For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture - Julian Reid / Musical Spiritual Hotel: Rest, Hospitality, and Sacred Music

Julian Reid / Musical Spiritual Hotel: Rest, Hospitality, and Sacred Music

10/23/21 • 46 min

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For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Julian Reid explores the way music and scripture can come together to create a sacred space. Extending metaphors of music as architecture and dwelling and spiritual experience as a river, the jazz pianist, producer, writer, and performer explains a recent project of his, "Notes of Rest," combining African-American spirituals with classical hymns for an experience of spiritual hospitality, gratitude, and proclamation of the Gospel into the full spectrum of human experience, in all its pain, frustration, frenzy, stillness, and joy. Throughout the conversation you'll hear Julian play along to accompany his points; he also graciously provided beautiful meditative interludes, much like the kind you'd experience in one of his "Notes of Rest" sessions. Interview by Matt Croasmun.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

Click here to learn more about Julian Reid's "Notes of Rest"
Introduction: Evan Rosa
"God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble... The musical art often speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart... Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful." (Friedrich Nietzsche at 14 years old; see Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Julian Young; h/t Brain Pickings)
Bringing together music and scripture
Engendering wonder and trust as a seedbed for a life of faith
Creating space, the architecture that music creates
Weekly liturgical practices
The ends and uses of music in sacred spaces
Living in a tent, motel—a musical spiritual hotel
Scripture is like a cathedral or museum.
Performance: "Thank You, Lord"
Gratitude—the way we enter into hospitality, "what it means to be hosted by God"
Hotel art—the artwork invites and calms rather than jarring and provoking
Curiosity vs calmness
Invoking a different kind of response
Sanitizing the Psalms
Performance: "Give Me Jesus"
Speaking to different registers
Aimed at an encounter with the living God
Grace
Proclamation: music and preaching
Taking risks over the pulpit
Karl Barth: "God tempts the church through God's absence."
Kerygma: "proclamation"
Performance: "Lord, Hear My Prayer" (Taize)
Word and Water
The metaphor of water utilized in "Notes of Rest"
Black musical idioms
Finding the use of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM)
Balm in Gilead
The Hymns of Isaac Watts, colonizing, historical context
Combining musical genealogies
Braxton Shelly's Healing for the Soul
Imaginative fuel from the mystics
Cistercian monastics: worshipping in silence and solitude; "a long-standing faith"
Performance: "Lord, Hear My Prayer / Give Me Jesus" (Medley)

Introduction (Evan Rosa)

One of the most gripping and influential philosophers of the last 200 years once wrote:

"God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble... The musical art often speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart... Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful."

That Friedrich Nietzsche, written when he was 14 years old.

There is plenty of "vain ostentation" in popular music today, and certainly not excluding the music played in church.

But the unitive depth and invitation into transcendence that music offers us of course pairs beautifully with scripture. And whatever else might have changed in Nietzsche's thinking, even at the end of his life in Twilight of the Idols, he suggested that "Without music life would be a mistake. The German imagines even God as a songster." And I say: Well, not just the German, but the human.

In today's episode, ...

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

Click here to learn more about Julian Reid's "Notes of Rest"
Introduction: Evan Rosa
"God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble... The musical art often speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart... Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful." (Friedrich Nietzsche at 14 years old; see Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Julian Young; h/t Brain Pickings)
Bringing together music and scripture
Engendering wonder and trust as a seedbed for a life of faith
Creating space, the architecture that music creates
Weekly liturgical practices
The ends and uses of music in sacred spaces
Living in a tent, motel—a musical spiritual hotel
Scripture is like a cathedral or museum.
Performance: "Thank You, Lord"
Gratitude—the way we enter into hospitality, "what it means to be hosted by God"
Hotel art—the artwork invites and calms rather than jarring and provoking
Curiosity vs calmness
Invoking a different kind of response
Sanitizing the Psalms
Performance: "Give Me Jesus"
Speaking to different registers
Aimed at an encounter with the living God
Grace
Proclamation: music and preaching
Taking risks over the pulpit
Karl Barth: "God tempts the church through God's absence."
Kerygma: "proclamation"
Performance: "Lord, Hear My Prayer" (Taize)
Word and Water
The metaphor of water utilized in "Notes of Rest"
Black musical idioms
Finding the use of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM)
Balm in Gilead
The Hymns of Isaac Watts, colonizing, historical context
Combining musical genealogies
Braxton Shelly's Healing for the Soul
Imaginative fuel from the mystics
Cistercian monastics: worshipping in silence and solitude; "a long-standing faith"
Performance: "Lord, Hear My Prayer / Give Me Jesus" (Medley)

Introduction (Evan Rosa)

One of the most gripping and influential philosophers of the last 200 years once wrote:

That Friedrich Nietzsche, written when he was 14 years old.

There is plenty of "vain ostentation" in popular music today, and certainly not excluding the music played in church.

In today's episode, ...

Previous Episode

Alysia Harris / Attention, Wonder, Permeability, & the Space Between Activity & Passivity

Over-worked or over-entertained? Our humanity gives us the joint gifts of both activity and passivity. We act and we are acted upon. But how do we balance and mediate these states? How do we cultivate long practices and habits that help us to inhabit the space between activity and passivity, bringing them together in a beautiful agency?

Poet and linguist Alysia Harris joins Matt Croasmun for a discussion of that space between active and passive in human life—bringing the concepts of wonder, awareness/attention, patient receptivity to the natural world and to God, bearing witness to the autonomy and action of the other, and how she cultivates and meditates on these things in her own life.

Show Notes

Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life: Humanity's Place in a Wounded World
Active life vs passive life
Intermediate category between activity and passivity: attentive awareness
Active receptivity and bearing witness
Human beings enacting and reacting
Witness as perception and response
Carl Sagan, Robin Kimmerer, Timothy Wilburn
Wonder as a mediating emotion between active and passive
"I'm not the entire system."
Granting autonomy to a natural system
Making the right impact through granting the sovereignty of the other
Adam and Eve as gardeners—beauty vs productivity
Genesis: "Avad and Shamar"—Till and Keep, Serve and Protect
Restrain, observe, attend, and magnify
"Me and God"
Capitalism, scarcity mentality, and "enough"
Ping-ponging between over-worked and over-entertainment—deficient visions of activity and deficient visions of passivity
Mark 4: Parable of the Sower. Scattering Seeds
Dynamic reciprocity and intentional permeability
The patience an orchid demands
"Ideas have no use unless they have something to do with our lives."
Practices and rituals to inhabit the space between active and passive
Writing habits—"faithful stewardship with less brings faithful stewardship with more"
Dance as an embodied balance with intellectual work
Intercessory prayer and producing opportunities
Working out of hope instead of striving
Running, walking, granting the natural world autonomy

About Alysia Harris

Follow Alysia Harris @Poppyinthewheat

Alysia Nicole Harris was born in Fremont, California but grew up in Alexandria, VA and considers herself on all accounts a member of the ranks of great Southern women. At age 10 she wrote her first poem, after hearing about sonnets in English class. That class began her life-long love of poetry and the literary arts.

Alysia went to The University of Pennsylvania where she experienced her first success as a writer and a performer. In 2008 she featured on the HBO documentary: Brave New Voices where she wowed audiences with her piece "That Girl". In 2010 Alysia graduated UPENN Summa Cum Laude with honors and was also inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.

Alysia received her MFA in poetry from NYU in 2014 and her PhD in linguistics from Yale University in 2019. Her dissertation “The Non-Aspectual Meaning of African-American English ‘Aspect’ Markers” breaks with traditional analyses and explores the discourse-oriented uses of the preverbal particles ‘be’ and ‘done’ in varieties of African-American English.

Although she has experienced scholastic success, poetry has always come first in her heart. Cave Canem fellow, winner of the 2014 and 2015 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prizes, Pushcart Nominee, her poetry has appeared in Best American Poets, Indiana Review, The Offing, Callaloo, Solstice Literary Magazine, Squaw Valley Review, Letters Journal, and Vinyl Magazine among others. Her first chapbook How Much We Must Have Looked Like Stars to Stars won the 2015 New Women's Voices Chapbook Contest and is available for purchase on site.

Alysia was also a founding member of the internationally known performance poetry collective, The Strivers Row and has garnered over 5 million views on YouTUBE. She has toured nationally for the last 10 years and also performed at the United Nations and the US Embassies in Jordan and Ukraine, as well as in Australia, Canada, Germany, Slovakia, South Africa, the UAE, and the UK.

Alysia now lives in Atlanta, GA where she works as a consultant for the Morehouse Center for Excellence in Education and as arts and soul editor at Scalawag Magazine, a nonprofit POC-led, women run media organization focused on Southern movement, community, and dissent. She is working on a book of poems and a collection of essays about the intersections of faith, violence, and the natural world.

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Next Episode

Will Willimon / Gospel Oddity: The Purpose of Pastors and the Problem with Self-Care

As the political world casts a leery eye on Christians—especially as the meaning of "Evangelical" changes—the focus on the meaning and purpose of the pastor is especially relevant. Amidst our consumeristic, narcissistic culture, what does it mean to pursue self-care? How does caring for oneself square with caring about what Jesus cares about? (Even and especially when Jesus cares about you?) Upholding the call of the pastor to take on the cares of Christ, Will Willimon (Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School) suggests we've developed a disordered approach to self-care, proving the triumph of the therapeutic and mimicking our consumeristic world rather than embodying the oddity of the Christian Gospel. Interview by Evan Rosa.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Introduction (Evan Rosa)

What is the purpose of a pastor? To teach you how to think (or vote)? To reassure you that you're safe? To heal your wounds? The goal of pastoral ministry is surely in question right now. Everything from the toxic masculinity of the bully pulpit, to the pastor as political pollster, to the staggering need to be cool of hipster celebrity pastor—there's lots of ways to go wrong in pastoral ministry, and a razors edge of getting it right. It's a demanding job. Perhaps its so demanding because the primary call of the pastor is to take up the cares of Christ, speaking the truth when the truth hurts, listening from both sides of the conversation between God and the Church, comforting the grieving when there's plenty in your own life to grieve, standing with the marginalized and oppressed when its the unpopular, difficult thing.

That is to say: it's a dangerous world, the world of pastoral ministry. But as my guest on the show today suggests, this danger ought to be faced with courage and eyes wide to the cares of Christ.

Will Willimon is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School and author of over 100 books, including Worship as Pastoral Care, Accidental Preacher, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (with Stanley Hauerwas), and his most recent, God Turned Toward Us: The ABCs of the Christian Faith. He's been a pastor in the United Methodist Church for a long time, including an 8 year stint as a Bishop.

Will Willimon is concerned about the direction the church is headed and is asking uncomfortable but necessary questions. Amidst our culture of consumerism, narcissism, where the vision of flourishing reaches no higher than getting whatever it is you want most, how does caring for oneself square with caring about what Jesus cares about? (Even and especially when Jesus cares about you?) Upholding the call of the pastor to take on the cares of Christ, Will Willimon suggests we've developed a disordered approach to self-care, proving the triumph of the therapeutic and mimicking our consumeristic world rather than embodying the oddity of the Christian Gospel.

About Will Willimon

The Reverend Dr. William H. Willimon is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at the Divinity School, Duke University. He served eight years as Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of The United Methodist Church, where he led the 157,000 Methodists and 792 pastors in North Alabama. For twenty years prior to the episcopacy, he was Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Christian Ministry at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. He is author of over 100 books, including Worship as Pastoral Care, Accidental Preacher, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, and his most recent, God Turned Toward Us: The ABCs of the Christian Faith. His articles have appeared in many publications including The Christian Ministry, Quarterly Review, Plough, Liturgy, Worship and Christianity Today. For many years he was Editor-at-Large for The Christian Century. For more information and resources, visit his website.

Show Notes

How Will Willimon became a pastor and educator in pastoral ministry
What is the purpose of pastoral ministry?
Equipping
Mutuality of care in Christian community
The sermon as conversation between the preacher, the congregation, and God
Preaching as "double listening"
Helping and caring, overemphasizing the role of help and care in pastoral ministry
Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas recent article: "The dangers of providing pastoral care"
The triumph of the therapeutic in pastoral min...