My high school band director used to say that the space between the notes was as important - or more important - than the notes themselves.
My high school band director said a lot of things.
When we lost our focus and started to speed up, he would say "Now now, we're not rushin'...we're American!" And when we were grappling with how to play runs of five notes at a time, he would illustrate the rhythm by saying "Opportunity, opportunity, opportunity now." (Because "opportunity" is a great five-syllable word.)
The earliest stages of learning to read music, sing music, and play music involve learning how to make the sounds and read the notes. Which keys to push down, which feeling in your throat, which dot on the page symbolized which key on the piano. From there, music becomes a matter of notes and counting at the same time. Counting to four. Counting to three. Counting to six. Then counting gives way to rhythm - some notes are longer and some notes are shorter, and some notes land right on the beat while other notes jump in early or show up late.
And when you are in high school band, you are pretty good at the notes, the counting, and the rhythm. But you are still focused more on the sound part of music than on the silence part. Rests are simply the times that you aren't playing, but they are really just an inconvenience. They interrupt your playing and don't hold much meaning.
So to hear that the silence is as important as the sound was a new concept for me as a teenager. One that took a little convincing.
It makes sense when you think about it. Notes have a duration, and the only way that you can know a note's duration is by giving it a clear start and a clear end. The space between notes is what distinguishes emphasized, tenudo notes from chopping, staccato ones. There is something magical about a band or a choir or an orchestra coming to a climax point where all are playing or singing loud and full, and then all cut off at the exact same moment, leaving the chord echoing and then floating away in to the silence. The space between quiet notes invites a listener to lean in, to engage, to focus on what they are hearing. The space between loud notes offers a relief to the ears, and a sense of anticipation for what notes are about to come next.
In the music of creation, God played six amazing chords all in a row, each one building in complexity and volume. The great orchestra of the universe played a symphony that started with a simple, two-voice melody, and with each successive movement, added harmony and counterpoint, fanfare and descant and probably even a pretty nice trio section like you'd find in any good Sousa march. But after all the playing, after all the singing, after the six-day wall of sound swelling into the cosmos....
...silence.
On the seventh day, God rested. Before leaping into the next creative task, God took some space. Not unlike the way that Jesus, after teaching the crowds and healing the masses, would head off by himself, to take some space and to find some silence.
Maybe it is just my introvert tendencies, but I find great comfort and solidarity in having a God (and a God-in-the-flesh) who needs some silence between the notes.
I mean, I know that it was the Spirit who drove Jesus into the wilderness after his baptism, for forty whole days, and I know that he was hungry and tired and encountered demons out there. But there's a little part of me that thinks Jesus also relished his alone time, at least at first, since at his baptism, he was there in the river for all the crowds to see, and he heard the voice of God and there was the dove and the heavens opening, and it was quite the spectacle. After something so big and so public, I suspect that Jesus was grateful to be whisked away by the Spirit for some time to reflect and to recharge...at least until things got too hot, too hungry, and too devilish.
(Click link below to continue reading)
It isn't difficult to look around and realize that we, as a whole, are not particularly great at leaving space between the notes. We aren't very comfortable with having gaps in our knowledge, our schedules, or our space.
Case in point? The Keret House. In 2009, Polish architect Jakub Szczesny spotted a three-foot gap between buildings in Warsaw, and decided to build a three-foot-wide apartment in that space. Too small to be a legal residence, it is an "art installation" that is complete with bed and desk, kitchen, bathroom, shower, and a front door that opens like a trap door from the floor. It is intriguing and sunny and claustrophobic and crazy. There are certain positive values to tiny-space living: minimizing unnecessary possessions and luxuries, small environmental footprint, the value of efficiency in design. But I can't help but think that this installation also points to sadder truths of our existence: the greed that makes us want to claim open space for our own, and the tendency to fill in gaps rather than allow for space - even ugly or uncomfortable space.
If this is a metaphor for anything, it is a metaphor for our persistence in filling up empty spaces. For adding things to our schedules. For keeping our lives structured instead of free-form. For filling up our days and making sure we are prepared for what's next, instead of allowing ourselves to rest in the present moment. By choice or by necessity, the song of life always goes on, it seems. A great wall of sound, notes following one after another, with only the tiniest, most necessary spaces to catch a quick breath. No quarter rests. Or, God forbid, half or whole rests!
I get it. Life gets busy. And for those of us Type A personalities in the world, even an ordinary day is more satisfying when it full of structure rather than space.
As a pastor, my "work-week" runs Sunday through Thursday. Saturday night through Thursday on weekends when I preach at our evening worship. Friday is my reliable day off. Friday is the day that I have nothing in particular to do, and it is the day that Sam stays home from daycare with me. What should be a blissful expanse of unstructured time - time between the notes - has been invaded by the psychological comfort of structure.
Every Friday, after Matt leaves for work, Sam and I get washed up and dressed. About 9:00 a.m., we make our way to the Magpie Coffeeshop downtown. We walk when it's nice out, we drive when it's cold or rainy. I order three scrambled eggs, two slices of toast, and a cup of coffee. Sam drinks water from his cup and munches Cheerios while we wait for our food. When it arrives, I split the eggs in half and put hot sauce on my half. The other half I give to Sam. As well as half the toast. We linger and eat and I finish my coffee, and we take the long way home so that Sam can fall asleep for a morning nap.
While Sam naps, I do some chores, watch a little TV, perhaps do some knitting until lunchtime. Afternoons are playtime, maybe another walk, maybe grocery shopping, maybe an afternoon nap. At 4:30 p.m. or so, I start working toward dinner. We eat at 5:30ish when Matt comes home, and dinner leads to bathtime, and bathtime leads to playtime and storytime, and then to bedtime.
This is the routine. Don't get me wrong. It's lovely. I cherish our mama-toddler time. But even still, things happen in order. They have structure. Because I can't help myself. I'm not great with unstructured time, and especially managing unstructured time for a toddler. And so instead of letting Fridays be days of silence between the notes, Fridays are instead just different notes, quieter ones perhaps, but notes nonetheless.
Ah, my friends, as much as I know and understand that space is important, that a break between one note and another is essential, it is so very difficult to make that happen. We always feel like we should be doing something or planning somethings or being purposeful.
But we have a God who cares about the rests. We have an introvert Jesus who cares about space and silence to reflect and recharge and to punctuate his ministry with starting points and ending points and good boundaries.
When you exercise regularly, and especially when you are doing strength training, the common wisdom is to give yourself rest days between workouts, because your body not only needs time to recover, but you also need that space and time to let the muscles you've worked rebuild and reshape. There have been studies done about how studying hard and then sleeping the night is more effective than staying up all night cramming, because your brain uses your sleeping time to process and embed what you've learned into your brain. Same goes for practicing music. You work hard, but then you sleep or rest and let the things you've done work their way into your memory. We need the space between the notes for our physiological and psychological and intellectual benefit. And we need it for our spiritual benefit, too.
I think that there is a spiritual discipline to asking the question "What now?" instead of asking the question, "What next?" Because the space between notes is an invitation to the present moment, a chance to finish hearing what came before so that you are able to clearly hear what is about to come after. Remember Elijah, waiting to hear from God? God wasn't in the earthquake, the fire, the whirlwind, the noise. God was in the sound of sheer silence. I tend to lump together the idea of God as a "still small voice" with the word of God to the Psalmist: "be still and know that I am God."
How many of us, even in our life of prayer, forget to leave space between the notes? When we are rushed for time or overflowing with intercessions for our world and ourselves and our human condition, we tend to pray by spilling out lots of words, trying to say as much to God as we can in the short time that we have to pray. But if God speaks in the silence, if our instructions are to be still, to know God instead of merely to be known by God, then we are probably missing something if we don't leave a few gaps for God to speak. Or for us to recognize that we are in the presence of God.
At one of my congregations, we held periodic contemplative worship services, where a time of singing, reading, and reflection would give way to ten minutes of silence. Ten full minutes.
You know as well as I do how slowly time passes when all is silent. Even when I take a twenty-second pause for reflection in our weekly liturgy of confession and forgiveness, even when I leave a full minute of silence following a sermon at evening prayer, there is always a bit of a tightening in the assembled congregation, a little stiffness and anxiety that grows with each passing second. We're good at being silent for, like, five seconds. And then we start getting worried and antsy and wondering if we are "doing" the silence right, if we are thinking about the right things, if we are wrong for getting bored or distracted. We start to look around and wonder if other people are feeling comfortable or uncomfortable, and then we start worrying that people are looking at us and thinking the same things, and we start to feel very vulnerable. Because silence feels so...private. And how do you do something so private in the face of others?
So try to imagine ten full minutes of silence, in company with one another. The first few seconds feel fine. And then the next minute or two feels weird and uncomfortable. And you feel so aware of how slowly time is passing. But after about three minutes, something happens. You start to settle in. Your brain settles down, and you start focusing on your thoughts, even if they are off-topic, and you start going along with the flow. You stop noticing the sounds of breathing and fidgeting around you, and you find yourself hunkered down in this warm, thoughtful place. It gets comfortable. So comfortable that these next minute fly by, and time is up before you know it, and you feel a little sad that you have to come out of your cocoon and move onto the next part of the liturgy.
Once you let yourself truly settle into the space between the notes, you wonder why you ever cared so much about the sound of the notes in the first place. I suspect that a regular practice of silence would probably result in looser hold on our schedules and our anxiety about getting things planned and prepped. We'd still do the important and necessary things, but maybe we wouldn't be so wrapped up in them. We might end up more in touch with our thoughts, our selves, our creation, our God. We might have better eyes to see and appreciate beauty, and we might have better hands and hearts to be creative and caring in our world.
The space between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.
We hear God in the sound of sheer silence.
Be still.
My high school band director said a lot of things.
When we lost our focus and started to speed up, he would say "Now now, we're not rushin'...we're American!" And when we were grappling with how to play runs of five notes at a time, he would illustrate the rhythm by saying "Opportunity, opportunity, opportunity now." (Because "opportunity" is a great five-syllable word.)
The earliest stages of learning to read music, sing music, and play music involve learning how to make the sounds and read the notes. Which keys to push down, which feeling in your throat, which dot on the page symbolized which key on the piano. From there, music becomes a matter of notes and counting at the same time. Counting to four. Counting to three. Counting to six. Then counting gives way to rhythm - some notes are longer and some notes are shorter, and some notes land right on the beat while other notes jump in early or show up late.
And when you are in high school band, you are pretty good at the notes, the counting, and the rhythm. But you are still focused more on the sound part of music than on the silence part. Rests are simply the times that you aren't playing, but they are really just an inconvenience. They interrupt your playing and don't hold much meaning.
So to hear that the silence is as important as the sound was a new concept for me as a teenager. One that took a little convincing.
It makes sense when you think about it. Notes have a duration, and the only way that you can know a note's duration is by giving it a clear start and a clear end. The space between notes is what distinguishes emphasized, tenudo notes from chopping, staccato ones. There is something magical about a band or a choir or an orchestra coming to a climax point where all are playing or singing loud and full, and then all cut off at the exact same moment, leaving the chord echoing and then floating away in to the silence. The space between quiet notes invites a listener to lean in, to engage, to focus on what they are hearing. The space between loud notes offers a relief to the ears, and a sense of anticipation for what notes are about to come next.
In the music of creation, God played six amazing chords all in a row, each one building in complexity and volume. The great orchestra of the universe played a symphony that started with a simple, two-voice melody, and with each successive movement, added harmony and counterpoint, fanfare and descant and probably even a pretty nice trio section like you'd find in any good Sousa march. But after all the playing, after all the singing, after the six-day wall of sound swelling into the cosmos....
...silence.
On the seventh day, God rested. Before leaping into the next creative task, God took some space. Not unlike the way that Jesus, after teaching the crowds and healing the masses, would head off by himself, to take some space and to find some silence.
Maybe it is just my introvert tendencies, but I find great comfort and solidarity in having a God (and a God-in-the-flesh) who needs some silence between the notes.
I mean, I know that it was the Spirit who drove Jesus into the wilderness after his baptism, for forty whole days, and I know that he was hungry and tired and encountered demons out there. But there's a little part of me that thinks Jesus also relished his alone time, at least at first, since at his baptism, he was there in the river for all the crowds to see, and he heard the voice of God and there was the dove and the heavens opening, and it was quite the spectacle. After something so big and so public, I suspect that Jesus was grateful to be whisked away by the Spirit for some time to reflect and to recharge...at least until things got too hot, too hungry, and too devilish.
(Click link below to continue reading)
It isn't difficult to look around and realize that we, as a whole, are not particularly great at leaving space between the notes. We aren't very comfortable with having gaps in our knowledge, our schedules, or our space.
Case in point? The Keret House. In 2009, Polish architect Jakub Szczesny spotted a three-foot gap between buildings in Warsaw, and decided to build a three-foot-wide apartment in that space. Too small to be a legal residence, it is an "art installation" that is complete with bed and desk, kitchen, bathroom, shower, and a front door that opens like a trap door from the floor. It is intriguing and sunny and claustrophobic and crazy. There are certain positive values to tiny-space living: minimizing unnecessary possessions and luxuries, small environmental footprint, the value of efficiency in design. But I can't help but think that this installation also points to sadder truths of our existence: the greed that makes us want to claim open space for our own, and the tendency to fill in gaps rather than allow for space - even ugly or uncomfortable space.
If this is a metaphor for anything, it is a metaphor for our persistence in filling up empty spaces. For adding things to our schedules. For keeping our lives structured instead of free-form. For filling up our days and making sure we are prepared for what's next, instead of allowing ourselves to rest in the present moment. By choice or by necessity, the song of life always goes on, it seems. A great wall of sound, notes following one after another, with only the tiniest, most necessary spaces to catch a quick breath. No quarter rests. Or, God forbid, half or whole rests!
I get it. Life gets busy. And for those of us Type A personalities in the world, even an ordinary day is more satisfying when it full of structure rather than space.
As a pastor, my "work-week" runs Sunday through Thursday. Saturday night through Thursday on weekends when I preach at our evening worship. Friday is my reliable day off. Friday is the day that I have nothing in particular to do, and it is the day that Sam stays home from daycare with me. What should be a blissful expanse of unstructured time - time between the notes - has been invaded by the psychological comfort of structure.
Every Friday, after Matt leaves for work, Sam and I get washed up and dressed. About 9:00 a.m., we make our way to the Magpie Coffeeshop downtown. We walk when it's nice out, we drive when it's cold or rainy. I order three scrambled eggs, two slices of toast, and a cup of coffee. Sam drinks water from his cup and munches Cheerios while we wait for our food. When it arrives, I split the eggs in half and put hot sauce on my half. The other half I give to Sam. As well as half the toast. We linger and eat and I finish my coffee, and we take the long way home so that Sam can fall asleep for a morning nap.
While Sam naps, I do some chores, watch a little TV, perhaps do some knitting until lunchtime. Afternoons are playtime, maybe another walk, maybe grocery shopping, maybe an afternoon nap. At 4:30 p.m. or so, I start working toward dinner. We eat at 5:30ish when Matt comes home, and dinner leads to bathtime, and bathtime leads to playtime and storytime, and then to bedtime.
This is the routine. Don't get me wrong. It's lovely. I cherish our mama-toddler time. But even still, things happen in order. They have structure. Because I can't help myself. I'm not great with unstructured time, and especially managing unstructured time for a toddler. And so instead of letting Fridays be days of silence between the notes, Fridays are instead just different notes, quieter ones perhaps, but notes nonetheless.
Ah, my friends, as much as I know and understand that space is important, that a break between one note and another is essential, it is so very difficult to make that happen. We always feel like we should be doing something or planning somethings or being purposeful.
But we have a God who cares about the rests. We have an introvert Jesus who cares about space and silence to reflect and recharge and to punctuate his ministry with starting points and ending points and good boundaries.
When you exercise regularly, and especially when you are doing strength training, the common wisdom is to give yourself rest days between workouts, because your body not only needs time to recover, but you also need that space and time to let the muscles you've worked rebuild and reshape. There have been studies done about how studying hard and then sleeping the night is more effective than staying up all night cramming, because your brain uses your sleeping time to process and embed what you've learned into your brain. Same goes for practicing music. You work hard, but then you sleep or rest and let the things you've done work their way into your memory. We need the space between the notes for our physiological and psychological and intellectual benefit. And we need it for our spiritual benefit, too.
I think that there is a spiritual discipline to asking the question "What now?" instead of asking the question, "What next?" Because the space between notes is an invitation to the present moment, a chance to finish hearing what came before so that you are able to clearly hear what is about to come after. Remember Elijah, waiting to hear from God? God wasn't in the earthquake, the fire, the whirlwind, the noise. God was in the sound of sheer silence. I tend to lump together the idea of God as a "still small voice" with the word of God to the Psalmist: "be still and know that I am God."
How many of us, even in our life of prayer, forget to leave space between the notes? When we are rushed for time or overflowing with intercessions for our world and ourselves and our human condition, we tend to pray by spilling out lots of words, trying to say as much to God as we can in the short time that we have to pray. But if God speaks in the silence, if our instructions are to be still, to know God instead of merely to be known by God, then we are probably missing something if we don't leave a few gaps for God to speak. Or for us to recognize that we are in the presence of God.
At one of my congregations, we held periodic contemplative worship services, where a time of singing, reading, and reflection would give way to ten minutes of silence. Ten full minutes.
You know as well as I do how slowly time passes when all is silent. Even when I take a twenty-second pause for reflection in our weekly liturgy of confession and forgiveness, even when I leave a full minute of silence following a sermon at evening prayer, there is always a bit of a tightening in the assembled congregation, a little stiffness and anxiety that grows with each passing second. We're good at being silent for, like, five seconds. And then we start getting worried and antsy and wondering if we are "doing" the silence right, if we are thinking about the right things, if we are wrong for getting bored or distracted. We start to look around and wonder if other people are feeling comfortable or uncomfortable, and then we start worrying that people are looking at us and thinking the same things, and we start to feel very vulnerable. Because silence feels so...private. And how do you do something so private in the face of others?
So try to imagine ten full minutes of silence, in company with one another. The first few seconds feel fine. And then the next minute or two feels weird and uncomfortable. And you feel so aware of how slowly time is passing. But after about three minutes, something happens. You start to settle in. Your brain settles down, and you start focusing on your thoughts, even if they are off-topic, and you start going along with the flow. You stop noticing the sounds of breathing and fidgeting around you, and you find yourself hunkered down in this warm, thoughtful place. It gets comfortable. So comfortable that these next minute fly by, and time is up before you know it, and you feel a little sad that you have to come out of your cocoon and move onto the next part of the liturgy.
Once you let yourself truly settle into the space between the notes, you wonder why you ever cared so much about the sound of the notes in the first place. I suspect that a regular practice of silence would probably result in looser hold on our schedules and our anxiety about getting things planned and prepped. We'd still do the important and necessary things, but maybe we wouldn't be so wrapped up in them. We might end up more in touch with our thoughts, our selves, our creation, our God. We might have better eyes to see and appreciate beauty, and we might have better hands and hearts to be creative and caring in our world.
The space between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.
We hear God in the sound of sheer silence.
Be still.
Tags:
space