking. I imagine them walking quickly, at a commuter’s pace, side by side, eyes focused on the long road beneath their feet. They reach their destination as evening starts to fall, and the stranger begins to leave, but the two disciples ask him to dinner. They sit down together, and as they meet each other’s eyes over the bread and wine, the disciples realize the man is Jesus. The gospel says “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.” 4
They had been mourning Jesus, and yet they had not known they were walking with him all along. Was he the ghost, or were they? On this First Sunday in Advent, perhaps the Christmas spirit that we spend this whole month trying to grasp, is already with us, in our sight, if only we have the courage to claim it. For all our hoping, our watching, our waiting, can we take heaven when it appears before us? Take peace in this present little instant?
“When you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.”
“The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see; and to see, we have only to look. Contessina I beseech you to look.”
The commuters that morning passed by an unexpected beauty. But are they really so awful? Would we have been any different? Even Kant, the philosopher who compared the human ability to appreciate beauty to the human ability to make moral judgements, said that for a human to recognize beauty, the viewing conditions had to be optimal. Optimal is not 8 am, late to work, work shoes tight, staff meeting to get to, big project to finish by the end of the week. Weingarten also consulted the senior curator at the National Gallery, who compared Bell playing in a subway at rush hour to taking a masterpiece painting out of its frame and spotlight at the museum, and sticking it in a restaurant. Bell was “art without a frame. […] Context matters.”
A few of the commuters who did stop and listen to Bell had a “frame”—that is, they had studied music in some way and knew that they were hearing something special. The first man to stop, however, had no such frame. His name was John Mortenson. He was heading off to a stressful day going over the budget in his division at the Department of Energy. Coming off the escalator, he starts to walk away from Bell—then turns around. He checks his cell phone—later he tells a reporter that he saw he was three minutes early to work. And so, for those three minutes, for the first time in his life, he leans against a wall and listens to a street musician. The article says “Mortensen doesn't know classical music at all; classic rock is as close as he comes. But there's something about what he's hearing that he really likes.” As he turns to leave, for the first time in his life, he gives money to a street musician. When told later on his phone just what he had been listening to, he said, “Whatever it was, it made me feel at peace.”
“No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!”
After the article was printed, some critics argued that many people today don’t like classical music, that it is a distinctly white, European genre. That perhaps if someone had been singing popular music the results would have been different. Yet Weingarten notes:
There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks, [Latinos] and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.
This week, we begin our Advent watch for the birth of a child who tried to show people a vision of beauty and hope. And children all around us continue to tug us towards this vision, attempting to pull us out of our routine towards the marvelous and the beautiful.
This experiment may say nothing “about people's sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about [our] ability to appreciate life?”
If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?
God said, “When you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.”
“Life is so full of meaning and of purpose, so full of beauty—beneath its covering—that you will find that earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then to claim it: that is all! But courage you have; and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.”
“And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you; not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem, and with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.”
“O house of Jacob,
come, let us walk
in the light of the Lord!”
Amen.
You can read the whole article and watch the videos here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
You can listen to an audio file of Joshua Bell’s whole Metro performance here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
video/2007/04/09/VI2007040900536.html
_____________________________
1. http://www.bartleby.com/73/1467.html
2. From a meditation given at the Appleton Chapel at Memorial Church, Harvard University, Dec. 5, 2006.
3.
All quotes (including block quotes) are from “Pearls Before Breakfast” by Gene Weingarten, unless otherwise noted. April 8, 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
4. Luke 24:31
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