Two Concerts at Christmastime

We attended two concerts in the last two nights. We watched the first one, Messiah Rocks, at the DuPont Theater, and performed the second one, Festival of Light VI, at Skyline. Whether listening or singing, I experienced a surprising sense of celebration and joy. 

I had sung the Messiah several times in college, graduate school and while serving at my first church, Bethesda UMC in Salisbury, MD. I know the tenor part of the Hallelujah chorus by heart, as well as several more of the choruses and tenor solos. But Jason Howland's fresh approach to Handel's classic oratorio opened a window of fascination for me to hear and see (and to participate in) the celebration of God's gift of the Messiah in a new way.

From the opening guitar and violin riffs, as the tenor sang "Comfort" with an easy confidence and infectious enthusiasm, my tears told me that these old songs had discovered a new way to speak to the deepest longings of my heart. The concert Friday night reminded me what its like to breathe the fresh air of (there's no other way to say it) salvation.

I'm not talking about a ticket to paradise. Nor do I mean some imagined divine seal of approval for a particular religious understanding. By salvation I mean the foundation of the hope of creation and the joy of life in all it's fullness. Perhaps because these concepts are so mysterious, they can only be glimpsed in the majestic mystery of song. How telling Friday night when the performers repeatedly invited us all to join in that song: "For all of us a child is born!"

Then of course, we had our own songs to sing the following night. It was the concert that shouldn't have been. We faced so many obstacles and scheduling crises, they ceased to surprise us. And for an hour Saturday night, we came together as a band in a way I could never have imagined. 

And it was fun.

For most of the previous five Festival of Light concerts we have put on at Skyline, the music has involved far more work for me than play. For one thing, the project of an hour-long concert involves many hours of creative, musical, interpersonal and technical skills. And for various reasons, the task of music selection and rehearsal direction has fallen to me. 

For the past five years at Christmastime, I have felt too keenly the responsibility of pulling everything and everyone together for the FOL concert. And before last night, I had always assumed that this crushing responsibility came with the territory of taking on such a difficult task. Last night should have been worse because of all of the difficulty we had pulling everything together in the days and weeks before the concert.

But perhaps because of the over-the-top difficulty we navigated en route to the concert, adapting became a part of the plan. Gregg McCauley said it best after the show when we were backstage together: "life is improv". In the weeks leading up to the concert, and during the Festival (in every sense of that word) I discovered the joy and not the cynicism of that statement.

I've been reading a bit of philosophy lately. Through the tough sledding, I've discovered some insightful statements about the nature of life that invite me to focus on the simple daily transactions between our experiences (life that happens to us) and our creative response to life (so much more than merely reacting). 

So much of the life we experience runs counter to what we expect, we run the risk of being immobilized by our frustration that nothing goes according to our plan. Recently I read an evolutionary sociologist's contention that without forgiveness, community would be impossible - because humans consistently fail each other's expectations.

Sometimes, these failures involve moral violations. But most of the time, failed expectations signify only that we are vastly diverse creatures. I suppose they also remind us constantly of our limited perspective of the world. And in one sense, that nagging reminder of our blindness and contingency only adds to our anxiety, fear and loneliness.

But in another sense, we can interpret our boundedness on all sides as a vast network of experience, perspective, and creative response that expands our sense of self and profoundly connects us to the human community. Two people standing back to back see completely different views of their world, but together they can see a range of nearly 360 degrees.

The secret involves recognizing that the limits of our perspective, precisely those places where our expectations are thwarted, form the gateways to the vast frontiers of human community. Repeatedly as the concert approached, I found it easier to look beyond the frustration of my failed expectations of others because new possibilities emerged - both in my (new) reactions and the creative wonder of others' lives.

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul celebrates a God               
"who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us" (Ephesians 3:20). Our thwarted plans make way for new possibilities beyond what we can ask for or imagine. So when another person does not (or cannot) meet my expectations, I am learning to expect a creative response (from both of us) that expands my imagination.

This year's FOL concert far exceeded my expectations and imagination. I stood amazed at the many unexpected creative gifts of people connected to me with bonds of forgiveness, understanding and creativity. And I learned to be amazed at myself - especially at the ways I am learning to look beyond my frustration to the very real possibility of amazement and wonder.

So we sang. And we danced. And we were not for a moment trapped in anyone's expectations (least of all mine!) of how a concert should go. We were singing love songs to our Savior, who confounds and expands our expectations of ourselves and of others every moment. The words and the music flowed. A child joined us and danced while we sang. And the music flowed far beyond our ability to perform it - in everyone who was present not merely to witness but to participate in the joy of a Festival of Light.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never overcome it!

Cultivating Gratitude Year-round

Brooks Twilley shared with me a recent (11/22/10) NPR radio interview between Dan Gottlieb Ph.D, host of Voices in the Family, and Dr. Robert Emmons, professor at University of California, Davis. His primary interests are in the psychology of gratitude and the psychology of personal goals. He's the author of "The Psychology of Gratitude." The show's a rebroadcast and originally aired in November 2009. Brooks asked me for my thoughts about the conversation, which I felt was so meaningful that I wanted to share them in this blog.

You can listen to the conversation here.

I like boiling happiness down to faith (hope), forgiveness (grace) and gratitude (praise). I heard once that persons who commit suicide suffer from a catastrophic contraction of their perspective of these aspects in their lives. Suicide, in this sense, becomes a fatal symptom of depression. They talked about the truncation of options in life being related to ingratitude later in the program.

I also enjoyed Dr. Robert Emmons' definition of gratitude as thoughtfulness and remembrance. Another way of thinking about the way they talk about the physical/neurological/psychological (as well as spiritual) effects of gratitude, thoughtfulness and remembrance is meditation, or perhaps contemplative prayer. Vicki recently read a great book titled "How Prayer Changes Your Brain" that explored the power of prayer from a neurological perspective. Some of this reminds me of the Psalms that catalog the good things that the community of faith remembers and celebrates God doing among them over time, and the old hymn: "Count Your Blessings".

The concept of movement beyond self focus to connection to others is the sine qua non (without which none) of any authentic religious practice and understanding. And I liked the concept of distinguishing between gratefulness as a desire or attitude rather than a feeling. The conversation about giving up the illusion of control (and self-sufficiency) and gratitude as acceptance was powerfully helpful in articulating what happens in religious, transformational experience of "the Holy".

One caller struggled with his inability to believe in a God/god who could receive his thanksgiving. When the host talked about giving thanks to the animals and the people who brought the food to the table, I was reminded of the prayers in the Cormac McCarthy book, The Road. I don't think being grateful to specific people and not wanting to deflect this feeling of gratitude to a transcendent reality (god?) because a person does not have an experience of God/god is necessarily a bad thing. I love that the caller felt a tug drawing him to experience what the AA group calls a "Higher Power", and I believe that to settle for anything less would prevent him from experiencing the blessing of getting in touch with the reality of what I call God.

To put it another way, I think the pathway to experience the transcendent reality of God/The Holy/The Divine is precisely through the immanent/incarnational relationships with real people in real circumstances of life. Ironic that I was just reading in 1 John 4 this morning:

16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
17 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.
18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
19 We love because he first loved us.
20 If we say we love God yet hate a brother or sister, we are liars. For if we do not love a fellow believer, whom we have seen, we cannot love God, whom we have not seen.
21 And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love one another.

The caller who talked about raising a special needs child and being grateful for every little thing hit home with me, as a sibling of a special needs person, and as a parent of foster children. The issue of the human need for the contrast of adversity in life (between good life and bad life) in order to "wake up" to gratefulness says something about the question of the necessity of evil in a cosmos/universe/world created by God - and of the necessity of suffering. Near the end of the conversation, I loved the observation that people who have experienced great loss are the most grateful - for all of the little things in a life that becomes precious in every little moment. I remember a book by (social scientist) Dan Ariely called "The Upside of Irrationality" in which he described persons who had endured great pain and healing (as he had, as a burn victim), even partial healing, had a far higher tolerance for pain than people who had not experienced great pain and healing - precisely because those who had suffered a great deal believed things could get better through the pain of suffering.

What a fantastic conversation to share with people struggling in times of deep uncertainty.