Speak your own love

Hi folks, i hope you are well, this week we will meet at 7.30 at the Crescent Club in Cullercoats, it would be great to see you if you are able. Once again a little reminder to wear a face mask when walking about the club please. This week we move away from our regular slots to a guest blog by the wonderful Alex Ross. When i asked Alex to describe himself to me he said this: “a criminal consultant / musician / spiritual leader and thinker / improviser”.

Speak your own love

There are two big problems for me with modern worship songs: the music and the words.

That’s a decent joke to start with, because you realise instinctively that songs are just music and words, there isn’t anything else. Or is there?

Of course there is more, or else a painting would just be canvas and paint, or a sculpture would just be whatever the sculpture is made out of. You don’t have to be a visionary artist to know that creativity and creating art is a mixture of the making, the material and the meaning.

Making is what the artist does. Material is the fabric of what is used to create. Meaning is the thing the artist is pointing us towards, but it is also the thing that we get to own for ourselves. I’ll come back to this in a moment.

So here is the crux of why I struggle so often with Christian worship songs, and I suspect it’s not just me: the problem is in presenting the “meaning” of the song as fact, without allowing any room for me to inhabit the meaning for myself. THIS means THIS and NOTHING ELSE. Sometimes I think we have forgotten that communion with God is to inhabit mystery, not certainty. Indeed many Anglicans and Roman Catholics still call the Eucharist “the mystery of Christ.” I love what Franciscan Priest and author Father Richard Rohr says

“Many mystics speak of the God-experience as simultaneously falling into an abyss and being grounded. This sounds like a contradiction, but in fact, when you allow yourself to fall into the abyss—into hiddenness, limitlessness, unknowability, a void without boundaries—you discover it’s somehow a rich, supportive, embracing spaciousness where you don’t have to ask (or answer) the questions of whether you’re right or wrong. You’re being held and so you do not need to try to ‘hold’ yourself together. Mystery is not something you can’t know. Mystery is endless knowability.” Richard Rohr, Holding the Tension: The Power of Paradox (CAC: 2007)

I have spent a lot of my creative and spiritual time in the last few years trying to understand more about what sound is and how sound relates to what we think of as God; why we are moved by communal participation in sound and singing, how are bodies and minds react to vibrations (which is all that sound is), and what nature is telling me about God, through its own divine sound. In the image attached by Ukrainian artist Anna Marinenko you can see the beautiful symmetry between nature and recorded soundwaves. This symbolises my journey.

The more I allow myself to be immersed in sound, rather than expressing a direct meaning through song lyrics, the more I am transported out of my ego, released from expectations of conformity, and held in the mystery of Christ. Realising that we are all just sound – vibrations of molecules at our most basic level – was the most joyous experience of “heaven on earth” that I can express. As I began to sit with this thought, meditating on it over and over, I was able to shed, bit by bit, the subconscious evangelical dualism that is so deeply ingrained. Life is not a series of yes/no decisions, and not much, if anything can be compartmentalised into right/wrong, up/down, true/false.

I realise over time, I am not a heretic for believing that I am just made of sound vibrations and carbon from old collapsed stars. We are carbon-based beings, the main thing holding us together. And that carbon comes from stars, just as the light you see is from stars that may no longer exist. Slowly, I begin to allow the mystery to inhabit me, that I am alive in this moment and also outside of this moment; perhaps I might even begin to declare that “it is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.”

So, you might be sick of worship songs, you might think you can’t sing, you might not be able to play an instrument, and you think you are not creative. But the very act of your existence is a song. You are musical vibration and starlight just by existing. You are the very joyful stuff of the cosmos, both alive in this moment as you, and at the same time alive forever in a cosmos held together in love.

To close, I said I would come back to this vision of creativity and sound: Making is what the artist does. Material is the fabric of what is used to create. Meaning is the thing the artist is pointing us towards, but it is also the thing that we get to own for ourselves. I think this description holds up when you apply it to a created universe: God is the maker, sound and space is the material, and we are the participants in the meaning. We both inhabit a collective meaning, and define our own.

Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.

With much love,

Alex

I have devised a meditation for youto do, https://soundcloud.com/alex-ross/speak-your-own-love and some questions to ask yourself as you participate. I have created this piece of music using only one note of my voice, processed in different ways. It lasts for about 4 minutes. During this time close your eyes, breathe slowly and rhythmically. If you would like to, you should hum, quietly so as not to put others off, but hum from deep down in your diaphragm, a love song in response to the very joy of being alive right now. It doesn’t have to be “in tune,” just respond and participate.

During the meditation on your own, or afterwards in your group, ponder these questions:

What artists/creators who aren’t operating in the obviously Christian world help you connect spiritually, and why? What happens to my worldview when I begin to view every single thing as fully created and fully alive because it has its own unique vibration?

What is most challenging to you about this written piece? The challenge to your ego as an individual? The challenge to your theology? The challenge to your sense of certainty? Or something else?

How can I begin to create my own sound?

When do I give myself permission to create my own meaning, and when do I accept the meaning asserted by others?

What space do I give to “not knowing” and how does this make me feel?

Having read the piece and/or listened to the meditation, ask yourself again what it might mean to be “in Christ.”

Five books have helped me enormously in recent times, and I commend them to you:

Richard Rohr – The Universal Christ

Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now

Carlo Rovelli – Seven Brief Lessons On Physics

Sadhguru – Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide To Joy

Stephen Hawking – A Brief History Of Time

Peace, Rob and Alex.

Rob Wylie

Rob Wylie is the founder of BeachcomberFX and guides its leadership team. He has worked in the North East for over 20 years and has vast experience from various roles he has held. He has a passion for Fresh Expressions of Church and Pioneer Ministry as well as beer, beaches and Miniature Schnauzers.

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