Many Voices

April 9, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Sometimes when we seem to hear too many voices in our lives, we wish they’d all go away except for just the one most comforting voice.

That seldom happens. We might be better off realizing that we aren’t made of just one solo voice. We’re a chorus of voices and wants and preferences, each speaking up at some time, the whole lot of them seldom agreeing.

And we live as part of this sea of voices, trying to find a good path through the clatter. Sometimes we can just decide and do something whether the other voices like it or not. Ideally, we can be creative enough to do it together, bringing the whole choir along. That takes great talent and great patience. But if the Buddhists are right in saying we’re more like choruses than soloists – and I think they are – then we need a home in our soul and in our world for all the voices within us. The brave, clear-thinking ones, the compassionate voices that want to do the caring thing more than the right thing, voices that need to understand, and those wishing they could love even where they can’t understand. And so many more voices within and around us, looking for a welcoming home.

In the meantime – and it seems a long meantime – we stand where we are, silently praying Oh God, Life, the Universe, let us find a home where all of us, all of us, can live together in creative compassion. Just that. Just that.

Amen.

SERMON: Many Voices

This was the first time I’d heard the Chichester Psalms. But when Brent told me about the music, and then when I read the Psalms from which Bernstein took his lyrics, I recognized one of Bernstein’s greatest and most unusual gifts as a composer. He made a space for a huge variety of voices in his greatest works. The voices don’t agree and aren’t squeezed into a forced and phony kind of harmony. Instead, they are presented as a slice of life without a simple and clear solution.

Here’s what I mean. When I read through the six Psalms from which he took the lyrics for this piece (2, 23, 100, 108, 131, 133), I wrote down the different voices and moods I found.

There is the voice of God as conqueror, sounding very triumphal. The voices of his people cover a huge spectrum, from excited, devoted and loved, to fearful, rejected, abandoned by God, and inadequate. In the next lines, they are joyful, praising God, sounding comforted and fearless. Then they are very angry – you heard this in the music, when the men’s voices came in under the calm and peaceful sound of the women’s voices.

There is also a voice of self-righteousness, eager to condemn outsiders. This is a voice speaking for a wrathful, furious, vengeful God, one that is offering dominion of the earth, granting power to break opposing nations with a rod of iron and dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel.

And these lines are followed by voices that are thankful for God’s goodness and mercy, which are followed by despondent voices.

Then there’s a withdrawn voice saying it’s just not concerned with high and hard demands, but is satisfied to be calm, self-contained and quiet. Finally, there is the voice of simple happiness, happy to be dwelling in unity with others. You could get whiplash three times, switching moods to keep up with the many voices in just these six psalms, even though you suspect they reflect the real human condition in all times and places.

There’s a normal human tendency to want to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, or at least to harmonize all the voices to our own voice, our own beliefs, our own style. And that’s what most musical settings of the Psalms do.

But one of the characteristics of Leonard Bernstein’s music that’s most appealing – or troubling – was his ability to create a musical space within which many voices could co-exist without being homogenized.

He did this in West Side Story, that marvelous musical of violence, murder, love, and surprising vulgarity in the “Officer Krupke” piece sung by street gang members.

But he did it most dramatically and best in his greatest stage work, the “Mass.” The piece was commissioned by the Kennedy family for the dedication of the Kennedy Center. Rose Kennedy, JFK’s mother, hated what he wrote. Cardinal O’Connor wanted it banned as a heretical work. I saw the touring company production in Detroit around 1976, and could see why they might have hated it.

How many here have seen a stage production of the “Mass”? Here was a mass, but – with music by the 53-year-old Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by 23-year-old Steven Schwartz – it was not a Catholic mass. While it did go through the traditional parts of the mass, it contained scathing critiques of both the Church and the mass, for being irrelevant and incoherent.

Showing a wonderful knowledge of history, Bernstein included “tropes” as solos inserted into the mass, to make his critiques. In medieval times, the tropes inserted into the masses could even be to the tunes of drinking songs, so there was the precedent for bringing very secular elements in, and Bernstein exploited it brilliantly.

One soloist interrupted the “Credo in Unum Deum” to sing “I’ll believe in one God; I’ll believe in three; I’ll believe in thirty if they’ll believe in me.”

Another interrupted the priest during the Gratias Deo, to say that she once thanked God. “But now, somehow, it’s strange,” she sang, “though nothing much has really changed, I don’t sing Gloria, I don’t sing Gratias Deo. I can’t say quite when it happened, but gone is the Thank You.”

In a choral piece called “God Said,” the choir only sings the real lyrics after the priest leaves the stage. These include the chorus “And it was good, brother, and it was good, sister, and it was good, brother, and it was goddam good.” This isn’t your grandmother’s mass, unless she was one heck of an outspoken woman!

Also in that song, the lyricist Stephen Schwartz wrote these words:

“God said take charge of my zoo, I made these creatures for you. So he won’t mind if we wipe out a species or two. God said that sex should repulse unless it leads to results, and so we crowd the world full of consenting adults. God said it’s good to be meek, and so we are once a week. It may not mean a lot but oh, it’s terribly chic. God made us the boss, God gave us the cross. We turned it into a sword to spread the word of the Lord, we use his holy decrees to do whatever we please. And it was good, Yeah! And it was good, Yeah! And it was goddam good.”

Finally, the protestors torment the priest to the point that he flings the chalice down, smashing it, tears his robe off and throws it at them and leaves the stage. Then all the protestors, who have been harassing the priest throughout the Mass, fall to the stage like puppets who have had their strings cut. They really didn’t have a message, just complaints and needs, and needed the priest to play off of. A child takes the guitar and plays the Simple Song with which the Mass began, then the priest returns to the stage, in blue-jeans, takes the guitar and leads them in the song – it seems, after all, that they need to be led. Oh, maybe it will be a happy ending after all – but no. One of the protestors is disgusted by this and won’t join. He goes upstage in his fury. At the end of the Simple Song, the priest says, “The Mass is ended, go in peace.” But the lone protestor gives the priest and the audience the finger and exits. And that’s the end of the Bernstein Mass.

Many voices, given space to coexist: brought into proximity, but not harmony. Just like in real life.

You can understand why Rose Kennedy might have hated it. Leonard Bernstein gave her a masterpiece that was more than she’d bargained for. He gave her not an orthodox mass, but many voices, brought together on the same stage, to sing their very different songs in their very different passionate voices, and to be heard – perhaps even revered – but not resolved.

Cardinal O’Connor thought that was bad. Most churches would think it was bad. But not any real liberal church worth its salt, and not any Unitarian church in touch with its history.

The range of voices we have in Unitarian churches is immense. And like the voices in Bernstein’s works, they are not resolved: they’re in proximity, but not necessarily in harmony, on a huge range of topics.

A couple months ago, we learned what a wide range of opinions we have on 9-11. I believe our government either let it happen on purpose or made it happen on purpose. Some others agreed. Still others thought that was an absolutely crazy idea, that our government could do such a thing. Others were somewhere in between, and others – perhaps the majority – don’t spent time thinking about who did 9-11 or how, because there are just too many other things going on in their lives that demand and deserve more attention.

But the whole range of voices exists here, as it does throughout the country and the world. No matter what you believe about 9-11, you know there are people sitting around you who don’t agree with you. And those different beliefs aren’t going to be harmonized. They exist here in proximity but not in harmony, and that’s one of the frustrating things about liberal churches – or any honest church. We live in a world with people who sometimes disagree violently with us on really important matters, and the challenge of civilization is the challenge to learn to live together creatively.

But the different political beliefs in this room absolutely pale compared with the differing religious beliefs here! We have members for whom Jesus Christ really is the son of God, at least in deep symbolic and poetic ways. We have members for whom religion is and will always be about God, by which they mean the God of the Bible. Others have bad memories of that god, but find inspiration through stories of some of the ancient goddesses.

We have others for whom the whole idea of gods or goddesses is somewhere between useless and repulsive: people who might say we’re called to be decent people and to make the world a better place, but who do it without ever thinking about Jesus or God. We have some for whom the structures of Hinduism are their center – with its rich tapestry of stories, its rich array of so many imaginative figures symbolizing the many aspects of the creative, sustaining and destroying forces in the universe. And others who, if asked, will identify themselves as Buddhists – though not all the same kind of Buddhists. Some here believe in an afterlife, and some don’t. Some believe in reincarnation, and believe that they are not now in either their first or their last incarnation. Others think that’s just crazy, that it all starts, happens, and ends here in this life. And if you haven’t heard your own belief yet, you can add it, then add another fifty or so to cover all the permutations and combinations of beliefs sitting right here in this room, all around you, in proximity but not in harmony.

That’s the world that Leonard Bernstein kept putting in his music: that world of many differing voices in proximity but not in harmony. So I think some of Bernstein’s greatest pieces were practically written for liberal churches.

But this is not only for us. Our whole country would be better off if they had that ability to tolerate profound differences. Like they were to Rose Kennedy and Cardinal O’Connor, too many divergent opinions on important matters like religion are very upsetting to a lot of people. The truth is, most of us would be more comfortable in a world created in the image of our own beliefs. And during the past few years, we have all heard some of these strident voices insisting that America fall in line behind the one set of right beliefs – which always, coincidentally, just happen to be theirs. They want harmony in our country, and think that can only come from getting all voices to sing the same song.

They’re wrong. That would be boring music, as well as a foolish and dangerous society. We need to learn something, and Leonard Bernstein could teach it to us.

He could teach us that the real art, in music and in life, doesn’t come from trying to stamp everyone with the same cookie cutter, to make them as alike as dead interchangeable machine parts. The real art lies in the ability to create an atmosphere in which all God’s children, all the wonderful and crazy variety of Nature, can live in creative proximity.

The kind of harmony we need in life isn’t that of pretending that all opinions or all people can be made to fit the same mold. They can’t. The kind of harmony we need in life comes through the art of creating the atmosphere that lets our many differences exist together in creative proximity. It’s a much higher art than just stomping on people with cookie cutters. It takes grown-up people secure enough in their own beliefs to welcome people who don’t share their beliefs, though they share our humanity, and our need for peace, understanding, justice and compassion. And in this great mix of life, no deep harmony is possible unless we grow past the clamoring for shallow harmony, which can never exist anyway.

That’s the vision needed, and the art – to see past superficial differences of thought and belief, into that deeper and more enduring level where all God’s children got a song to sing, and it’s our collective job to provide the chorus that can cradle all these many voices in its heart and accompany them with the music of the heavens, the rhythm of justice, and the beat of the human heart – all our human hearts – trying to find our way back home together, trying to find our way back home together, and to know the place for the first time.