Haydn, Happiness & Hope: A sermon at the Edinburgh Festival

When the first Edinburgh International Festival took place in 1947, it was “to heal the wounds of war through the language of the arts” by providing “a platform for the flowering of the human spirit”. The brief looked for a city with a distinguished setting and townscape that would embrace the opportunity “to make the festival a major preoccupation not only in the City Chambers but in the heart and home of every citizen, however modest”. That’s an aspiration to admire, not least for its idea that the arts need to find a place in our healing and flourishing, and that they belong to everyone, not only the wealthy or well-educated or privileged. An event that was any less generous or inclusive would not be the Edinburgh Festival we cherish.

Among possible festival locations, Salzburg was mentioned as the kind of city to emulate. So how apt to have the city of Mozart represented at this mass through his sublime Ave Verum, and indeed eighteenth century Austria, the homeland also of Joseph Haydn whose Little Organ Mass we are enjoying this morning. In its way, our music from the German-speaking world (including a Bach organ voluntary) affirms a confident Europeanism, our belonging to this continent that has enriched Scotland in so many ways and to which (setting a fine example to England) it remains sturdily committed. Brexit is not a word that’s understood in the world of music, theatre, film, letters or art.

The Haydn brothers Joseph and Michael, both great composers, were deeply religious men. Of Joseph’s Little Organ Mass one of the experts* has said: “in this music, Haydn’s religious character becomes glowingly apparent: instinctive and unquestioning in faith, yet celebratory and reverent, seeking devotion through the contemplation of beauty.” Near the end of his life he was taken to a performance of his Creation to celebrate his birthday. When they reached that glorious C major chord that bursts out of the representation of chaos at the start of the score, “And there was light”, Haydn, it is said, “raised his trembling arms to Heaven, as if in prayer to the Father of Harmony”.

He spoke to his biographer about composing an Agnus Dei for one of his late masses. “I prayed, not like a miserable sinner in despair but calmly, slowly. I felt that an Infinite God would surely have mercy on his finite creature, pardoning dust for being dust. I experienced a joy so confident that as I composed to the words of the prayer, I could not suppress my joy but gave vent to my happy spirits and wrote above the miserere, Allegro.” Not at all like the more reflective adagios we are used to at this point in the liturgy. But that is Haydn, always taking us by surprise, not least spiritually. My daughter and I once went to his mausoleum at Eisenstadt in Lower Austria, near the Palace of the Esterhazys he’d served so loyally. Inside they were playing a cd of one of his masses. I needed to honour the great man and thank him for all that he’d meant to me. It was most moving.

Why am I telling you this? Because I want to go back to that phrase I quoted, seeking devotion through the contemplation of beauty. This seems to me to be one of the functions of music and the arts for people of faith. Perhaps a hint of this lies behind the vision of those who created the Edinburgh Festival, a belief in the power of art to bring life back into some kind of beautiful order and ordered beauty. Making contemplatives of us means learning how to see, to pay attention, to be present to our experience and glimpse its inner meaning, what Gerard Manley Hopkins called inscape. And as we are doing the work of God at this eucharist today, we should celebrate the capacity of liturgy to achieve this, help us live in a more contemplative way so that we “see into the life of things” as Wordsworth put it.

So let’s ponder the juxtapositions within our worship today. Into the words of the mass and the music of Haydn and Mozart, the lectionary inserts readings that ask questions that are among the most fundamental we can face. Where does meaning lie, asks the preacher in Ecclesiastes, exhausted by the ever-circling years that bring no age of gold, only vanity and ennui. Psalm 49 examines the futility of living only for your power or wealth or fame or reputation, for death is the great leveller that will bring us all down to the grave like the beasts that perish. The gospel reading about the rich fool warns that there is no gospel of prosperity and we can take nothing with us when we die. Even Colossians, so radiant with the spirit of Easter, warns that we must put to death our self-serving behaviours and “set our minds on things that are above”.

I wonder whether we can set up a spiritual conversation between these readings and the Viennese mass we are enjoying. On the one hand the readings underline the realities of living and dying. They belong to the world of a series of medieval paintings in Hexham Abbey where we often worship, that show the “Dance of Death”. A skeleton brandishing a scythe comes up to different kinds of people and engages them in deadly waltz that tells them that their time has come. These sombre readings call on us to face our mortality and ask what it means to become wise in the light of our human condition.

On the other hand, Haydn’s music is shot through with a God-given happiness. Not I think because “Papa Haydn” was cheerful by temperament (though he was remembered for it), but rather that his music evokes the confident faith in which it was composed. The gospel reading ends with a striking turn of phrase. It speaks of those “who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God”. Might we experience the liturgy, enriched by the arts of the church and especially Haydn’s music, as one of the ways in which we might become “rich towards God”? Seeking devotion through the contemplation of beauty we said. That seems to me to be one of the God-given paths to wisdom because it enables us to see ourselves as we truly are, “frail and feeble, doomed to die”, yet in Christ raised from the dead, given back our lives, put together again, transformed, discovering the wisdom that teaches us how to be “rich towards God”.

The sixth century writer Boethius authored a famous book called The Consolations of Philosophy. He wrote it in prison as he faced death at the hands of his political enemies. It calmed his spirit and brought him peace at the last. Medieval theologians loved his writings because of their message that through wisdom, the soul attains to the vision of God. I believe music and the arts bring consolations too when they find their place in liturgy, prayer and a contemplative outlook. In this sacred space, in the environment of the holy, Haydn’s music is a source of grace and wisdom that strengthens us, steadies our gaze, comforts us and gives us confidence at the grave and gate of death. We lift up our hearts in gratitude, and find ourselves once again caught up in the movement of God’s everlasting love towards creation. And here’s the miracle, that we are risen with Christ, learning to seek the things that are above, discovering how to be rich towards God.

Old St Paul’s Church, Edinburgh, 4 August 2019
Ecclesiastes 1.2, 12-14, 18-23; Psalm 49.1-11, Colossians 3.1-11, Luke 12.13-21

*H.C. Robbins Landon & David Wyn Jones, Haydn: his life and music, 1988 

At the Dangerous Edge of Things

Robert Browning spoke about ‘the dangerous edge of things’. Today’s New Testament lesson speaks about events that take people to the extremes of their experience, and it does indeed feel edgy and dangerous.  The disciples in their boat on Galilee struggle against the storm.  The waves crash over the flimsy craft and it threatens to capsize. The Lord, asleep in the hold, is woken by terrified cries of panic: ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ He rebukes the chaotic wind and waves and there is a great calm. Safely on dry land, it’s the same story in another guise. Jesus takes on the chaos in human life: the Gadarene man and other victims whose lives are being possessed by demons, or by disease and disability that reduce their victims to chaos. As on the lake, mortals clamour desperately for help, beg to touch even the hem of his garment.  Who is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, demons, sickness and death and they obey him?

 

Just before the reading from Genesis, at the very beginning of the Bible, we learned how ‘the earth was a ‘formless void’: tohu wavohu, a rare moment of Hebrew rhyme.  That first creation story in Genesis 1 tells how shape and order emerge out of the chaotic deep: light and dark, sea and dry land, vegetation, the different orders of life in earth, air and water; and humanity as the crown of God’s achievement.  This patterning of time, space and the material world is fundamental to a cosmos that is stable and trustworthy.  In this universe that is ‘very good’, chaos has no place. And although the lesson we heard from Genesis offered us a much earlier story of creation, what scholars call the Jahwist’s version, with the Bible as it now is we can’t help but read the second story in the light of the first. When we do, it echoes the same primordial pattern. God is at work to shape a world like an artist or craftsman. When Michaelangelo forged a sculpture, he said that the shape was already there in the stone; it was simply a matter of revealing it. I like the idea of God chipping away with infinite skill to bring out the fundamental shape and structure of reality from the undifferentiated chaos of matter.

 

In the ancient world, order was experienced as precarious. There was an ever-present fear that the chaos might return to overwhelm hard-won civilisation.  In the psalms, Yhwh is king over cataract and flood who has crushed the heads of the monsters of the deep; in today’s, he ‘stilleth the raging of the sea: and the noise of the waves and the madness of the people.  And that madness tells that the threat is not only natural but human.  The raging of the enemy is personified as an overwhelming force which only the mighty power of Yhwh can subdue: ‘why do the nations rage so furiously together?’  In a bleak vision of Jeremiah, the formless void appears again:  ‘I looked on the earth and lo, it was tohu wavohu, waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.  I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro.  I looked, and lo, there was no-one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled.  I looked and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger’.  This is Genesis wound backwards from cosmos to chaos, its artistry unravelling to a terrible, anarchic collapse. 

 

If once, people doubted that atavistic fears like these had been banished by the onward and upward march of progress, this last century surely dispelled the fantasy. Tohu wavohu does not only belong to the ancients.  A century ago, an unsuspecting world sleep-walked into a Great War. Seventy years ago, the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau were opened to reveal the unspeakable horror of what had gone on under the Nazis. I was brought up under the shadow of the Bomb: the Cuban Missile Crisis taught me how deeply untrustworthy the world is. I learned to be afraid. Now we have Al Qaida and Boko Haram and Isis, not to mention climate change, human trafficking, the abuses that drive asylum seekers to our shores. They all point to tohu wavohu as a present reality for us, both as nameless fear and felt reality, consequences most of them of what the Prayer Book collect calls ‘the unruly wills and affections of sinful men’. 

 

The history of this Benedictine cathedral reminds us how in the 6^th century St Benedict set about creating communities of stability and order when the Roman Empire was in its final descent into anarchy.  Perhaps his Rule saved Christian Europe from the dark ages.  His enterprise could be a model for mission today: intelligent religion marked not by easy successes or showy drama but by the sustained spiritual imagination and commitment to live with complexity.  In his book A Staircase for Silence Alan Ecclestone offers clues as to how we might set about this.  He says that only a radical deepening and broadening of our vision is equal to the task of bringing to birth and nourishing a spirituality strong, generous and inspiring enough to help men and women…. grow up as truly human beings in the immensely complicated world that lies ahead. That spiri­tuality must provide a disciplined way of living in which growth to the fullest possible stature of each is made the concern of all. It requires a spirituality [that] relates the creativity, the humanising and the unification of mankind in one growing experience of mutual love. The world may well be entering a yet darker age than any known before. The demands laid on the spirituality needed during such time will be correspondingly greater.

So we must not be paralysed by the storm, hide in the bowels of our ship, never venturing on deck to get the measure of the tempests that rage outside and within. At those times when we stand on some dangerous edge of things – in personal life, in world crises, the first thing is to imitate the mariners at the start of the Tempest and cry out, ‘to prayers, to prayers!’: like the disciples, the vessel we are sailing is so tiny and the sea is so terrifying and big. But as we face our fear, assess the danger, say our prayers and help one another to find strength, we find that Christ was hidden in the darkness all along, and is there beside us, rebuking but also cheering us: ‘where is your faith?’

The tornados and tsunamis of life put hard choices to us that call for hard decisions. When the crisis comes, do we have the spiritual resources to respond?  Even in the storm, especially then, we need to keep the doors of perception open so that God can come anew to us, as he did to the possessed man by the lake and to the disciples in the boat. The Lord’s Prayer that we utter every day has as its focus how we fare in the time of trial, how we endure Gethsemane when we cry in despair, ‘let this cup pass from me’. When it comes to our great ordeals, what would we do? What shall we do?

This is where Christian character is tested. And I wonder, as I hear the news day by day and feel profoundly despondent about it, whether my Christianity is being called to some test of resilience and maturity it has never had to undergo before. This is no time for easy religion, play-acting our Christian profession. Our faith needs to go to the heart and change us. This is why we need those Benedictine virtues of stability, obedience and conversion of life in our churches and our personal lives.  They shape us to live by the values of the gospel, so that life is transformed and we begin to make a difference in the world: as Benedict did, holding on for dear life as the world fell apart around him, yet never despairing of the mercy of God. Which is why, when big storms break against the shores of our complacency, and we are shaken by earthquake, wind and fire, we need to hear the voice that calls out to us, ‘where is your faith?’, the still small voice that gives us the strength not to be afraid. And then, God willing, we shall live to praise his name, and tell how much he has done for us.

Durham Cathedral, 8 February 2015, Genesis 2.4a-end, Luke 8: 22-39