Psalm
27:1-4
Revelation
21:9-14, 18-21
William G. Carter
September 3, 2017
Jazz Communion
“The Lord is
my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my
life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh—
my adversaries and foes— they shall stumble and fall. Though an army encamp
against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will
be confident. One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to
live in the house of the Lord all
the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his
temple.” (Psalm 27:1-4)
Thanks to Keith Jarrett, I had a true-blue
spiritual experience when I was seventeen. It was a moment so extraordinary
than I don’t talk about it much, lest I cheapen it by overexposure. No, the
experience was a gift, a gift that I now understand as a moment from God’s
Spirit.
It was around the Thanksgiving holiday as I
recall. I was in one of my recurring adolescent moods, and had retreated to my
bedroom and shut the door. I don’t know if I had too much of my family or if I
was simply in a foul funk. For some reason, I turned on the stereo, put on a
set of headphones, stretched out on my bed, and listened to a brand new
recording.
The album was called “Arbour Zena,” and I
found it in the jazz section of a store at the local mall. It didn’t sound like
jazz, not at first. A German chamber orchestra plays a suite of three Jarrett
compositions. Keith, bassist Charlie Haden, and Norwegian saxophonist Jan
Garbarek improvise through the pieces. The notes swirl upward. Pretty soon, I
was swirling upward too.
I had never had an experience like that. It
was like I was lifted off the bed, floating three feet into the air. The music
absorbed me. Time slipped away. For the moment there was perfect peace.
Conscious thought ceased. It was as if I was held in greater hands and I didn’t
want it to end. When the music concluded, I was back on the bed, perfectly
still, with no need to do anything.
Pretty soon, I was seventeen again. But I
have never forgotten the experience or its profound effect on me. One of the
few times before now that I ever talked about it, I was at a complete loss for
words to describe it. But the one word that lingered, the word I would use to
describe it, is “beauty.” Complete, sublime beauty.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had a moment like
that. I suspect you have. If so, I suspect you have done what I have done:
shake it off, dismiss it, and attempt to explain it away. Like Ebenezer Scrooge
trying to explain away the appearance of Marley’s ghost: “You may be an
undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of
underdone potato.”
That moment for me, after all, came after
Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe I had eaten too much pie. Or the turkey was pushing
me toward the zone between wakefulness or sleep.
But as I’ve talked with musicians,
photographers, poets, writers, painters, architects, hikers and bikers, I’ve
decided not to dismiss the experience or reduce it somehow. For one thing, it
was real. It was very real. For another thing, I’ve had more moments like that throughout
my adult life. And each one has lifted me of the spiritual presence of beauty.
We don’t talk about beauty very much, either in
church or out of church. Why do you suppose that is? Maybe it’s the same reason
that Presbyterians don’t talk much about spiritual experiences. They lie
outside our comfort zone. For the benefit of our visitors, Presbyterians are hard-working,
rational types. Nuts and bolts are our currency. That’s why our sanctuaries are
rather plain and our worship is pretty tame. Yet the moments of beauty still
come, don’t they? Maybe it’s the song that makes our saxophonist cry.
“Beauty” is a word that doesn’t appear in the
Bible very much. That’s telling, in all kinds of ways. Sometimes the word is
translated as “pleasantness.” Beauty is what creates an experience of pleasure.
You see something, hear something, smell something, and go “Ahh.”
The most famous of those occurrences is a
verse from the Psalm that we heard. The poet wishes to be in the constant
presence of God, or as he puts it, “to live in the house of the Lord all the
days of my life.” That’s more than spending all your time in a church, which
might not be all that beautiful if you think about it. No, it’s bigger. It’s
living in the presence of the Creator, of dwelling with the One who is the
Source and Destination of all life. The Psalmist calls this “to behold the
beauty of the Lord.”
Now this is not mere escapism, what Marx
called “the opium of the masses.” And it’s more than mere optimism, although a
positive attitude does tend to improve our lives and make us more pleasant to
be around. The Psalm is pointing beyond escapism and optimism to the ultimate
reality at the heart of all things. Fact of the matter is, Psalm 27 mentions
evildoers, opposing armies, and devoured flesh – but points through them to the
beauty at the heart of God’s creativity.
And that’s the truth of the text from the
book of Revelation. In the concluding pages of the Bible, the prophet John sees
a New Jerusalem coming down here. We don’t fly up to heaven, it seems, heaven
comes down here and it stays. John strains to speak language that touches the vision,
much less describe it. The new city is enormous. The streets are paved with
gold. The pearly gates are always open (if you think about it, that’s good news!).
Then we hear the city’s foundations are
twelve huge precious stones. Here’s a curious thing about those jewels: some of
them are known to us (emerald, topaz, amethyst) and some not so much
(chrysolite, jacinth, chrysoprase). The prophet doesn’t even have the words to
describe how beautiful they are. They are beyond him, in every way. But they
are real.
And the even more curious thing, if you know
the book of Revelation, is that you have to wade through twenty chapters of
pain, war, destruction, and desolation before anybody can see the totality of
the beauty. Along the way, you might catch a glimpse of the beauty. Maybe you
might hear a song or see a vision and it’s enough to keep you going. When these
moments come, they are gifts, because most of the time, life has its
challenges.
Try telling the people of Houston that the
world is a beautiful place. This week, they might beg to differ. The scenes
after that storm and all the rain are heartbreaking. But in the middle of all
that destruction, there are glimpses of beauty, particularly of people helping
one another, or brief rainbows pointing beyond themselves.
I recall after 9-11 hit. As the shock
subsided, all kinds of help was offered and given. One of my favorite stories
was about the musicians who appeared at St. Paul’s chapel in lower Manhattan,
which functioned as a rescue center. They pulled out their instruments and
started playing chamber music, because they wanted to declare to the world there
is more to life than all the pain. It was a holy moment, a beautiful moment.
So we thank God for the artists,
photographers, musicians, and all others who point to something so beautiful
that they can’t even describe it. And we pray for God to set us free from all
that restrains us from what the Psalmist calls “the beauty of holiness.”
When Keith
Jarrett presented the National Endowment of the Arts award as a jazz master, here’s
something he said:
"Music is not something you can use
words to describe. Music is either in the air and you find it, or it is in the
air and you don't find it, but you just don't try hard enough. You can be
educated to play the piano, you can be educated about chords, you can be
educated about scales, you can be educated about everything there is you do
with music, and you are still zero until you let go of what holds you back. And
all of us could possibly not be held back, but most of us don't let it happen.
My job, in my opinion, is to let it out.[1]
I heard
him let it out one time. He was playing a concert at the theater across the street
from my graduate school. So I paid a lot of money to take a date and hear the
concert. I should have warned her. At that time, the pianist would come out on
stage and improvise at the piano for an hour and a half. Jarrett got to be
quite famous for this, traveling around the world to improvise the concerts.
The
problem is sometimes he had a good night . . . and sometimes the music was way
over anybody’s head, including his own. The guy can play. He’s an extraordinary
musician. That night, he left us in the dust. My date kept looking at her
watch. She went to the rest room during the intermission and I wasn’t sure she
would come back. When she returned, she said, “Is the second half going to be
as long?” We had just survived an hour of thunder. The second half forty-five
minutes of the same.
To our
amazement, the room exploded in applause when he finished. Maybe everybody was
grateful. But then the crowd stood up, and I wondered if perhaps we were the
only people who didn’t have a clue what we had just heard. It felt like our
ears had been assaulted.
Keith
Jarrett came out, acknowledged the applause, and then moved toward the piano.
My girlfriend groaned. He sat down, cleared his head for a moment. Then he
played, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” It was incredible. Simple, heartfelt,
accessible, available beauty. The encore was only a few minutes long. And when
he was done, there was complete silence in the hall. Nobody dared to disrupt
the moment.
It was
then that I first prayed the prayer that I have prayed every time since, whenever
I have found myself in the presence of profound, indescribable beauty: “Lord,
let it happen again.”
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