By Donald Schell
What St. Paul hinted at it in I Corinthians –‘Now we see in a glass darkly, then face to face: now I know in part; then I shall know even as I am known’ –he left to the writer of I John to speak plainly, ‘Beloved, we are already God’s children, but what we will be hasn’t appeared yet; what we know is this: when He comes we shall be like Him, for we’ll see Him as He is.’
More than ‘believing,’ seeing is becoming. Mirroring makes us who we will be.
Participants in a Music that Makes Community workshop feel the energy of that becoming when they learn by mirroring generous musicians like Ben Allaway, Ana Hernandez, Marilyn Haskel, Eric, Law, Lester Mackenzie, Emily Scott and Scott Weidler. In January and February All Saints Company will offer the eighth and ninth of these three day workshops at San Francisco’s and St. Louis’s Episcopal Cathedrals. Three years into this work discovery continues for both leaders and participants.
My own role exploring “What God’s doing in this music” has me reading and re-reading primatologist Frans de Waal and Neurologist Marco Iacoboni, scientists whose research could challenge the church to ask how liturgy and music-making in liturgy trains us in compassion and shapes us for community in mission. If our humanity emerges from empathic communication, and if singing together is older and more essential to our communities than language, as Steven Mithen argues in Singing Neanderthals, how can we do it better?
For millennia before we had printed texts our ancestors learned music from face-to-face mirroring. Many of us learned songs this ancient way at summer camp and maybe from learning some spirituals and work songs, or savoring world music that brings us living choral folk traditions from Africa and elsewhere. There are musical treasures that would be very, very difficult to learn without words and notes on paper. But singing by mirroring, learning without paper touches something profound in our God-given humanity and taps a primal root of human community.
Reaching to feel and see this deep synthesis of practice, reflection, and theory, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched (and of course listened to) Stanford University’s Talisman A Capella singing ‘When he comes’ (from the I John text) to nursing home residents in Capetown, South Africa.
Naturally enough the nursing home setting of Talisman’s song reminds me of my wife’s University of California doctoral research, a qualitative study of the daily meal interaction between nursing home caregivers and residents. One day Ellen was discussing her research with Leonard Schatzman, the groundbreaking sociologist on her dissertation committee. Ellen said, somewhat apologetically, “I’m really just interested in what happens locally, at the bedside and in the hallway outside the patient’s room face-to-face. I don’t know what to make of the big institutional stuff higher up.” Dr. Schatzman’s responded simply, “Ellen, face-to-face is all there is. It’s face-to-face all the way up.”
Watching Talisman’s singers key off one another face-to-face, we see and feel their faces and bodies communicating what they’re singing, and then, as the camera takes us to the faces of the old people in the home caught up in their visitors singing a song they know and love, we catch another glimpse of the community-shaping power of face-to-face.
But what about global politics? Does face-to-face music-making have anything to do with the big questions? Or is it simply that global systems and politics live beyond the reach of compassion? How does the coming of the tender baby’s kingdom change systems? To bring it home, what’s face-to-face got to do with conflict and change in the Anglican Communion? Schatzman’s point, of course, is that even presidents and archbishops change (or don’t) by what they see, feel, say and do face-to-face.
Singing together doesn’t change us all at once any more than a single encounter with an openly gay Episcopalian changes a homophobic Anglican. Friendship and the discovery of grace come with repetition. Face-to-face singing and learning music to pray together in liturgy changes us ripples out to generous leadership and creativity that emerge among us as we count on one another to hold tune and words. We used to know this culturally. Civil Rights movement songs like ‘We Shall Overcome,’ changed the people who sang together and echoed in hearts and minds facing fire hoses and police dogs. It’s courage, ‘heart’ that we find when we offer even tentative voice to sing what we’re just learning and eventually to stand in front of the group and take a turn as leader.
Another Talisman YouTube vignette takes that practice to echo life and death politics as Talisman sings ‘Hosanna’ at an Easter Monday liturgy at Regina Mundi in Soweto. We watch privileged Stanford students risking hubris. As pleasingly rainbow-colored as they are, these kids singing a Soweto hymn in a Soweto shrine and sanctuary of the anti-Apartheid movement are among the most privileged young people on the planet. They know that. They’re also a typical college mix of skeptics and agnostics with a smattering of cultural Jews and Christians. Singing at a mass at a shrine where anti-Apartheid martyrs’ funerals were celebrated, Talisman’s singers find legitimacy from their willingness to open their hearts and sing the music as they received it. Their singing steers clear of the hubris of claiming suffering they haven’t known. Just watching, we can feel and mirror how the music itself and the people they’re singing to enlarge their experience and ours. Talisman risks singing a mystery that’s stronger than their religious skepticism and we can feel that they sing a history that has now touched and changed them.
And at the end of clip, the camera gives us of a black South African congregation who lived through the terror and bitter politics. Again we’re mirroring the congregation’s skepticism, as we wonder, ‘what do they/we think of this?’ and then…communion, and gratitude at what the singers have seen and felt, what they have learned and sung.
Face-to-face we recognize authenticity.
Baby’s brains are primed to discern faces. Even an abstraction, a highly stylized pair of eyes, nose and mouth holds a baby’s attention. All of us began to discover who we and how we care by seeing ourselves in the faces, voices, and gestures of others like us. And in glimpsing their tenderness mirroring us, we longed to become what we saw. Our adult’s consciousness still involuntarily tips our eyes sideways to discern a face nested in print ;~)
Seeing isn’t believing, it’s becoming, and, as Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa insisted, we become both human and holy by seeing and by learning. ‘Gnosis,’ esoteric, fully defined knowledge for the few can’t build community. Learning together face-to-face does build community.
Imitatio, the imitation of Christ, is our becoming, our becoming like him who is, by the grace of God, our being. Repetition, mirroring, our simplest, most primordial building block of human learning puts us face-to-face, where compassion is born, where conversion and formation really happen.
Am I stretching too far to take this to politics and to our Anglican Communion?
Whether in church or in our workshops, when I’m singing in our familiar ecumenical, progressive mix of LGBT and straight church musicians and clergy, I find moments when I must give thanks again for the pioneering courage of our middle-aged and older gay who risked coming out. Coming out is face-to-face. I know it a little when I declare myself a divorced and remarried priest. Face-to-face takes us to the specific incarnational particulars of humanity. Who would we be without the sometimes joyful, sometimes disquieting experience of knowing people well when they tell us the next piece of their story and experience? Face-to-face changes us all.
The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.