Because of what has happened ten years ago, we now realize that anything can happen.

We will gather to remember- to offer each other a continuing sense of solace and reassurance, and yet, we now know, maybe more than ever before, that all the accustomed ,comfortable, taken for granted ways rest uneasy. We are uncertain in our own skins, and each of us can feel that our life and the lives of all those whom we love have become both more precious and more precarious.

We have come to realize that we are no longer comfortably insulated by wealth or safely isolated by oceans; we are no longer inviolate, protected by armies and supported by commerce- that our lifestyle, and the attitudes that have supported it, has now become the object of scorn and hate. As a result, it made more of us ask vital questions about how we live and what our values truly are.

Maybe, for the first time in our lives, we can understand the anxiety and dread that the average Palestinian or Jew has lived with daily, and how they have lived for decades.

As empathy is a great teacher, out of our suffering, an honest empathy can be born- one that asks us to commit to a higher way of humanity, a way of peace stronger and more resilient than any missiles and tanks could ever provide.

2

Many of us can easily recall a national tragedy, for it is easy to mourn the loss of 3000 lives, and to remember heroism, courage, bravery, and resolve. While all these noble ideals are noteworthy and important, under the lens of time,  I feel we have to ask of ourselves about the extent of our personal awareness and to assess our national priorities in the light of compassionate ethics. These are heartfelt inquiries that ask us to look at the last ten years and ask ourselves how we have changed as a culture, and as individuals, because of the 9/11 experience.

However, I will not try to present a political diatribe, nor argue for some kind of necessary repentance on our national behalf. Neither will I will not try to justify our military actions in Afghanistan, or Iraq, nor will I call to task our sense of domestic entitlement and our socioeconomic greed. These concerns are all too well documented, and are all too tragically well known.

Assessing or assigning blame serves no good ends, and even though we, as a nation, and as individuals have to accept a certain level of responsibility for our economic intrigues and political collisions, what I will reach for tonight is to try to answer what I see as the aching need within our humanity- our soul sickness- that ours is a need is to seek clarity and compassion, to achieve an empathy with worldwide suffering, and to admit to the many kinds of inner terrorism we all can face during our lives.

3

What this tragedy brings into focus for me is the fact of universal human terror we all have to live with or we all need to learn how best to release. This terror that I speak of tonight is not enacted by a few extreme Islamic militants. The true terror comes into our lives from how we have accepted toxic and terrorizing behavioral standards and how we have expected a lack of genuine ethics as being somehow normal!  Daily, or so it seems, we passive absorb news headlines telling us of inhuman treatment, profound selfishness, prejudice,  and other indignities and injustices… and then find ourselves saying that its to be expected!

We have to accept and we have to admit that for all the worldly sophistication, and advanced levels of education that our society has to offer, our human and heart centered needs have come up short: What the great spiritual traditions of humanity call us to do is to return to those universal values that support kindness and compassion. We, in our so called modern society, need to learn how to live with more faith, more hope, more love.

As a culture, we have been taught to seize control, to be self important, and to define our happiness and joy as being centered on materialistic goals. So we learn strategies, we learn to put on false faces, and then arrogantly go out to master the world … as if life, as if our very souls, are defined by such counterfeit success.

4

We try to give each other quick solace or some easy steps of reassurance with sound bytes of advice; we tell each other to just “get over it,” and other such glib ways that do not address the depth of ordinary pain and daily suffering that has been neatly concealed, packaged, and bottled up within us.

As Martin Luther King once put it, “[our chief concern is for social acceptance- that we readily choose convenience over conscience, as if ethics are defined by what most people will accept, and that morality is defined by the Gallop Polls.]”

Robert Kennedy then adds this insight on the nature of courage and change:

“[Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their [peers] the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence.

Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, (s)he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, … And those ripples can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.]”

As I see it, there is far too much cruelty, egotism, addiction, and corruption in our world to believe that we are immune to various kinds of  interpersonal terrorism. And yet because, we do not want to judge others, or even hesitate to hold ourselves accountable, we permit these terrors to reign over us…

5

Terrors that are frankly worse than bombs or planes that can snuff out life, because we permit these terrors to insult our humanity and our dignity on a daily basis. There seems to be a resistance to accepting a more heartfelt responsibility for how we cooperate or conspire to shape and to determine our values and how those values will operate effectively in our world.

We appear to be afraid, because we do not realize the power and the grace we hold within us, and among us, if we were willing to respond bravely from our hearts, so that our actions can deeply affirm, understand and console all our sisters and brothers, be they in the Middle East or in this room… For you see, I believe that each of us has known some form of terror- each of us knows what it is like when we cannot sleep at night- fearing what might await us or possibly awaiting our children during the next day.

In our culture, and played out through our common humanity, we live alongside a daily litany of terrors; whether it is a life threatening illness, the fracturing effects of divorce, the loss of income, the feelings of uselessness, and various degrees of loneliness, rejection, insult, disappointments we have to endure, cope with, reconcile, and eventually seek to overcome…

Yet, we also can know and affirm that when we listen to our hearts, when we reach inside for some answers, we can tap and then release the power which forms a new level of consciousness; a shared synergy can make our world more safe and more secure.

6

When asked how humanity will resolve the problems of war, and inhumanity, Albert Einstein remarked, “[There will be a need to raise human consciousness, for no problem in the history of humankind has ever been solved by the same level of consciousness that created it!"] Because of this, I can say that we are all in need of change; we are all in need of more faith, more hope, more love for ourselves and for our world.

The main terrors that afflict us, from which all other fearful terrors can come, can be seen broadly as Skepticism, Cynicism, and Nihilism. Each is a soul robbing attitude, a quality of pessimism, and each of these toxic outlooks is empty of any genuine heartfelt feelings, wisdom, or compassion; More importantly, I believe and affirm that each of these negative outlooks will yield to a higher consciousness based in those abiding virtues that are found in all the great spiritual and ethical traditions- faith, hope, and love.

First, skepticism, and by skepticism, I do not mean our need to keep an open mind, or to accept having doubts, or be willing to challenge the assumptions and conclusions of others. When I refer to skepticism, it is the chronic belief that there is nothing worthy or reliable enough to believe in- that nothing and no one is faithful, trustworthy, sincere enough and that the world is a cruel and selfish place.

We meet the challenge of looking at our world in this way by understanding that faith is both an action and an attitude.

7

Faith is a present tense action verb- one that accompanies all that we do, and that supports our confidence and that underlies any sense of trust.  Faith is not some stagnant acceptance of a creed, or particular religious outlook. Instead, faith requires courage from us;  the courage to be able to live in the questions that surround our current situation, or that currently plague our hearts. Faith, as a verb, encourages us to meet these outlooks with confidence- to be active in learning how to live creatively and not give in to any frozen  insecurities or crippling fears.

The opposite of having faith is believing that you have to be in control. The absence of faith is one of the psychological rationales for why we seek to have power over others. In contrast, a real or genuine faith contains an equality of relationship; it is full sharing of authority and trust, for it is too restless to be lived without the inner authenticity that gives us an abiding sense of confidence… Faith frames our understanding of our own motives and decisions, and how well we sincerely choose to believe in ourselves and trust in the good that can be found in others.

Remember, at its core, pessimism is an personal injustice; it is a sin against ourselves. Nobody or no condition was ever made better by encouraging despair. Faith is necessary for healing such pessimism and restoring a sense of trust to ourselves and to how we act in our world.

8

The next terror of large proportions that we find among us is Cynicism. Cynicism is an attitude or outlook that states that nothing is good, fair or just, our culture is “on the take,” and that everyone has an ulterior motives. Cynicism promotes having a selfish or self serving design on others in their lives. When cynicism dominates in our thought or our relationships, the healing effect of being with connected to one another lessens, we wind up feeling drained, emptied by our caring, so that an unkind individual or narcissistic concern takes its place. Oncologist and family physician, Rachel Naomi Remen puts it this way: “we often shirk from creating a set of values that are truly life affirming. We forget that we need to live a life of integrity, to live closer to the truth of what and who you are… We can lose or gain ourselves by our choices”

The remedy for cynicism is hope; hope that instills genuine feelings of promise and possibility- that we are capable of living clearly- of living up to the ideals and behaviors we wish to see in others, or as Mohatma Gandhi put it, when responding to the challenge of hypocrisy: “We have to become the change we wish to see in others.”

Having a sustaining sense of hope defeats our feelings of powerlessness. When we place hope in our hearts, we loosen the grip of fear and lessen the burdens of belief that say we are to only believe our limited life experiences, and that there is only a limited amount we will ever know, or ever be able to change about ourselves or our world.

9

Hope, as we know it from our Western Scriptures, gives us resilience and deepens our resolve. It builds character from suffering, and its insights do not disappoint us. (Romans 5)

Hope is holding on to a positive perception; it is being open to inspiration and receptive to our highest aspirations. Hope believes; it helps us to muster a willingness to work for a new or renewed vision of ourselves, and gives us  a foundation for new, positive possibilities of personal change and social transformation. When we hold on to hope, we can capture or recover the feelings that can make life whole, healthy and worthwhile.

The last, and maybe the most difficult terror to overcome is Nihilism. Nihilism is that nagging sense of the nothingness of life- that it has or holds no meaning, no purpose. That life is chaotic and cold- and our souls are chilled at the thought of feeling useless, cut off, out of touch;  To be without a sense of being valuable to ourselves or anyone else.

I feel that when we are the most nihilistic, when we are looking straight into the Abyss; when we are facing our ultimate moments of life or death… There… There in the depth of our aloneness and despair we are given a choice of connection or annihilation. When we desperately dare to reach out, and by some holy grace, some divine synchronicity, there will be a hand and a heart,  who will hold you…

10

I feel that our modern spiritual crisis deals less with the nature of God, than it does with our human capacity and our personal willingness to form meaningful relationships. How we access or embrace God, is also how we embrace our deep Self, and it influences how well we will accept and embrace one another. ….

As one former colleague  Arnold Westwood, put it, “[our religion is found in our relationships. We are defined by the quality, the sincerity and the depth of our relationships, and through them we come to know and experience the good, we come to know God"]

So, most poignantly, most completely, to end our feelings of nihilism, we live in the need of more love…. And what could be said of its truth and power? As we have all read, ” Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Love, as I know it, is the only truly transformative power that is; Love cancels fear, and overcomes hate; it is the guiding and sustaining principle behind all blessing, all grace. When love is present, then all the possibilities of growth, change, healing, and reconciliation are open to you…. And are open to our world.

I will close my remarks tonight with the words of James Baldwin, author, activist, who makes this observation- He said: “The inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror- the terror of being touched. And if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And if you cannot be changed, you can’t be alive.”

11

This evening, I ask that when you leave, that you hold your hearts open to this touch, this ability to change, and personally embrace the renewed promise of having more faith, hope, and love in your lives. I ask you to claim these gifts, and then go out and become an embodied blessing in this world of hurt, and to offer comfort, healing, and peace to one another.           AMEN … SO BE IT WITH YOU ALL !

 

Selected Readings:

How Listening Is the First Step Towards Peace

“[Without understanding, compassion is impossible. When you understand the suffering of others, you do not need to force yourself to feel compassion, the door to your heart will naturally open.... We need to look after the victims here within our country and also have compassion for the hijackers and their families because they are victims of ignorance and hatred. We need a wake up call now in order not to allow hatred to overwhelm our hearts.

The deep reason for our current situation is our patterns of consumption. USA citizens consume 60% of the world’s energy resources yet they account for only 6% of the world’s population. Another reason: Children in America have witnessed 100,000 acts of violence on television before they finish elementary school. Another reason for our current situation is our foregin policy and the lack of deep listening - we do not listen deeply to the causes of suffering and the real needs of people in other nations.

... When we have taken the time to listen deeply, we then can begin to develop the energy of brother and sisterhood among all the nations. To develop a drop of compassion in our own hearts is the only effective spiritual response to hatred and violence. That drop of compassion will result in calming our anger, in having the courage to look at the roots of our violence, and how we perpetuate it, and will allow us to understand the sufferings of everyone involved in any act of hatred and violence.]”

From an Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh

 

“[Speak your truth. Listen to others as they speak theirs, too.

When you let go of fear, you will learn to love others, and they will learn to love you. Do not be afraid of dying; and do not be afraid to live and to ask what living means for you. Open your heart to love, for that is why you are here....]”

Author Melody Beattie – Releasing Co-dependency

We are the generation that stands between the fires… Behind us are the fires and smoke that rose from Auschwitz and from Hiroshima… Before us the nightmare of twisted rubble and broken lives of Tuesday’s fire and smoke… It is a flame of hate that threatens to consume us and to place the rest of our lives in jeopardy…

But our task is to make from this fire, not an all consuming flame, but from its warmth, a light in which we will truly see each other fully. All of us are different, all of us bearing sparks of a single holy flame. For this moment onward, we shall light our fires to see each others more clearly, see the rainbow of colors and faces that show us that we are one. Blessed is the One within the many. And Blessed is the Many who, by their light, their faith, their hope, and their love, will make us one.

Arthur Waskow- adapted

 

In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually turning into a wilderness… Which will destroy us…

I can feel the suffering of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I believe that all will come out right, and this cruelty will end., and peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I will uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I will be able to carry them out.

From the Diary of Anne Frank

 

May our eyes remain open in the face of tragedy. May we not become disheartened, but let the experience of loss dissolve our apathy and denial in the cup of our broken hearts. May we offer the power of our sorrow to the service of something greater than ourselves,. May our suffering serve to purify us and not paralyze us.

May we endure and may our sorrow bond us and not separate us; may we realize that our sorrow makes us great in compassion and immune to the flames of hate.

May we not be afraid to see or to speak out truth, and be blessed with the remembrance of who we really are, and what humanity is capable of and can be.

The Terma Collective adapted

 

Pastoral Prayer: For whom The Bell Tolls ( from John Donne’s famous poem…)

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;… Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Perchance he for whom the bell tolls… Knows not that it tolls for him; and perchance I might think myself better than I am, as are they who are about me… And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

Holy and Gracious Spirit, that lives in us all, and is expressed through us all,

We gather this evening to remember: to pay homage, to gain solace, to give voice to grief, and to shelter our anger until our feelings of sorrow can, through the comfort of human empathy, transform themselves into release, relief and forgiveness.

The bells across our nation toll for all those lost, and our attention and our gratitude, goes out to all those heroes and heroines of this past year: our brave civil servants; the courageous police, fire, and medical people who unselfishly gave their lives to respond to the the disaster, saving countless numbers and averting a far more devastating disaster. We also gratefully recall the soldiers, sailors and pilots who responded to their call to duty and did not return to their families. They gave, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “the last full measure of devotion.”

Our prayers this evening to go out to all the widows and widowers, to the fatherless and motherless children, and especially to the orphans whose lives will never be the same. We take all who are suffering into our hearts, and we extend to them our compassion, our caring, our peace…. It is if the arms of a whole nation embrace their loss as our own; and we struggle to make sense of hatred and violence, and we seek comfort for our own doubts, fears, and anxieties.

We pray in sacred intention, to find answers…. For the causes of this tragedy and we pray for the courage to face our own present terrors…. We are comforted by our connections to one another; by our caring for those who share our lives, knowing that over this small fragile world, humanity of every color, race, and belief exists as one universal family, entire of itself, so that  every act of hatred breaks our hearts.

As we have gathered to share our grief, and in that sharing lessen its burdens, let us remember that victor and victim are always linked, and regardless of government policies and contrasting beliefs systems, there really is never a victory as long as any child suffers… None of us is an island, we are connected through both our joys and our sorrows. Let us pray for peace…..

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

 

THE SECOND COMING        William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

A Prayer for Our Children

I now will offer a prayer for our children, for those parents who will not be coming home, for all the children of our world who will inherit this world from us….

Whose blood now runs into the rivers of the world? Whose breath now can only sing in the sorrows of our universe? In the eye of the enemy, can you not see reflected, your own soul? When a baby cries among the poor and outcast, do you long to hold her? Can you comfort, will you rock her?…. All children are our children… May we embrace all human bodies, may we not collapse into our suffering…. All children are our children ….

 

A Litany for Our Children….

Which has as its response, Spirit of Life, we pray to you…

 

O Ruler of all, Spirit of Life, let us pray for our children and for our world….

For the sake of all children, bring an end to the buildup of weapons. Preserve us from the attitudes that are willing to use such weapons, for we hold our children’s future before us…  Spirit of Life, we pray to you…

For the sake of all our children, bring an end to conflict and war between nations. Give us the hearts and minds of peace, to teach only peace to our children.   Spirit of Life, we pray to you…

For the sake of our children, bring an end to the misuse of the land, water and the earth… Teach us to be faithful stewards of all the Creation’s resources. Spirit of Life, we pray to you…

For the sake of our children, bring an end to injustices caused or abetted by those in places of power. May our hearts and minds change wealth to charity, power into service, and arrogance into humility so that we can hear the cries of our children. Spirit of Life, pray for us…

Holy God, Sprit of Life, through whom all is transformed and made whole, grant us and our children a newness of life. Give us hope, and faith, and a capacity to love that is unbounded by human fears. May we all have enough; enough to eat, enough to live; and may all the children have enough trust in their lives to rest secure in your love.

O Holy One, whom we also call our Father and Mother, We ask these things on behalf of our children, and the future we shall give them.  AMEN.

from The Children’s Defense Fund adapted

 

“[A man and a woman leap from the burning South Tower hand in hand....  they reached for each other and their hands met, and they jumped. I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead, and the harrowed families of the dead, and the screaming souls of the murderers, but I keep coming back to his hand in her hand, nestled into each other, with such extraordinary love.

It is the most powerful prayer I could imagine; the most eloquent... It is everything we are capable of when faced with horror, loss and tragedy. It makes me feel that we are not fools to believe in God. To believe that, as human beings, we have a greatness and a holiness within them that are like seed pods that open only under a great fire or pressure.... To believe, against all the contrary evil evidence, that love is why we are here.]”

From the PBS  Frontline  Documentary on the Spiritual Effects of 9/11

 

“[And I saw a river, over which everyone must pass to reach the kingdom of heaven; and the name of that river was suffering. And I saw a boat which carries the soul across that river, and the name of that boat is love.

St. John of the Cross- Ascent to Mt. Carmel

 

The best and most beautiful things cannot be seen, they are experienced through the heart…. Helen Keller

 

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you will help them to become what they are capable of becoming.

Goethe, German poet and scientist

 

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. –Benjamin Franklin

 

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Gandalf the Grey, by J.R.R Tolkien

 

Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

Personal commitment can lead to a better understanding of self:

“Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes… But no plans.”

– Peter F(erdinand) Drucker

 

“If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.”   Richard Hofstadter

 

“Commitment means that it is possible for a man to yield the nerve center of his consent to a purpose or cause, a movement or an ideal, which may be more important to him than whether he lives or dies.”

– Howard Thurman

Fear can be a powerful ally in moving forward: “Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.”

Marilyn Ferguson.

 

Courage is simply the willingness to be afraid and act anyway.

–Robert Anthony, American psychologist

 

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.  Nothing can be done without hope and confidence. –Helen Keller

 

Courage is fear that has said its prayers      Karl Barth

 

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” -

Marianne Williamson, quoted by Nelson Mandela.

 

“To defend one’s self against fear is simply to ensure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.”

James Arthur Baldwin

 

Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve.  He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.

Leonardo da Vinci

“There are times when fear is good. It must keep its watchful place at the heart’s controls. There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain.”   Aeschylus

 

“Only when one is connected to one’s inner core is one connected to others.  And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.”

Anne Spencer Morrow Lindbergh, American aviator and writer of “North to the Orient”

 

The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.  The saint is the man who walks through the dark paths of the world, himself a light.

- Felix Adler

An inclusive, creative, and a Spirit filled approach towards the future centers us on this pneumatic and soulful truth: That we are prophetically called, and that we are mystically invited into the fullness of life.

We are prophetically called by our ethical concerns and our humane principles that encourage equality, dignity, and being a compassionate witness. We are mystically invited into greater spiritual participation by our courageous inner seeking aspirations to live more fully in the light of God.

Being prophetic or mystical requires our willingness to have faith in the face of uncertainty- for no one can know for sure how anything will turn out. … We live by faith, and it is often a faith that is against the odds and so it forces us to live near the margins of our understanding, close to the bone, when it comes to any sense of security. Only by possessing a compelling guiding vision and having a vital purpose that can be shared and celebrated, can any person, family, or community come through to the other side of any dilemma, risk, or life trial.

The value of a religious community or any spiritual gathering is to unify and repair all the broken and split parts of our humanity. Then its purpose becomes to gather together to listen attentively as the Spirit educates, inspires, and moves us.

At the very last, I believe that there is planted in every human soul, an urgency to live:

To build character, to forge, and to refine the quality of our relationships, to reach beyond previously held limits, and to face the asking years of our uncertainties with faith and courage. The importance of our future rests in the assurance that we have reached out, that we have been willing to risk, and when looking back, in all humility and self knowledge, to be able to say that we have done our best…

 

 

Closing Words and Benediction:

 

The Spirit is brooding over the world (Deuteronomy 32), and She is ready to hatch her offspring— the women and men of God who will fully recognize and embody her.

 

On the positive and transformative side, Spirit is manifest whenever the heart is warmed and whenever the will is informed. I believe that our lives can be activated to receive the spiritual impulses of grace and change, and then we can, as a result of that leavening, act to make those effects evident in our personal lives. Then as an outgrowth of our individual transformations, we can come together and apply its wisdom as a dynamic and gracious social force throughout our culture.

UCC Jazz Vespers Service  7/10/11

Reflections on Jazz And The Spirit:

When I was first asked to do this Jazz Vespers, I was struck by how awkward it first appeared to me- yet the challenge was intriguing! I was asked to try to link my research into new inclusive definitions of The Spirit, and the need for a spiritual transformation of church and culture to… Jazz?

How could that be possible?

Well, after mulling it over in prayer and reflection, and after reading what noted jazz musicians have said about the core and vitality of jazz, I feel that there are certain valuable parallels that can be made…

To paraphrase the famous saxophonist Charlie Parker who defined music in these words: ["Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you do not live it, it won’t come out of your horn. [Society, and the rules of our culture] teach you that there are definite boundary lines to your music. But, man, there are no boundary lines to art [or the Spirit.]”

The unconventional, and controversial qualities of the Holy Spirit can be connected to and be descriptive of the fierce, dynamic flow of notes and feelings we can find in jazz. Both resist limitations of form, and the strictures of polite conformity.

 Ray Brown concurs when he defines jazz this way:

“Jazz, is to me, a complete lifestyle. Its bigger than a word. It’s a much bigger force than something that you can say.

It is something you have to feel. It is something you have to live.” And Charles Hayden puts it this way: “I want [people who listen to my music] to come away with an ability to discover the music that lives inside them. “

Jazz might well represent the dynamism of the Spirit in the work and art of life because it is transformative, and while it can appear intense or chaotic, it flows purposefully to its internal harmonics that seem to blend into the music of the universe itself.

Jazz and The Spirit can both be summarized here as being too prophetic to control, too mystical to be harnessed, and too transformative to lend any sense of safe security to the listeners or to those who can perceive the deeper resonance and rhythms of life that each represents. It is emotionally passionate and it is thoughtfully reflective… It is lively, and it is pensive… Jazz is one of the rare art forms that can embrace the many dimensions and facets of the human paradox, and allow its many expressions to have a resonant voice of its own…

 The depth psychologist who best understands these challenging metaphors and their potential meanings was Carl Jung, who gave us this observation:

“The action of the Holy Spirit does not meet us in the atmosphere of a normal bourgeois (or proletarian!) sheltered regular life, but only in the insecurity outside of the human economy, in the infinite spaces where one is alone with the providentia Dei. (Divine Providence) We must never forget that Christ was an innovator and a revolutionary, executed with criminals. The reformers and great religious geniuses were heretics. It is there that you find the footprints of the Holy Spirit, and no one asks for the Spirit to work in them or guide their life without having to pay a high price“ (Jung, 1975b, paragraph 1539).

It could be said, that our very origins at the time of the Creation were instilled with the harmony of the Spheres, and like the rhythms in jazz, possess a incessant melodic freedom that express relentless creativity and an abounding, abiding grace in that brings life into being…

Jazz is like the creative Spirit.  It is a musical style that gives birth to a flowing expression of human inspiration, one that is often intuitive, and containing just such a multifaceted harmonic structure that gives each note its vitality, expression, and purpose as a part of the gracious, flowing whole.

Like no other genre of music and composition, there is no one right way, and even missed notes can lend a human value and credence to the remarkable creative flow and its impressionistic force. It is a vital form of music- essentially creative and ultimately expressive of its own free and gracious forms. It will not be fenced or controlled by tradition, nor will it be limited by our personal expectations. Each time it can be brand new; each time the creative and gracious energies of sound can shape our hearing and our knowing in ways that open up our feelings, and broadcast our sentiments- placing them in a new frame of reference, for all to hear, for all to grasp and know intimately, and then to share universally.

From this and other such allied points of reasoning, I would boldly conclude that the Spirit, as the dynamis of God, is a constant, ever present, unfolding reality, [Playing the jazz of the universe and it is heard with our hearts as well as our ears...]

As such, it is the Spirit that has the capacity to assist humanity in shaping the understanding of its history, and it is Spirit that will positively prepare us for its future.

However, it is our participation that is needed. It is up to every person to pay attention! It is required of us to learn how to listen, and then how to reverently and responsibly act on Spirit’s behalf. Given our indispensable gift of free will, and the awesome ethical responsibility to use it for the greater good, it becomes our core task to take the Spirit’s message of wholeness, integrity, and salvation seriously. We are to learn how best to apply those gracious, challenging, and transformative experiences and insights in our lives.

Then it is up to us personally, reinforced by our churches and spiritual communities, to share it broadly among us and across our world culture. From this melodic impulses, we can move consciously together towards an inclusive, peaceful, and compassionate future.