Eshtine

glimpses of heaven in music

Tonight, thanks to some very generous folks, I had a chance to lead the discussion at the "house church" gathering that takes place here every Tuesday night. Here's something-kinda-like a transcript of the talk I gave.
(We prayed the Our Father as a group.)
I wanted to start with the Our Father tonight because in it we pray "Thy kingdom come," and tonight I wanted to talk about the kingdom of God, heaven, our home in eternity, that life that is both already and not yet. But more than talk about it, I would like to introduce you to some experiences of it in music.
Now what do I mean by that? I should back up and talk about the difference between words and music. Of course there are many differences between words and music, but one big difference is that words are how we talk about an experience, but music is the experience. With words we can talk about abstract ideas like joy or sadness or freedom or whatever, but with music we can get inside, we can feel joy, we can feel sad, we can feel free, or whatever. Now, there are and have been gifted preachers--Martin Luther King Junior comes to mind--who can get their listeners inside what they're preaching about, but you'll notice this happens when their speaking gets most like poetry or music. The point is that music transcends language, and that's useful when we're talking about heaven, 'cause heaven transcends language too.
I said that I wanted to "introduce" you to these experiences, these glimpses of heaven. I say that because, well, at heart I'm a DJ. Being a DJ means you always want to grab your friends and go, "You gotta listen to this!" every time a song grabs you. What you're trying to do is to get your friends to hear what you hear. But if you don't give any background, it's hard for your friends to get a handle on what you're all excited about. It'd be like if I said to Eric, "Eric, I'd like you to meet John Smith. John Smith, Eric." That's not as helpful as me saying, "Eric, this is John Smith, he was my physics professor in college, he got the whole class to really wrap their heads around Einstein's theory of relativity. And one time in the cafeteria, he saw me choking and gave me the Heimlich maneuver, saving my life. Oh, and he's a jazz pianist." My job is to make the introductions, and you can decide if you want to get better acquainted.
So there are three concepts we'll be focusing on tonight, and three different songs to take you inside these concepts. The first is a glimpse of heaven inside of time, the second is a glimpse outside of time, the third is a look at the gulf between heaven and earth.

So first--heaven inside time. I think--I hope--we've all experienced this, even if that's not the name we gave it: how there's a moment when time stops, and it might not last long chronologically speaking, but it's not the length this moment has, it's the depth (or even better, the height) that makes you believe it when someone says God lives in the present, God is Now.
The song for this is one you may know. It was written by Carole King, it's been performed by James Taylor, most famously by the Drifters; the version I want to play for you is by The Nylons. It's something of a signature song for the singer here, Marc Connors, because it has a wonderful falsetto part--and Marc had a marvelous falsetto. The part that for me is heaven inside time is just after the line "right smack dab in the middle of town." Right there, Marc's voice spirals upwards, and then he hits a note that rings like a clear glass bell. It hangs suspended for a moment. And that moment...opens up.
I don't know if Marc meant to impart a theological concept by this, but notice where it happens: in between the lines "right smack dab in the middle of town" and "I found a paradise that's troubleproof." Right smack dab in the middle of the song, then, we're given a glimpse of paradise.
(Here's where we played the song, which is the version on 1991's Four on the Floor.)
One other thing--this version of "Up on the Roof" was recorded about three or four months before Marc died of an AIDS-related illness. The anniversary of his death is this Saturday, March 25; it was fifteen years ago. He knew he was dying at the time they recorded this album. That may be why he put so much of his soul in this performance.
Now for the second concept--heaven outside of time. Most of us don't get to see what time looks like from a perspective outside of it. The nearest I think we get is what people say happens to them just before some big accident--that their whole life flashes before their eyes. Now if you've been on this planet a number of years--I've been here for thirty--it's tough to imagine how everything that's made up 10,950 days, 262,800 hours, 15,768,000 minutes or 946,080,000 seconds can fit in that split second between when you see the tractor trailer and when it hits you. And so maybe it doesn't, maybe that's a situation where you're looking at time from a place where you can see it as a whole.
There's only one song I know that has given me that sense of an outside-time perspective: "Jerusalem" as performed by Anuna. Tradition says this song was written by a priest on the day of his martyrdom. Anuna perform it in a style called heterophony, which means the same musical phrase is sung at different times--not like in a round, where there's a strict rhythm; this is just this side of chaos. On first listen you might be shocked, it sounds so strange, but luckily it's a rather long song so it can grow on you. There is an otherworldly beauty to it. And the reason I think of heaven-outside-time when I hear it is that it reminds me of those motion photographs that show the arc of a golf swing or the bounce of a tennis ball. It's like the sonic equivalent of that--you get to hear the sweep of the song.
(Here's where we played it--and if you want to follow along at home, it's on Anuna's first, self-titled album.)
Now the third concept, the gulf between heaven and our day-to-day reality. The tricky thing in listening for glimpses of heaven is that they can be so powerful you wanna stick with them--like Peter at the Transfiguration, how he wants to set up some tents and stay up there on that mountain with Jesus and Moses and Elijah. If you find other people who also want to grab hold of these experiences, you might end up forming a utopian community where you all sit around saying, "Everything's perfect, la la la la." So it's good to get smacked in the face with a reminder of how far we are, on this planet, to our true home, to the way things ought to be, to the kingdom we pray will come.
And there's no one better to deliver that smack than our modern-day Jeremiah, Bob Dylan. Dylan really does not have a good voice, but that's okay, because we're talking about how far we are from heaven here. There's no greater way to demonstrate the gap between our aspirations and our limitations than by having Bob sing "Blind Willie McTell." It's a good contrast to our opening song, too--Dylan's voice compared to Marc Connors, who I believe possessed the best voice of his generation; remember for that one I talked about the sound of a clear glass bell and here we have a bell, too, but it's an undertaker's bell. And in our first song we were finding a troubleproof paradise, but here we are nowhere near. From the very first line we know we're in a desolate place: "See the arrow on the doorpost/Saying 'This land is condemned/All the way from New Orleans/To Jerusalem.'" That's a lot of condemnation. Dylan gets specific in talking about one of America's major sins, but he makes it clear he's not just concerned about America's sin, there's evil here that is not confined to any one country. The bleakness of the words is reinforced by the soundscape. The production is spare and the arrangement is barebones--I think there's just guitar, piano, a tapping foot, and Dylan's vocals, which sound like they are coming out of an empty room far removed from everything else.
Where are we, anyway? I wonder if there's a hidden clue, I wonder if Dylan's employing some Cockney rhyming slang here. Notice how many words he has rhyming with "Blind Willie McTell"--"fell," "well," "bell," even "hotel--but there's kind of an obvious rhyme missing, isn't there? He left out "Hell." Is that where we are? Maybe not, maybe that rhyme was left out because he's not willing to go that far. And the reason I suspect that is that just after the instrumental break there's one tiny little word that keeps the whole line from falling into complete despair. Take a listen.
(So then we played it. This song is on one of the Bootleg Series albums, I forget which.)
Hear it? "Well, God is in heaven/And we all want what's His/But power and greed and corruptible sin/Seem to be all that there is." That one little word--"seem"--is the hope of heaven in a fallen world.