- I have never put my hope in any other but in You,
- O God of Israel
- who can show both anger
- and graciousness,
- and who absolves all the sins of suffering man
- Lord God,
- Creator of Heaven and Earth
- be mindful of our lowliness
- Spem in alium
- Listening to this 40 voiced, 8 part motet this afternoon, with the sun briefly apparent, flooding the room, suspended in peace. It is one of my favourite pieces: voices melting one into the other, soaring upwards in supplication.
- This afternoon I found myself pondering the words (adapted from the Book of Judith).
- I was reading 'Butcher's Broom', Neil M Gunn's novel of the Highland clearances. The first part describes a Highland community poised on the unknowing brink of disaster. It is a community that combines old traditional ways and the accepted imposition of a hard Calvinism. Here God is a supplicant of last resort and the imposition of a morality that cuts across more natural patterns of shared life: a God of anger or remote, capricious engagement. He could be the God of Tallis' motet.
- But that would be too simple a charge. The word translated as 'anger' here is more usually given as 'wrath' and 'wrath' is an objective response to strip away all those conditions that distort our being (that make us miss the 'mark of our being', its full home, namely 'sin'): 'who absolves all the sins of suffering man'.
- Like the wrathful deities in Buddhism that have purchase on our reality because they latch on our 'lowliness' - all the ways we invest in not being our radiant selves - mark our lowliness, says the motet, yet absolve us, strip away all impediments.
- This is not something, the music suggests, we do on our own. We step into the purging and transformation of God as a community. We cannot soar without other voices. That we are meant to soar, that the freedom of soaring is our freed nature, the music also gives, if you enter it, let it sing you.
Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
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