A matter of style

from http://tijil.org/gallery/d/214-1/cellist.jpg

For a moment What a surprising incongruous image! and I love this from Tomas' collection. I don't know whether he drew it or got it from some where else. The drawing style is of course Asian manga/anime but the instrument very Western and high art and the girl is drawn very street style.

In a life on another continent I was a bureaucrat and strangely I often went to work in a green army jacket and jeans. On it I wore a patch which said Don't follow me, I'm lost too! If you know me already, you would know that there a contrariness in me. If you asked me a question presenting a black and white situation, I will often bring in the grays. One of my close friends told me that if he wanted to explore the options he would come to me but if he wanted to make a decision then he wasn't sure.

The Greeks had a wider vocabulary for many concepts and love is probably the most well-known because of CS Lewis who listed storge, phileo, eros, and agape . For wisdom Aristotle presented two intellectual virtues: sophia and phronesis. Sophia is what we usually translate as "wisdom". Thus philosophy is love of wisdom. Sophia is the ability to think well or critically, and is used in our study of the world and the way it is; sophia involves deliberation concerning universal laws and truths. Phronesis is sort of more pragmatic and a way of being in the world. It is the ability to think about how and why we should act in order to change things, and especially to change our lives for the better. I have heard common sense and prudence as words used to translate phronesis. Aristotle said that phronesis isn't simply a skill, in fact it involves the abilities to both to decide how to achieve a certain end, and to reflect upon and determine that end. (This latter point is under dispute because I think it brings Aristotle much closer to Plato.) Phronesis requires time and thus is not truly common sense.

I think juxtapositions which set things or ideas in opposition are often unhelpful. However incongruities can bring the norms and values of the world to sight. The wisdom of phronesis is not based on conformity. Human existence is hugely ambiguous and even the Christian faith is based more on phronesis than sophia because it is based on a transcendent relationship lived out in concrete realty.

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:2

The embrace

I found an image on the internet and felt a desire to copy it. My copy is a simple sketch drawing but reminds me of one of my cello teachers who told me about caressing and embracing my cello or literally thinking more in terms of hugging it when playing.

I've already posted about the anime and drama Nodame Cantabile which has reminded me of many things I had forgotten over the years. But for me its fundamental impact was about our attitude to music and our love for its own sake and its relationship to technique. Mediocrity is unworthy of music and in fact any aspect of our lives. We need to embrace our lives.

Many years ago a cello coach on a music holiday said to me It's such a shame that someone with such musical ability is handicapped by their own technique. That comment really rocked me very hard and I went back to having cello lessons soon after.

I'm very interested that cellist Paul Tortelier in his book with David Blum noted that "when some of my students succeed in correcting poor technical habits, there is a change in their interpretation. They become aware that their interpretation has been mediocre as well as their technique." Tortelier, who was a great teacher of technique, said the proof of a good technique is that you don't have to practice long and that you can play when you become old. In fact I seem to remember him also writing that 30 minutes of good practice was equivalent to running 5 miles. I seem to be in a loop saying again that good technique and soul touching music are linked.

I remain saddened that so much in church seems mediocre 1/ lacking technique i.e. proficiency on the instrument, 2/ lacking practice i.e. absence of ensemble playing , and 3/ lacking inspiration i.e. the music fails to touch the soul. A few weeks ago, my good friend Evy was visiting and she shared frustrations about 3/ and I about 1/ and we didn't even get to 2/. As I write this blog, I have discovered the deep spiritual symbolic link that the music/cello and life have for me.

Tortelier noted that the father's hands in Rembrant's painting The Return of the Prodigal Son resemble the hands of a cellist. (see my earlier post)

"... they are not identical. The left hand is larger and more tense, while the right has a calm, almost spiritual quality. Now although I am righthanded, my left hand is in fact larger; it is in immediate contact with the strings, and is more tense and energetic ... My right hand is less developed physically because the fingers have less individual effort to make... [being the pivotal link between bow and arm] One hand is that of a workman, while the other is that of a priest."

Of course music and cello together with life and the spiritual life are symbolically linked for me and the insights are important. We need to put some work into our spiritual lives, in attitude embracing life itself, in developing technique/skill, in order that we may truly live lives to the full.

Command them to do good ... as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life. 1Tim 6;18-19

A forceful, concentrated drive

"I'm too thin, and my ears stick out, and my teeth are crooked and my neck is much too long." - Ariane Chavasse (aka Audrey Hepburn in Love in the afternoon)

I suppose my favourite movie of Audrey Hepburn would be Roman Holiday although she appeared many successful movies including Sabrina, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and My Fair lady. An Anglo-Dutch actress who grew up in Holland during the Second World War she remarked,

"I was exactly the same age as Anne Frank. We were both 10 when war broke out and 15 when the war finished. I was given the book in Dutch, in galley form, in 1946 by a friend. I read it - and it destroyed me. It does this to many people when they first read it but I was not reading it as a book, as printed pages. This was my life. I didn't know what I was going to read. I've never been the same again, it affected me so deeply."

Growing up in war and hunger, she never ran from it in later life. From 1988 she was appointed special ambassador to UNICEF and ended up in Ethiopia, Sudan, Bangladesh and Somalia. "Taking care of children has nothing to do with politics. I think perhaps with time, instead of there being a politicization of humanitarian aid, there will be a humanization of politics." Sadly in our world this has still to happen, yet she worked tirelessly up to her death to bring attention to the needs of children.

Surprisingly the third greatest female star of all time said, "you can even say that I hated myself at certain periods. I was too fat, or maybe too tall, or maybe just plain too ugly... you can say my definiteness stems from underlying feelings of insecurity and inferiority. I couldn't conquer these feelings by acting indecisive. I found the only way to get the better of them was by adopting a forceful, concentrated drive."

Yesterday I found myself again bringing God into a situation, where I knew I could not solve the problem. To anyone in pain, quick fixes are meaningless. Deep disappointments and personal struggles with self cannot be patched up. Time is an important healer, but loneliness can be a dangerous infection. Each of us has to carry our own load in life and it requires great will or forceful, concentrated drive to recognize both strengths and weaknesses. But we ought not to linger too long on either rather exercise reasonable assessment. We can help, share, and encourage each other but we cannot take another's load from them.

Bear one other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. If those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves. All must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbour’s work, will become a cause for pride. For all must carry their own load. Gal 6:2-4

The breath of community

Over the last five years I have had a lot of dreams including these themes of the cello just out of reach, forgotten or separated. This image I found just so strongly epitomizes the essence of those dreams even to the subterranean elements.

Leaving my old home town for another city on another continent, I left a very specific community which helped me understand togetherness or community in a distinctly esoteric manner. There are eight of us in this group, 4 violins, 2 violas and 2 cellos, but we aren't an orchestra. This is Schubert's octet where each has their own part to put into the ensemble. No single part is more nor less important than another and this so true that everyone knows when one player is not playing their part either sufficiently fully or excessively. The effect may be that the harmony and balance may be wrong and perhaps even the whole function and meaning of the piece is lost. In fact playing the piece of music (I am not talking of rehearsal here) becomes unsatisfying. Joy and pleasure are lost. I spent over 20 years playing string quartets but it was the quintets and larger that gave me greater pleasure. A chance to play Schubert's octet was always a high point in my year.

The late John Denver aired in a PBS special tonight said Bands are like breathing together. Over the years my music coaches have told us that we should endeavor to breathe together in order to play effectively together. Breath/wind and spirit are overlapping concepts in Biblical language and spirituality. One of the great problems of the 21st century is a lostness and feelings of isolation and loneliness. Yet there are tensions in our identities how to maintain our individuality, what makes us unique and also our collectivity in what we need to feel we belong. If we could learn to breath together, in order to play together in the one purpose, so to create good and enjoyable experiences for those participating then perhaps we are beginning to learn what true community is about.

Loss as necessary to life

In September 2003, I was working through Margaret Silf's book The Inner Compass. I wrote that I was disturbed by the following reading.

"Each breath [is] a stepping stone to God. ... As time passes I learn to recognize God's ways and to trust when I stand in the middle of the fast-moving water, that he will always bring me one more stone ... he is a little late today, still there on the river bank searching out the right stone. And only now I see how he is doing it. He is taking the stones away, one by one, from my cottage on the riverbank. Already it is half demolished. He is dismantling my kingdom [my home], bit by bit, to provide me with ways to discover his."

Days later I added a second quotation "as we have noticed in our painful experience, getting unhooked can be devastating. It feels like losing so much of what we must value. Freedom is costly - we pay with the currency of our hearts."

This sequence of images constitutes my adult spiritual journey and thematically records transitions and losses. During September I recorded that I dreamt I was trying to chew up fried pieces of Tofu with discomfort and difficulty. Furthermore I kept finding more pieces I must eat and they were too big to swallow. Things happening in my life were difficult to understand and digest.

Necessary Losses, by Judith Viorst, is one of those books that made clear that loss is essentially part of what it is to be human. I find that this is countercultural to our consumer capitalist worldview which suggests to be human is to have, to want, to collect, to accumulate.

I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle: be patient, bearing with one another in love. Eph 4:1

Play so sweetly - live so sweetly

"Few people knew of the greatness she achieved then, of the nobility and inner development as she discovered new strength and vision within herself even as her body became her prison. It is a comforting half-true legend about multiple sclerosis, that the sufferer is enveloped by a quiet serenity and happiness which copes with the illness. But we cannot deny the frustration, the bitterness, the enormous anger which could and did erupt during her long night of suffering. It was balanced by her humour, by her compassionate work for fellow sufferers and her continuing joy for life. Jackie had a unique place in our lives because she belonged to that rare group of individuals who blessed the world."

- Rabbi Friedlander, Eulogy for Jacqueline du Pré

Given her complex life and personal struggles, I can't say she was a saint but she had an ability to touch deep inside the psyche with her music. Elgar's cello concerto is intense and deeply expressive and yet she set the standard for all time by which all performances are measured by adding her own intensity. I felt moved to listen to the first movement this morning and felt the tears welling up in response to it all. What is it all about? What is the purpose of life?

I am no du Pré, but years ago in my string quartet I was getting frustrated with the others. The cello at that point provided the rhythmic foundation. I complained to our coach How can I make them listen to me? She replied, Play so sweetly that they cannot fail to hear you! I've struggled sometimes with Paul writing "Imitate me", as it seemed to lack humility. However more recently I've connected these ideas. "Play so sweetly" and "Live so sweetly" that they cannot fail to pay attention ... not to me ... but the music.

Zubin Mehta, a year after du Pré's death, said. "Recently, I was conducting the Elgar concerto in New York. Toward the end of the third movement, I just couldn't conduct anymore. The cellist looked up and said, 'You're thinking of her, aren't you?' 'Yes', I replied. ... At that point I knew I could never conduct the Elgar again. There was no one like Jackie and no one could replace her. There is nothing else I can say. There is nothing else to be said."

"To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!"

The quote comes from Charlie Chaplin. Read any outline or biography and you find a journey of loss and pain.

Looking back in 2002, I note that I had lunch with two students. When one went to the washroom, the other burst into tears saying God can't forgive me. Of course she was wrong but where was that coming from? Now 5 years on, I think my current reading in discernment has made me realize we don't get enough teaching on evil, the enemy, and temptation.

Around the same time in 2002 I was reading this in Don Postema's Space for God. A desert father, "Abba Mios was asked by a soldier whether God would forgive a sinner. After instructing him at some length, the old man asked him: Tell me ... if your cloak were torn, would you throw it away? Oh, No! he replied, I would mend it and wear it again. The old man said to him, Well if you care for your cloak, will God show mercy to his creature?" Sadly in the 21st century the truth is lost because we tend to throw things away rather than repair and restore them to use. But we are worth something to God and worthy of repair and restoration, even though our cultural messages are the opposite. The assertion there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain and the cry "I am making everything new" has a reality in the here and now, which in pain and suffering produces perseverance, which in turn brings character, which in turn, hope and "hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit."

You may not recognize Charles Chaplin the great silent movie actor. This picture comes from the cover of some music composed by him part of a failed music publishing venture. Fortunately even though the publishing company failed his compositions continued and his music score to Lamplight won a bittersweet Academy award albeit a decade after its initial release.

Forgiveness is not something to be treated lightly or treated cheaply. A couple, colleagues from Edmonton made a presentation of forgiveness which touched me deeply. Alas Brian is no longer with us but because of his endurance through his protracted illness I can remember him in this quotation from David Stoop.

• A third misconception about forgiveness is that it is a quick, simple process. Genuine forgiveness [takes time; it is] something deep and powerful.
• And a fourth misconception about forgiveness is that in order to forgive, we must forget. If we still retain the memory of what was done to us, we think, we have not truly forgiven. In fact, just the opposite is true: To forgive is to remember. That is because forgiveness is not just a one-time action on our part; it is usually something that we must choose to do over and over again. If we are to continue to forgive, we must continue to remember.
  

If pain is to lead to perseverance onto character and into hope to find the love we already have, then forgiveness is not forgetfulness and cheap. We must not devalue it in too easily receiving it nor in the quick giving away of it

With Open Hands

Henri Nouwen's With Open Hands was an important catalyst to integrating visual journalling into my spiritual life. Before I started I had not really drawn since I was 11 years old and these images come from January 2003 many many years later.

My spiritual director suggested that the activity of journalling itself focuses and therefore concentrates the drawing itself. Around the same time I was reading The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. A monk who worked in the kitchens and yet over 17 years learnt to find God there. The book records "It was a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times ... prayer was nothing else but a sense of the presence of God." For drawing the hands and reflecting about what I was reading was to discover something I already knew well which was "Letting go and letting God" but to transfer it. This was, in the words of my old pastor Patrick Brock, the 18 inch drop, namely from head to heart.

Cracked, scarred beauty

Five years after I dropped out of university my mum bought me a cello at the same time as she bought my sister's graduation present. It is a 1913 Hawkes French cello. I was attracted to it and am still attached to it. It carries the scars and wounds of the past. I heard it spent 3 years in the workshop of Paul Voigt in London after a nasty accident at the Sadler's Wells Theatre. The instrument is full of re-glued cracks and pins. Under the bridge 's left foot (right side of picture) is a new piece of wood 0.5 cm wide and close to 42 cm long. You can see two other vertical cracks rising from the lower loops of the f-holes. Yet she has a voice I love and on a good day I have pulled a wide ranging nice tone. What makes her beautiful in my eyes is her uniqueness in the marks of the past, the wounds and scars she carries, and her distinctive voice.

A cello frequently features in my dreams and I see it very much as a metaphor for myself. At the end of February 2003 I read Henri Nouwen's The Wounded Healer and it was one of those moments when I realised that I don't have to have it all put together to be effective. The Talmud records a Rabbi came to Elijah the prophet asking "When will the Messiah come?" to which the reply was "Go ask him yourself!" "How shall I know him?" "He is sitting among the poor covered with wounds. The others unbind all their wounds at the same time and then bind them up again. But he unbinds one at a time and binds it up again saying to himself, 'Perhaps I shall be needed: If so I must always be ready so as not to delay for a moment.'"

Nouwen names these wounds as alienation, separation, isolation, and loneliness. For the healing task Nouwen uses the word hospitality which "is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our house to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveller."

My pastor has been strong enough to call the presentation of "having it all together, heresy!" I'm not sure of the word but at minimum it is a lie or deception. Ronald Rolheiser's classic book The Restless Heart notes that to be humans is in fact to be intrinsically lonely, but to be human is also to have a choice to respond. But loneliness is not wholly a negative experience because being human carries a call to love. "For loneliness is one of the deepest, most universal, and most profound experiences that we have... we pay a heavy price for not admitting our loneliness, facing it squarely, and grappling with it honestly." Brokenness is part of authenticity, however when it becomes Nietzsche's ressentiment it acquires the vengeful bitterness applied to or used by victims. When wounds become a weapon as will to power then heresy becomes real with all the bandages pulled off. What should create community is a common loneliness and call to tend each other's wounds.

Blaise Pascal noted that the sole cause of humanity's unhappiness is that each does not know how to stay quietly in their room. But staying in our room is impossible. For Augustine, the 4th century theologian, to be human is to have a restlessness in built and our mixed existence of partially living in the city of God and partially in the city of men leaves us "incomplete and thirsty, restless and lonely, longing always to bring this pilgrimage to an end, to return to God and our true homeland." A dark night experience demonstrates this, that in darkness the soul searches ever more desperately and finds authentic faith through the experience of casting prayers to God in raw faith into the darkness. It is this very restlessness/darkness that calls forth hospitality and reminder that there are fellow travellers.