Saints and Singers
Preacher: Dr Jane Pettegree, Lecturer, Music Centre
Readings: Isaiah 51:1-11; Luke 6:20-36
[Psalm 19:14 Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer]
Hands up who likes pumpkin pie?
A mixed response? It’s rather too sweet for my taste, normally. But on a cold night, around a bonfire maybe, it’s sweetness would warm me up and possibly kickstart my sluggish brain which begins to slow as the thermometer drops.
This past couple of weeks, many of us have walked past rows of grinning orange pumpkins, lighted candles shining through wonky teeth. Pumpkins are much less risky to carve than Scottish neeps, or as north Americans call them, swedes. Growing up, my dad wielded the turnip lantern knife for reasons of health and safety. Whether you use pumpkins or neeps, there are few things more cheering on a misty autumn evening than a Halloween lantern; and nothing more dispiriting than a collapsing, soggy version of the same, candle long extinguished, its sweetness no longer fresh, breaking down into a fermenting ooze on the doorstep in the middle of November.
For rot they will. We are, this week, in that time of the year associated with the die-back of vegetation, the last leaves clinging to the trees, the lengthening of the hours of darkness, and the early bite of winter.
But for the pumpkin, that pile of rotting pulp also serves a useful function; in giving itself, losing form and substance, in ending, it also serves to fertilize the ground for the seeds which have been growing in the darkness within it, ready for new growth.
Pumpkins and turnip lanterns, sweeties and trick-or-treating, belong to a pre-Christian Celtic tradition of Samhain [pronounced Sow-wen], marking the end of summer and beginning of winter. As we northern hemisphere people move towards winter, we need to store up sources of sweetness and light, energy for the present, and hope for the future. But also, to meditate on what it means when things come to an end, to take stock of what we have been given, and to use this in ways that are healthful, individually and collectively.
Like leaves and pumpkins breaking down into soil, sometimes we need things to decompose in order to be re-composed.
Preparing to speak to you today, I wrote, tore up, and rewrote several versions of whatever these words are becoming. Most of the things I make need first to break things. Hence, omlettes, and pumpkin pies. And, I was pleased to learn, also J S Bach’s Cantata 161, the work the chapel choir are singing today.
Cantata 161 is a composition born from decomposition: as the opening section invokes an image from the life of Sampson, honey found in the mouth of a lion’s carcass.
It was written when Bach was only 21, working in the Weimar court, for performance on the 16th Sunday after Trinity in 1716. This falls in mid-autumn, usually in September, not All Saints day, on a Sunday featuring readings from the Gospel of Luke chapter 7, the raising to life of the widow of Nain’s son: a good moment to pause and reflect what being dead, and then alive again in Christ, might mean. Hearing it, today, on All Saints day encourages us to think of this in a time of year when we are circling round death; but in fact, its original liturgical context encouraged thoughts of resurrection.
Resurrection: another kind of breaking, in order to be remade anew.
The cantata text was written by Salomo Franck, a lawyer, civil servant, and author of many hymns still in use in German today, and appeared in print the year before Bach used it in this work.[1] Before it could be sung, the text was revised – whether by Bach or someone else isn’t clear – in a manner that slightly mitigated lines about daily dying to sin, emphasising instead a longing to be with Christ. Not that dying isn’t still central to this piece: sigh motifs, chromatic lines, the catabasis or falling melodic gesture, all speak to a desire for an ending.
The text Franck had written revised an older Lutheran chorale written by Christoph Knoll in 1599: “Herzlich tut mich verlangen” (I warmly desire a blessed end), whose melody would have been familiar to Bach’s listeners. The original melody of that old hymn tune is more commonly sung as “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (O Sacred Head so Wounded); this choral tune sits in the choral contributions to the first- otherwise solo aria – movement of the cantata, and was the spark for other melodic lines used throughout the cantata. Bach used the first verse of Knoll’s hymn in the 2nd aria of Cantata 161, Mein Verlangen, Mein Verlangen.[2] And he absorbed the 4th verse into the final chorale, that speaks of worms disassembling the body yet one day, looking forward to our rising to new life in Christ. Those who knew that old hymn would have recognised those acts of creative reassembly: breaking, and renewing. The old chorale tune, and Franck’s more recent words, being digested into a new work.
Around 1737, when Bach was working in Leipzig, he returned to this cantata. And again, although less radically, it changed. The recorders used in the original Weimar version were replaced in Leipzig by flutes. While this might have been simply changed fashions, or even just circumstantial – composers compose for the musicians they have on the day – one might ponder whether the flute, by 1737, had come to have a changed spiritual association following Bach’s use of that instrument in the St Matthew Passion (written in 1727) in duet with a solo soprano, as a surrogate for the Holy Ghost. Our listening, our making meaning in what we hear, is changed by the things we hear. Each new experience opens up the possibility of hearing old material with fresh ears.
To live is to revise and remake, and to be revised and remade by experience.
Sometimes, it is sound that breaks and remakes us.
Sometimes, it is silence.
At the start of the new academic year in mid-September, I was listening to a visiting speaker at ITIA, the institute for theology, imagination and the arts, talking about her journey as a theological artist. Alyssa Coffin uses performance, film, and site-based installations using natural materials, to explore her relationship with nature and in her talk, meditated upon how sensory experience might open spaces for spiritual encounter. Her website explains, “silence is the ground for my practice”.[3] Out of silence – listening to what experience gives her – comes growth. Her art is based on the potential for regeneration we find in negative spaces. For Coffin – what a wonderful name that is, given today’s topic – to be alive is to know and embrace the capacity to organise one’s environment, to create, to compose. In contrast, to die is the process whereby we are reorganised by our environment. Both are necessary, complementary experiences. The constant cycle between these two modalities connects us with natural cycles of creative resurrection; to be alive is to give oneself to a constant process of renewal out of, and because of, decay and loss.
By the time I was listening to Coffin’s meditation on life and death, I’d spent quite a bit of time drafting and redrafting this sermon. Some versions were heavy on biblical exegesis. At least one version, in my head rather than on paper, involved taking a pumpkin and carving it, live, in the pulpit. What could possibly go wrong…
Well, quite a lot really.
At the heart of my anxiety was the prickly question of death. Cantata 161 longs for death. For the present life to fade away.
I don’t, actually, long for death. Even though I am rather closer to it than some of you here; and in fact, with each minute that passes, or each pumpkin carved, we are all one step nearer to our own last moments. But I have little desire, today, to encourage you to feel that the things that mark living are mere specs of dust that need to be cast away peremptorily. So how can we live in a way that reconciles this longing for an ending with the reality that life is given to us creatures as a space in which we live and in turn, according to our capacities, create?
The Old Testament reading we heard today (Isaiah 51:1-11) opens up vast expanses of geological time, where restored gardens emerge and fall back against a backdrop of continual flux, and in which our little lives are the briefest of candles that briefly flare and vanish. What can we do in the face of such immensity? [briefly, silence].
The second reading from Luke 6: 20-36 brings us, thankfully, into a more human timescale. This contains a passage called the Beatitudes, a litany of blessings found in both Matthew and Luke from the Sermon on the Mount. Some readings of these suggest that they constitute something akin to a pathway towards holiness, or sainthood. I am not sure, myself, that this is quite how they work; simply being poor, hungry, sad, hated, and so on doth not necessarily make you holy. But together, they do reconcile us to the necessity of change, of giving ground, making way for others, which constitute our making space for renewal. For the blessed listed here, change is a welcome gift. Jesus continues with some very sensible, if radical advice: love other people, even people who don’t love you. Forgive – don’t seek revenge. Be generous. Treat others as you would have them treat you. Be merciful. Give way, break the old patterns, make space. By giving ourselves to change, to let life flow in.
This is transformative, one of the greatest passages of moral insight that Jesus gave the world. While much Christian interpretation of scripture assumes – as indeed cantata 161 explicitly says – that the sweetness of the world is a kind of poison, the advice given by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is enormously helpful in suggesting,nevertheless, a moral path to making the world we live in a sweeter place. There is much we CAN do – small steps towards saintliness if you like – before the final great transformation.
Saints weren’t always saints. They became saints. They made decisions – sometimes suddenly, sometimes cumulatively – that meant revising what they were, to be recomposed into a new, finer versions of themselves. On a cosmic scale, Christ also allowed himself to be recomposed; through His sacrifice, His head so wounded, his emptying out of himself, He showed God’s love for us and for all creation. The resurrection shows us God’s endless power to recreate, to bring light from darkness.
From silence to sound. Singing, too, is a form of pumpkin-life: a constant giving out, of sound, of breath. Singing, and listening to, music, means giving ourselves to a process that surrenders our mind and bodies – and possibly souls – to the transformative processes of God’s creation unfolding through time. The beauty of music is released, like a fragrance from a crushed petal, in and because of its passing. Singing, then, is not only sweet in and of itself, but is a gift from God, a model of hopeful process, and making and listening to it can be, if we let it, a force for creative renewal, giving of ourselves and asking for a renewed life in and through Christ.
As the Cantata 161 argues, midway in its flow rather than at the end: “Although to mortal ash and earth I shall be ground through death, the pure radiance of my soul will then blaze like the angels”.
[1] Franck, S, Evangelisches Andachts Opffer (‘Evangelical devotional offering’), cited in Scott Milner, ‘“Süsse Todesstunde” or “Mit Fried und Freud”: Reformation Theology and the Art of Dying in Two Bach Cantatas’, Riemenschneider Bach Institute, 31(1), (2000): 34-47, p.47
[2] Ibid, P.52, and Alfred Dürr, Die Kantaten von Johann Sebastian Bach (Barenreiter, 1999), pp. 605-606.
[3] Alyssa Coffin, website: https://www.alyssacoffinart.com/about