On Practice

Not unlike, I suspect, not a few others, I like to practice the piano intensively on the day of the lesson, to make up for neglect caused by the interventions of life on my time throughout the week. I try to keep the morning of my lesson day free enough for me to make up for lost time. But yesterday, I found my lesson day practice time removed by the Angel of Death.

            I received a call as I was practicing, to tell me that a loved and respected mentor and friend had died and the funeral will be tomorrow. Yvonne had been ill and so it wasn’t unexpected, but it had been sudden, happening quickly over the weekend, without a lot of warning, so it wasn’t expected either. Of course a funeral is an absolute obligation and commitment upon our time, our valued chance to show love, regard, and respect to our dead who are now in the hands of God, and to give love, compassion, and listening to family and friends. And to share memories of the practices of her life and her gifts of generosity, kindness, patience, and knowledge.

            So what is practice? The hands understand repetition, many repeats of bars and phrases, notes and beats, in a closed and concentrated situation. How does the soul understand practice? American writer Fenton Johnson points out that while practice may be “any disciplined undertaking” (such as the practice of medicine), spiritual practice — for example, meditation practice — is “a never-ending striving toward perfection” and I wonder if the practice of the hands is no different from the spiritual practice in this way. And then, says, Johnson, “the process of striving — the practicing — turns out to be the thing itself.”

            While practicing towards some future state of perfection we stand in the presence of our mortality, and that of others: Memento Mori. While it’s true that today’s practice is tomorrow’s reality, it’s also today’s reality, as looking to the past will demonstrate. You probably don’t know how the things you do and say today will be treasured or resented ten years from now. I’m surprised to see my words, photographs and paintings either better or worse than I thought at the time: my self-expression. The soul practices of patience, compassion, reverence and love are today's reality or they are nothing. You can't be patient in the future! (I think I'll be patient with this tomorrow...)  Take heed of what you're doing at the present time, for this is the time of your practice. There is, actually, no time to prepare at the last minute, before the last lesson.

All in the Eye of God: Sex and Cameras

I believe it was William Penn who believed that you shouldn’t do in private what you wouldn’t want to be seen doing in public.Whether you have your hand in the till or up your neighbour’s skirt it’s even more likely you’ll be seen in the digital age. The ubiquitous camera whether attached to your phone or not — I carry my camera constantly, so I should know — will be recording many events of which you may have no memory, so fast they flashed by you. Some cameras direct traffic; some solve crimes. I’m not anti-camera.

            Cameras, in some cases, reflect in a sense the eye of God, sometimes understood to see all things, sometimes even to understand all things, and sometimes to condemn some things including misuse of one’s neighbour. From barrack-room ribaldry to serial rapes of teens rendered helpless by drink, to murder itself, anything can be photographed and filmed. Surely the transcendent God has seen everything; I feel it’s quite certain there’s nothing new in the lines of sin or folly under the sun, any more than there was when the Preacher was telling us all is vanity.

            So what is private, and who owns what’s public? Excepting those legitimately making a living from the sex trade, I find a number of questions around amateur cameras and possibly private activities. The past and current military scandals involving filming of sex acts between adults of controversial consent brings up the question: who owns the copyright in your sex life?  If only one person is filming, who has the distribution rights? If someone is going to make money out on the internet somewhere, who gets a cut? Did she really agree to world-wide viewing rights?  Does he actually want the facts about his manhood revealed? How drunk or drugged was anyone?

            And what is libel? I seem to think it’s loosely covered in the term ‘false witness’. Is photographing someone having sex with you and then distributing the image on the internet with demeaning text ‘false witness’? That’s actually one of the more serious sins in the Decalogue, right up there with coveting your neighbour’s ox.

            The idea of God’s all-seeing eye has been used to keep people in fear of their bodies, their desires, and their relationships. Yet God’s eye would appear to be more forgiving than the eyes of a vast impersonal viewing public, or even the eyes of the friends of your friends. “You are the God who sees me,” said Hagar the slave-girl, someone who was in a tangle of relationships in an unconsenting role. God sees all: maybe only God has the need to see everything.

           

On Silence: Richard Rolle, John Cage, and Zero.

I often wear a cross which depicts, on a red ground, the body of Christ as a single diamond. It puts me in mind of the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist scripture about impermanence, non-materiality, and lack of separateness in persons, things, and time. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, talks about mutability as the characteristic of our world; he’s also very interested in time. I think that silence, also, partakes of mutability, impermanence, and lack of separateness between ourselves, the world, and the divine.

            ‘Being,’ says Matthew Fox (in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ) ‘one might say, is silent.’ But silence itself is actually full of sound, as John Cage found when he placed himself in a sealed chamber in a laboratory to experience ‘absolute silence’ or as close as one can come on this earth. He heard the sound of his own blood rushing through his body: it was surprisingly loud. I think of the two minutes’ radio silence enforced on the BBC by the slow entry of a large audience through a single door at the premiere of Britten’s War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral: enough to frighten any technician, as according to the producer, Richard Butt, ‘the radio audience heard nothing but the sound of a large, silent congregation waiting for something to happen.’ Yet listeners wrote letters of praise for the ‘wonderful silence’ preceding the first chord of that devastating yet transfiguring music. That performance was also followed by silence: by which we mean, no intentional sound was made.

            English mystic Richard Rolle (in The Fire of Love) speaks of his ‘spiritual song’ which he delivers in silence, song that is the gift of fire, song that no one else can hear. Cage’s blood sounds are also the gift of fire, as his body consumes the fuel for him to live. Now diamonds are also the gift of fire (more prosaically, a combination of high temperature and great pressure) and become perfectly clear, harder than any other substance in the universe, and yet not imperishable, as the Diamond Sutra tells us, because nothing is imperishable: in fact, imperishable is exactly what Nothing is.

            Aquinas begins his explorations by telling us what God is not. (This might be a place to begin with our friends the Atheists, who seem so sure they know what God is). Just as zero is vital to both the higher and the lower mathematics, so emptiness or silence is vital to our knowledge of the divine. To take John Cage again, the famous piece 4’33” features a pianist performing a Trinity (four minutes and thirty-three seconds) of silence in three sections; Cage later revised this to be playable by any instrument or combination of instruments for any length of time. The silence, however, will be full of ambient sounds.

            Consider the ambient sounds following the silence of Jesus after his final words: ‘Truly, this man was God’s Son!’ (that is, the King: Mark’s centurion, Pilate’s official witness on the crucifixion detail); ‘Certainly this man was innocent!’ (Luke’s centurion); the voices of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea seeking the body from Pilate (John); the mourning of women looking on (Matthew). Not to mention storm sounds and earthquake sounds and tramping as soldiers return to their barracks. We wouldn’t hear music without the silence between the notes (as Mozart found most beautiful); we wouldn’t draw recognisable objects without the negative space; we couldn’t see the Resurrection unless we first know the silence, full of mortal, mutable, impermanent sounds, following the death of Christ.

On Confidence: The Centurion and His Slave.

When I was at art school, I learned that drawing is largely a matter of confidence: you have to trust the eye, and the hand will follow. Now that I’m learning the piano, I think I’ll finally need to trust the ear, and the sound will follow. And the best advice I’ve had on writing came from Barbara Jefferis: “Don’t get it right, get it written.” It might seem that the hand is primary, but in fact it’s confidence. The hand is secondary to the eye, the ear, and the thought. And it helps if the critical mind can be stilled while this process of trust is going on, for example, by playing it some Mozart to keep it happy.

            Yesterday Luke’s story of the Roman centurion and his dying slave was read. I have written a thesis on this topic, which is about confidence, a word derived from Latin confidere meaning ‘to trust altogether’ or total trust. (We have further an implication of boldness: bold trust). This thesis did rather well (unlike the most recent one, which might be the subject of a future blog), so you can trust what I say about the centurion and his slave, at least somewhat.

            The centurion who sends his friends to ask Jesus to heal his slave is a Gentile, a Greco-Roman slaveholder and a dominant male. My thesis set out to prove that this particular slave was a male concubine, a ‘boyfriend’ in modern terms, a possession certainly in a culture where sleeping with the master was unavoidable for slaves of all genders (including eunuchs who might be castrated to preserve their youthful looks) if the master so wished. And this master does love his slave, so much that he’s willing to sacrifice his honour by claiming to be ‘unworthy’ — a countercultural admission for a Roman officer — and having such confidence he thinks one word from Jesus will banish the evil spirits that cause disease. And he’s right: this has a happy outcome; reliable witnesses return to the house and find the slave in good health. ‘Not even in Israel have I found such faith,’ says Jesus: another insult for those who insist on ethnic and religious purity, and they’ll chalk it up against him.

            So who is this centurion? Firstly, he’s an enemy. He’s engaged in supporting the Roman occupation of Israelite lands; he’s keeping the peace, keeping it Roman. Secondly, he’s a foreigner, an alien conqueror: he sleeps with his male slave and his table is no doubt set with the appalling menu of forbidden foods that scares Peter when God commands him to visit the centurion Cornelius in Acts. And thirdly he’s a polytheist. He has allegiances to Roman military gods; as a centurion, he might be a priest of the Imperial Cult; his household gods would include, among others, his own genius, or guardian spirit who is expected to protect not only his personal household (including his slave) but the eighty men under his command and their families. How can Jesus do this?

            How should we treat our enemies? Jesus taught us to love our enemies, and do good to them. Healing the slave isn’t only for the slave: compassion for the master is part of the equation. How are foreigners and strangers to be treated? The Hebrew tradition gives clear direction on the welcoming and protection of strangers: that’s why Sodom went to the wall. What they eat and who they sleep with and whether they arrived on a boat or a plane are not at issue: taking care of the stranger within your gates is your responsibility. And what about polytheists? What do we do about them?

            I recently attended a conference at Australian Catholic University where a military chaplain gave a paper on liturgical theology. She’s a Uniting Church minister, but as a naval officer, she’s responsible for the welfare of all the ship’s company. At a Sunday Service a new member of the congregation came forward to receive the Eucharist: she knew him to be a Hindu. What should she do? She consulted her conscience; it was confronting for her. The UCA practices an ‘open table policy’ for those who ‘love the Lord’ but she didn’t know how far this could extend. She decided this was God’s business: she acted pastorally and served him, and spoke to him later. He told her he loved and revered the Lord Jesus, honouring him as one of the many names of God. And he was grateful to have been able to worship God in this way. He had come forward with the same kind of confidence the centurion showed when he sent his friends to ask Jesus to heal his slave. Luke’s Jesus found the centurion’s bold yet humble confidence more full of faith than official religion’s careful purity and rules.

            It seems to me that confidence, in drawing, or playing music, or relating to the truths of God revealed in Jesus, is what enables us, with total trust, to make sense of ourselves, our complex world, our simple hearts, and the hearts of others. Through Jesus Christ Our Lord.