Awet Andemicael

The "Broken" Music of "Humanity at Full Stretch"1

One of the more subtly disconcerting experiences a Christian can face is participating in a worship service in which the music does not seem to "work/' Although it may be perfectly good music in itself, it fails to foster in us what Don Saliers calls the "senses of worship/72 In some cases, we feel as if we are being drawn away from our efforts to remain explicitly open to God. Instead, "the thoughts of our hearts"3 turn in the direction of temporary pre­tenders to the throne of our ultimate telos: ourselves, other people, even — through excessive foregrounding of aesthetic appreciation — the very music intended to point us to God.

What might cause such a turning away from the God-ward orientation appropriate for worship? Secular influences on wor­ship music are one factor frequently cited.4 Since at least the fourth century, Christians have expressed concern about worship music borrowing from or being influenced by the music of the wider culture. One of the roots of the danger anticipated is music's power to evoke thoughts of the texts and contexts, however profane, with which it was previously associated.5

Awet Andemicael is a recent graduate of Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut.

11 would like to express my sincere gratitude to Gordon Lathrop, Karsten Harries, and Natalia Marandiuc for having read and commented on previous drafts of this paper.

2 Don E. Saliers, Worship Come to Its Senses (Nashville: Abingdon 1996) 17. Saliers lists these "senses'' as awe, delight, truth and hope.

3 From Thomas Cranmer's translation of the Collect for Purity, The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing 1979) 323.

4 Don Saliers and Emily Saliers, A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2005) ^ 2 ; Don Saliers, Music and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon 2007) 55-64.

5 For a discussion of early Christian responses to instrumental music, see James McKinnon, ed., Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987) 1-4. For a discussion of controversies over "secular" ele­ments in African American gospel music, see John W. Work, "Changing Patterns

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But what is the solution to this dilemma? Some have proposed the complete elimination of secular influences, so that worship music can be clearly distinguished from music outside the church.6

The appeal of such an approach is its emphasis on the sense of being "set apart/' a characteristic constitutive of many definitions of "the sacred/'7 Just as we set apart a certain time for worship, reserve certain types of language for liturgical use8 and sometimes designate certain clerical vestments or laypeople's "Sunday best" attire for church; we might want to set apart certain types of music for use in worship.

This solution is not, of course, unproblematic. Even if such "purification" were possible, too much of a differentiation between the "sacred" and "secular" has the potential to promote the fiction of the "segmentability" of human existence. This would deny the continuity of God's presence and the unity of the human self that permeate "our humanity at full stretch," a phrase with which Saliers evokes the totality of human existence and experience.9

The time, words, clothes, actions and music that we designate for

in Negro Folk Songs," Journal of American Folklore 62 (April-June 1949) 140; Horace Clarence Boyer, "Contemporary Gospel Music," The Black Perspective in Music 7 (Spring 1979) 5; Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Conscious­ness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford Uni­versity Press 1977) 178-80; Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church (New York: Marlowe and Co. 1981) 62; inter alia.

6 E.g., John Calvin and, to an extent, Augustine. On Calvin, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (London: James Clarke and Co. 1957) 148-49; Calvin, "Epistle to the Reader," in Charles Garside, Jr., The Origins of Calvin's Theology of Music: 1536-1543 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society 1979) 32. On Augustine, see Paul Westermeyer, "Liturgical Music: Soli Dei Gloria," in Liturgy and the Moral Self: Humanity at Full Stretch Before God, edited by E. Byron Anderson and Bruce T. Morrill (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press 1998) 199-200; Saliers 2007,14-17.

7 E.g., Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., s.v. "sacred." See also, Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001) 46.

8 How often, for example, does one say "thy will be done" outside the context of reciting or referring to the Lord's Prayer?

9 Don E. Saliers, Worship as Theology: Foretaste of Glory Divine (Nashville: Abingdon 1994) 28.

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our liturgies remain embedded in our complete experience of time, language, vestment, action and sound.10

What distinguishes the Church and her proclamation and Scrip­tures from secular counterparts, then, is not an escape from "secu-larity."11 Rather, according to Gordon Lathrop, these ordinary things, as well as the symbols, language, rituals, etc., of the liturgy, become new as they are "broken" (in the Tillichian sense)12 into deeper meaning and significance by their encounter with the reality of Christ, the risen Word.13 In an essay written for Saliers' festschrift, Liturgy and the Moral Self, Paul Westermeyer relates Lathrop's theme directly to the subject of our concern: "As Gordon Lathrop might say, music, like all things, has to be broken to the Word."14

But what does it mean for music to be "broken to the Word"? And how does that "brokenness" relate to categorizations of "sacred" and "secular"? Saliers has grappled with these issues in many of his writings, especially Worship as Theology, Music and Theology and A Song to Sing A Life to Live (the latter co-written with his daughter, Emily Saliers, of the acclaimed folk-rock duo The Indigo Girls). We will engage him, through his writings, as our

10 As Karl Barth explains, "The Church is also in fact a sociological entity with definite historical and structural features. Preaching is also in fact an address [. . .] The Bible is also in fact the historical record of a Near Eastern tribal religion and its Hellenistic offshoot. Jesus Christ is also in fact the Rabbi of Nazareth/' Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, volume I, i: The Doctrine of the Word of God, trans­lated by G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: Τ & Τ Clark 1975) 165.

11 Barth claims that nothing, not even the biblical miracles, "break through this wall of secularity" (ibid).

12 See Tillich on "broken myth": Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperCollins 1957) 52-54. Lathrop interprets Tillich's concept of "broken myth" as follows: "In a broken myth the terms of the myth and its power to evoke our own experience of the world remain, but the coherent language of the myth is seen as insufficient and its power to hold and create as equivocal. The myth is both true and at the same time wrong, capable of truth only by reference to a new thing, beyond its own terms. Such a break is present in the deep intention of the words and ritual practices of the liturgy: the old is maintained; yet by means of juxtaposition and metaphor, the old is made to speak the new." Gordon Lathrop, Holy Things (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1993) 27.

13 Lathrop, 1993,27-32. 14 Westermeyer, 200.

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principal conversation partner in our exploration of the "broken" music of "humanity at full stretch."

"BROKEN'7 MUSIC

Although Westermeyer implicitly connects Saliers to Lathrop's idea of "broken symbols," and Saliers himself acknowledges his theo­logical debt to Lathrop,15 the term "broken music" has not appeared in any of Saliers' major works thus far.16 Neither does Saliers use the word "broken" in the same peculiar way that Lathrop suggests.17

However, Saliers does allude to similar concepts on numerous occasions. In line with Lathrop's assertion that Christian symbols consist in "ordinary things, broken into meaning,"18 Saliers writes of the Christian use of "the things of earth to refer to and to invoke the glory of God,"19 underlining "our complicity in the very culture that provides the modes of communication, music, and language employed in our liturgical celebrations."20 Moreover, just as Lathrop describes the breaking of symbols as occurring "by their juxtaposition to the surprising story of Jesus Christ,"21 so Saliers counsels the Christian assembly to "take our cultural modes and to hold them up to the doxa22 of God until their very fragilities and

15 Saliers, 1994,11. 16 Broken Music is also the title of rock artist Sting's 2003 memoirs, although

there seems to be "no relation," as it were. 17 In Worship as Theology, for example, Saliers uses the terms "broken" and

"broken symbol" almost exclusively in reference to the Christ made vulnerable, who stands at the heart of the Eucharist (e.g., Saliers, 1994,49,61,91,94,124,170, 174,192). He refers to "brokenness" in a Tillichian-Lathropian sense only once: in the context of a consideration of the Eucharist, Saliers discusses Lathrop's "Ordo," and mentions the word "broken" in a passage which he quotes directly from Lathrop's Holy Things: "'For Christians, all texts and all rituals are the wrong words. All have to be broken to speak the Christian faith, the resurrection, the encounter with God in the crucified Jesus, the new vision of the world'." Saliers 1994,167, quoting Lathrop 1993,50.

18 Gordon Lathrop, The Pastor: A Spirituality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2006) 20.

19 Saliers, 1994,213-14. 20 Ibid., 43. 21 Lathrop, 2006,20. 22 Saliers points out that doxa, or "the divine glory," is a term which "has the

wonderful ambiguity of referring both to human belief and to something intrinsic to God" (Saliers, 1994,40).

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inadequacies are transformed,"23 since "encountering the holiness of God fills the forms we employ with what cannot be manufac­tured."24 This meeting of "human pathos" and "divine ethos," which we will discuss in greater detail momentarily, is the frame­work within which Saliers avers that the transformation (or "breaking") occurs.

In order to understand Saliers' concept of music in relation to divine ethos, we must consider his position on music's place in God's creation. He claims that "all the various arts" used in liturgy, including music, "find their origin and their true end in the love and glory of God."25 In line with Luther,26 Saliers indicates that music is part of God's good creation, and has God as its appropri­ate telos. In addition, liturgical music-making must be sustained by God: "In the very act of gathering to sing, to listen, to pray, and to eat and drink, the assembly must be gifted. [. . .] So when singers, preachers, servers, celebrants, givers of hospitality, and others engage in prompting the assembly, there is openness to the gifts of God [. . .] Each gathering is marked by the cry, Ύβηΐ, Creator Spiritus,' even if no one knows Latin. [. . .] Each gathering in the name of Jesus is a new opening to God."27

The presence-in-glory and grace of God are thus vital for litur­gical music to be effective. The task of liturgical planners, then, is "to search for ways to let the doxa of God shape our actual doxo-logical practices. Because only that way will the indicative art of our theology have enough resiliency and be rooted and grounded in its true object."28

23 Saliers, 1994,43. See also, ibid., 44. 2 4 Ibid., 205. 2 5 Ibid., 211.

26 "Music is a gift from God [. . .to be] properly used to serve her dear Creator and his Christians." Martin Luther, "Preface to Georg Rhau's Symphoniae iucundae," in Liturgy and Hymns, ed. Ulrich S. Leupold (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1965; Luther's Works, éd. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann 53) 323, 328.

27 Saliers, 1994,207-8. Thus, Saliers completes the three-fold connection expressed by Paul: "For from him and through him and to him are all things" (Rom 11:36).

28 Ibid., 42.

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The key is the meeting of the "doxa of God"— the "divine ethos" — and "human pathos" in the authentically worshipful liturgical moment.29 Saliers defines pathos as "the reality of human life, our daily struggle to make sense of longings, hopes, fears, joys."30 He bids us bring "the depth of emotion of our lives to the ethos of God. In these acts we discover who we are, but also and primarily, we discover who God is in this art."31 We cannot have one without the other, since "pathos without God's ethos is tragic self-expression; God's ethos without human pathos figured in Jesus is opaque, that is, sovereign but not saving."32 Thus, Saliers posits the "how" of "broken" music: transformation by means of the encounter of human pathos and divine ethos.

Moreover, he attends to something of the "what" of "broken" music. For Saliers, the "what" does not lie in a set of normative stylistic strictures for music worthy of the name "sacred." He in­sists on allowing a wide scope for stylistic variety among musical works which might reflect "brokenness," making frequent refer­ence to many genres of sacred music, including Western European classical, jazz, and rock idioms, to demonstrate something of this scope.33 Nevertheless, he does not embrace an "anything goes," indiscriminately inclusive approach to "broken music." Though he indicates that there is "nothing wrong" with using different musical styles for liturgical music, he adds: "Yet in each case, the question remains whether every style is equally suitable for worship. [ . . J A local community can begin to sense that some music does touch deeper realities than other music can."34

What characterizes such music?35 Saliers explains that, like the liturgical arts in general, liturgical music must address both the

29 Ibid., 21-38. 30 Ibid., 27. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 36. 33 Saliers and Saliers, 97-114; Saliers, 2007,55-64, inter alia. 34 Saliers and Saliers, 162-63. 35 Lathrop has suggested, in an unpublished note, that the contrast between

Saliers' emphasis on doxa as sovereignty and Westermeyer and Lathrop's own focus on the gospel, prompts the deeper question: "Who is the God to be glori­fied in sacred music?" A theology in which the primary portrait of God is "Sovereign Creator" or even "Christus Victor/' for example, is likely to be

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individual and the community. Thus, it is prevented from degener­ating into a "warmed over, privatized pietism" fostered by a "con­sumer culture."36 He avers that "when the doxa of God is sought, the primary languages of our humanity are released, not as indi­vidual virtuosity, but as a consort of praise, thanksgiving, and intercession for the world."37

Another important characteristic of Saliers'version of "broken music" is that it represents "the beautiful [. . .] always at the service of the holy."38 This is because the "primary intention of liturgical celebration is participation in the mystery of God's holi­ness and the divine self-communication, and things of "broken" beauty must thus always be "viewed in light of their teleology in the divine beauty."39 More explicitly for music, Saliers explains that, though "there is need for beauty in the concretely experimen­tal dimensions of worship," it "cannot be judged solely on artistic grounds [. . .] Every song, every prayer [. . .] is eschatological — that is, God intends it to point toward completion in the fullness of time."40 If "the beauty inherent in liturgy" is not deeply connected to worshipers seeking "God and God's kingdom," then, as Saliers quotes Gerardus van der Leeuw, "the liturgy becomes a spectacle and a sin"41 — the very antithesis of "broken" music.

In the entire preceding discussion of Saliers'version of "broken" music, however, we have begged a fundamental question: what about music that gets "broken"? I mentioned previously that Lathrop discusses the breaking of liturgical language, yet there may be something in music — possibly even apart from its texts — which is in need of "breaking" into liturgical meaning. Clearly, we seek a deeper definition of "broken music" than merely music to

connected to a very different type of worship music from one in which God the "Suffering Savior" is more frequently foregrounded. One promising line of theo­logical work would be to develop a more complete Christian theology of music based in and on God as Trinity, seeking, inter alia, to juxtapose the "sovereignty" and the "suffering" of God.

36 Saliers, 1994,43. 37 Ibid., 209. 38 Ibid., 207. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 210-11. 41 Ibid., 206.

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which religious texts have been affixed. Slapping on a biblical or theological text to a given piece of music — a juxtaposition based solely on proximity — is hardly sufficient to produce a transforma­tive, "breaking" encounter. As Saliers acknowledges plainly, "the appearance of religious words is no guarantee of authentic praise/'42

In addition, as I suggested above, the breadth of the range of styles which Saliers affirms as possible for effective liturgical music calls into doubt the validity of creating objective rules for the intrinsic sonic features appropriately called "sacred sound/7 He expresses wariness of such a move,43 claiming that "the very notion of 'sacred sound' [may be] demythologized into another genre of 'social construction'."44 While pointing out how culturally situated our stylistic notions of sacred propriety are, he also argues that "the modes of appropriating and sharing the mystery in and through language, symbol, and song must be the people's"; and allows for a "permanent tension" between "the necessity of local cultural modes of communication and interpretation and what is common to Christian faith and life."45 This suggests that any "rules" we could create would be so inextricably bound to our socio-cultural location that it would be vain, even harmful, to try to establish universal norms of "brokenness" for the music of the entire Church. As assemblies and communities of assemblies, we can strive for the encounter for which God has already sought with us, but we may not be able to determine a priori what music must flow from that encounter.

However, as we have seen already, Saliers claims that there are some things we can say a priori about "broken" music, based on what we know of God, and of human beings in light of God. In order for us to seek with Saliers such cataphatic insights into the "what" of "broken" music, it may be helpful to consider a possible definition of music, despite recognizing that any such definition will be incomplete and easily challenged by counterexamples. Nevertheless, if we consider that the greater part of what most cul­tures consider "music" can be understood as "intentional sound,"

42 Saliers and Saliers, 165. 43 In contrast with Calvin (cf., footnote 5 above). 44 Saliers, 2007,57~5^' 45 Saliers, 1994,215.

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this may provide us an operational starting point.46 Such a working hypothesis takes into account many components in music, catego­rizing them largely under the headings of "intention" or "sound," with the assumption that the "sound" of music results from "intention." "Intention" may be that of the composer, performer, listener, or any other animate agent.

Accepting this as a provisional definition of music, we may ask: which component(s) must be "broken" into meaning: intention, sound, or both? It would be, of course, simplistic to choose one or the other, as the two are not easily separated. However, a passage Saliers quotes from James Gustaf son's Can Ethics Be Christian? may provide some illumination: "When one's being is rightly tending toward or intending God, when one's love is rightly directed, there will also be a right intention and direction of specific projects. Thus, what one is by virtue of God's creation . . . can become realized to some extent in the moral life as one has the right objects of love."47

Saliers' citation of this passage supports a causal relationship between the intention of the self and the direction of "specific projects."48 Lathrop, too, affirms the deep involvement of the human in broken symbols when he explains that they "gather us — our deepest hopes, our very selves — into the circles of their reference."49 If we, as human agents of music making and receiving,

46 See Dusan Plavsa, "Intentionality in Music/' International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 12 (June 1981) 65-74. For an example which may both support and challenge this definition of music as "intentional sound/' con­sider American composer John Cage's (in)famous piece, "4'33": "In performance, the instrumentalist approaches her instrument, prepares to play, and proceeds to sit, motionless and without sound, for four minutes and 33 seconds [. . .] The music, therefore, is the sound that exists in the environment during that period of time." James C. Kaufman and Jean E. Pretz, The Creativity Conundrum: A Pro­pulsion Model of Kinds of Creative Contributions (New York: Psychology Press 2002) 80. See also John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 1961) 6-17; and Christoph Cox, "Nietzsche, Dionysus, and the Ontology of Music," in A Companion to Nietzsche, edited by Keith Ansell Pearson (Oxford: Blackwell 2006) 508-9.

47 "Liturgy and Ethics," 34. 48 See Martin Luther, as characterized by H. Richard Niebuhr in Christ and

Culture (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco 1951) 173. Incidentally, James M. Gustafson, whom Saliers cites, is also the author of the preface to the 50th-anniversary edition of Niebuhr's classic.

49 Lathrop, 2006,5.

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are broken to the Gospel, then will not the music which comes forth from us and is made meaningful to us be itself "broken/' as fruit of a "broken" body and spirit?

I submit, then, that "broken" human intentions lie behind and beneath — "under, with and in,"50 — the "breaking" of symbols, including music.51 On a fundamental level, it is our human "spin" on myth, on ritual, on all the complex humanity which forms and informs our various hermeneutics, that is broken in the encounter with the coming, "the risen Christ." The words, the actions, the sounds in themselves may remain unchanged in appearance, but the content and intent which we bring to them, in our use of the languages of action in word and music and movement, are shaken and restructured in the encounter with the reality of God. In that encounter, they are reborn into a being that is able to and does bear more and deeper and truer meaning, though never epistemo-logically complete; pregnant with the fullness of God's self-revelation, but still "not yet" in their eschatological hoping for fulfillment.

If we posit that human intention is the primary locus of transfor­mation in the "breaking" of music, we must address the lurking danger that what are colloquially termed "good intentions" may be used as justification for poor liturgical music. Saliers states firmly, however, that the transformation of human intentionality is not equivalent to mere "good intentions." He warns that "continu­ing to pray and sing biblically impoverished texts that may also lack aesthetic power, no matter how seriously done [i.e, how good the intentions are], cannot guarantee a deepening of spiritual growth and discernment of what it is to be church today."52

Another potential pitfall is the fallacy of psychosomatic dualism. "Broken" music should not be conceived as the result of the inten­tion to separate body from spirit, thus "breaking" the spirit free from the sensuality of material reality. Music is "inescapably

50 See Formula of Concord, VII 35-36. 51 Implied in my use of the word "broken" here is both the Lathropian/Tillichian

usage and the rather different, though not unrelated sense of being "crucified with Christ" (Gal 2:20).

52 Worship and Spirituality, 31 — cited in the Introduction to Liturgy and the Moral Self (11).

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bodily"53: "despite all the tensions and temptations to the contrary, Christianity steadfastly remains a religion of the body and of song."54 Thus, any Christian liturgical music aesthetic that attempts categorically to deny the psychosomatic unity of body and spirit — by forcibly eliminating rhythmic alertness, expressive musical gestures, embodied and body-oriented ways to praise God — may represent a circumscription of the entirety of human pathos. Rather, such an aesthetic must acknowledge, even if it does not actively affirm, the human psychosomatic unity, with sensitivity to the variety of its culturally specific manifestations. Otherwise, it presents a challenge of consistency with the validation and re­demption of embodied human being effected by the incarnation and work of Christ Jesus.55 An aesthetic of disembodied, ethereal music, without at least a conceptual inclusion of more embodied affects, serves to bring only a portion of our human being forward to be transformed in the liturgical moment, rather than the full­ness of our humanity "at full stretch."

HUMANITY "AT FULL STRETCH"

Some of Saliers' sharper critiques are reserved for those "religious communities" which "settle for too little" at a time when "we need the ancient full stretch of praise, lament, wonder, and hope, of truth and grateful openness to the divine."56 Part of this closed atti­tude may relate to the "narrow" boundaries inherent in "some of our categories and standard ways of thinking about music and musicians—religious, secular, classical, popular, sacred."57 Men­tioning on several occasions the historical permeability of the border separating sacred and secular,58 Saliers seems to seek a dynamic interplay between the two realms. "More and more in my own career as a liturgical or church musician," he explains in one interview, "I want to see the connections made between the liturgy

53 Saliers, 2007,13, quoting Jeremy Begbie's Theology, Music and Time. 54 Ibid., 11. 55 Ibid., 11-18. 56 Saliers and Saliers, 180-81. 57 Ibid., 153-54· 58 E.g., Saliers, 2007,55-64.

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or church music and the longing, terror and beauty of life — the struggle just to be human, apart from religious doctrines."59

Nevertheless, though he indicates the "ambiguity of all such easy sacred/secular distinctions," he does not advocate that we "do away with the terms 'sacred7 and 'secular' " or blend the two realms.60 He takes into consideration the suitability of particular music for particular situations, noting that when liturgy is "'domesticated' or made only to serve the surrounding culture's images and narrative self-understandings," it is due to a "failure of symbol" and constitutes the "'malformation' or even the subver­sion of the meaning and power of the narratives embedded in the symbolic actions originating in the 'Christ event'."61 The music of Christian liturgy should "not simply absorb local culture. It also may criticize specific behaviors and even sub-liturgical practices discerned as incompatible with faithful worship of the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ."62

Rather, Saliers seeks to transcend these categories, allowing for each realm to inform and enrich the other in a mutual search for ultimate significance. He and his daughter and co-author, Emily Saliers, conclude that: "religious communities should actually listen to and share the messages, the images, the emotional con­tent of music generated in the more general culture [. . .] At the same time, we want to insist that the church also has something to say to the world from out of its own treasures."63

In his effort to reach beyond superficial categorizations, Saliers speaks to the spiritual life of the whole human being, across sacred and secular spheres.64 He seems profoundly concerned that both sacred and secular music have a "deep soul," a term he adapts from Mary Mothersill's Beauty Revisited: that which can "withstand

59 Amy Plantinga Pauw, "Musical lives: Don and Emily Saliers on the religious power of music," The Christian Century, 20 November-3 December 2002,24.

60 Saliers, 2007,59. 61 "Afterword," 220. 62 Ibid., 213. 63 Saliers and Saliers, 164. 64 The positive value of a thoughtful mutuality of influence between sacred

and secular is a theme which occurs repeatedly in Music and Theology and A Song to Sing, A Life to Live. See Saliers, 2007,59,60,62; Saliers and Saliers, 158-59,162, 180-81; inter alia.

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prolonged spiritual analysis," remain memorable, "always yield new discoveries [. . . and] continue to be luminous, even revela­tory. These are occasions when the doxa of God is at the center, and the pathos of human being is truly prayed and sung."65 Such music "can evoke the divine and not necessarily mention God all the time [since] not all music with religious import needs to be explicitly liturgical, that is, addressed to God."66

However, Saliers holds both sacred and secular music account­able for failure to live consistently up to its divine call to bear a deep soul. In spite of the potential for "spiritual dimensions to be discovered in all kinds of music," Saliers laments that "some music simply lacks the qualities of sound and the evocative power to awaken matters of spirituality."67 He warns of the danger of elimi­nating mystery, "not as mystification but as opening up dimen­sions of divine reality and the human being to one another."68

Among his specific critiques are the tendency in some secular music to be "quite destructive and enervating. And misogynist,"69

and the failure of some sacred music to go beyond "entertainment or the frivolity of mere self-expression."70

Saliers contends that music can move us into the realm of the deep soul "when we cease to be interested in music only for enter­tainment or'background'purposes, and begin to pay attention to how music points toward the deep elemental facts of our existence."71 He continues with the assertion that "this might be indeed music evoking and sustaining in us restlessness for God,

65 Saliers, 1994,205. 66 Saliers and Saliers, 165. This definition of explicitly liturgical music being

that which is "addressed to God" is not unproblematic. Some portions of Chris­tian liturgies are addressed to the gathered assembly, some musical settings of the "sending" (e.g., "Let us go in peace . . .") being one obvious example that comes to mind. At the same time, it is easy to conceive of music directly addressed to God which is not liturgical, at least not in any commonly accepted sense of the term.

67 Saliers, 2007,62. 68 "Afterword," 224. See also, Ibid., 218-19. 69 Pauw, 25. 70 Saliers, 1996,47. 71 Saliers, 2007,60.

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and for a redeemed world."72 Saliers leaves room for something like a "general revelation" motif when he avers that the human experience of "the mystery of goodness beyond ourselves — a goodness we name as being from God," who is actively seeking us, is what "some people would say they have found when good and true love finally comes to them, others when they return to sobriety after a long period of addiction."73 This broadening of epistemo­logica! framework beyond traditional theological categories may reflect, in part, an attempt to incorporate or at least make space for the perspective of co-author Emily Saliers, who describes herself as being "deeply disappointed in the organized church."74

Although I respect his effort to be welcoming to points of view beyond explicitly Christian ones, my concern with some of Saliers' remarks along these lines is the potential chasm they leave unfilled between a musically-inspired nameless "restlessness" for some­thing beyond ourselves and the pointing of music to its specific telos in the triune God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Consider the following passage in A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: "As musicians of Saturday night and Sunday morning, the two of us especially want to encourage music that puts listeners in touch with the sources of human truth and flourishing. There is something profoundly spiritual about true musical artistry wherever it appears, especially when it is brought to music that takes us beyond our self-created images of ourselves and one another."75

What are the "sources of human truth and flourishing" to which they refer? Are they talking about God here, or a more generic concept of "transcendence"? A comment by non-Christian philos­opher Karsten Harries comes to mind: "The dynamism of religious transcendence [. . .] carries with it the danger of a radicalization of transcendence that threatens to so empty it and therefore also God

72 Ibid. See Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroads 1978) 44-89. These rather Rahnerian conceptions of a restlessness for God and an "openness to the mystery of being in the world" (Saliers, 2007,64) which "deep-souled" music can evoke, comprise another pervasive theme in both Music and Theology, 64, and A Song to Sing, A Life to Live, 172,174,175; inter alia.

73 Saliers and Saliers, 178. 74 Saliers and Saliers, 4. 75 Saliers and Saliers, 166.

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of all meaning that mysticism and atheism come to coincide."76

Although, in light of Saliers' larger project of liturgical theology, it is highly unlikely that this is his intention, nevertheless it is a potential interpretation.

Another passage in the same book follows a similar line: "Emily remembers [playing gigs at Atlanta's Little Five Points Pub, and] having'long talks about the real issues of life, as folks sought com­fort and consolation. Then we would jam and create a space for real joy!' Now that strikes us both as a pretty good description of what a church might be."77 As profoundly rich as the gatherings described above must have been, I find it hard to detect any sig­nificant difference between them and an effective music therapy session. If that is "a good description of what a church might be," it seems to be lacking something — or someone — essential: God. Are "hints of God-with-us"78 enough? Saliers underlines the claim that, "even while we are searching for God, God is also searching for us."79 Yet, so often, the implicit without the explicit is not enough. Time and time again, we worship the gift — music itself, or the experience of joy and transcendence which we receive from music — rather than the Giver. We settle for a comfortably vague concept of the transcendent divine, the shadowy contours of whose form we glimpse through music, rather than walk the path which leads through the cross to the reality of the Triune God.

How can we solve this dilemma? Saliers himself may provide an answer. Let us consider his concept of the liturgical formation of the worshiper: "Worship forms and conveys the awareness of God and the orders of creation and history."80 If the music of worship is indeed, as Saliers claims, a "deliberate rehearsal"81 for the "liturgy in life,"82 then we can say that we are formed by Christian liturgy

76 Karsten Harries, "Art and the Sacred: Postscript to a Seminar/' in Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity: The Thought of Louis Dupré, ed. by Peter J. Casarella and George P. Schner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1998) 193-94.

77 Saliers and Saliers, 160. 78 Saliers, 2007,62. 79 Saliers and Saliers, 175. 80 "Liturgy and Ethics," 17. See also, ibid., 18. 81 Ibid., 23, quoting Stanley Hauerwas in Character and the Christian Life: A Study

in Theological Ethics. 82 Saliers, 1994,45.

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into knowers of God, such that we can recognize God in all "deep-souled" music, be it sacred, or secular, or something in between. This opens up the possibility of our experience of explicitly theo­logical liturgical music informing our experience of implicitly theological non-liturgical music — music that is deep-souled though ostensibly secular.

Saliers argues convincingly that music appropriate for Christian liturgical use — music which Lathrop and Westermeyer would call "broken to the Gospel" — brings the fullness of humanity to the glorious presence of God, from whom, through whom, and to whom it exists.83 It is manifested in a wide range of stylistic incar­nations, all of which speak to the community as well as the indi­vidual, and represent beauty at the service of God's holiness. Although he agrees that explicitly theological, "sacred" music plays roles different from "secular" music, Saliers insists that the music of the Christian Church can and should respond to the broader cultures in which it is located. Both sacred and secular music can have "deep souls," Saliers confirms. He implies, thus, that there is no sense in maintaining the fiction that "church" is somehow a separate realm from "non-church," since the continu­ity of the human person and her/his participation, among other things, must challenge any attempt to establish hermetical concep­tual walls between the two spheres. After all, in Lathrop's idea of "broken symbols," the original myth/symbol is not lost, but rather expanded and reinterpreted — it is both false and true.84

Moreover, Saliers holds that sacred and secular music with "deep souls" can effect an implicit proclamation of the depths of humanity and, thus, the God to whom those depths are opened, without necessarily proclaiming God explicitly. In church contexts, he wants music that is both deep and explicitly theological. Out­side a church — specifically, liturgical — context, however, explicit God-wardness may not be necessary for music to function effec­tively for theological ends.85 Particularly in the book he co-wrote

83 See footnote 27, above. 84 Lathrop, 1993,32. 85 Note, for example, the suggestion (Saliers and Saliers, 163) that churches

expand their range of music in church-sponsored, non-liturgical contexts.

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with his daughter, Saliers strives to leave room for those who do not give the name "God" to their experiences of transcendence.

And yet, he declares elsewhere that "loyalty to the God of Abraham, Moses, the prophets and Jesus of Nazareth is to find one's existence oriented in the attitudes, beliefs, emotions and intentions which target that God and no other god."86 Saliers' own concept of the Christian affections asserts a crucial formative role for the liturgy itself. Over time, he claims, "the language of this story teaches us to describe all creatures in the world as God's."87

Based on this framework, we can start to build a paradigm for the interaction and mutual informing of the "sacred" and the "secular." In order to preclude too diffuse a notion of "divine tran­scendence," the explicitly sacred must become normative in the Christian's perception of God: God, and no other, must be named as God. This naming and knowing of God, which is developed and fostered in, among other places, the liturgical moment, is applied only subsequently to the implicit declaration of God in secular music.88 However, the sacred must acknowledge its place as a par­ticipant in the secular, rather than a version of reality exclusively distinct from it; transformed by God, yet still intimately connected to the world that lies ostensibly beyond the church gates.

Ultimately, Christians experience music, whether explicitly sacred or only implicitly witnessing to God, as authentically "sacred" primarily because we ourselves have been shaped as "receivers" of God's self-revelation. We ourselves have been trained to recognize the hints and traces of God in the world of music. We ourselves are being "broken" throughout the "full stretch" of our humanity, so that we are enabled to bear greater understanding and deeper insight into the doxa of God.

86 "Liturgy and Ethics," 15. 87 Ibid., 17. 88 Here, I mean "subsequently" in conceptual, though not necessarily chrono­

logical, terms. One could certainly look back at a previous unthematized experi­ence of music through the epistemological lens of a more recent thematized experience of God.

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