I am awed by the contributions of the not-famous, the moderately talented -- the 15th violinist, the accompanist, the singers in the chorus, the multitudes of smaller voices who sing Beethoven's Ninth at the Orchestra Hall but never Mimi at the Met….

The moderately talented are everywhere…. When we get sick, the show goes on, and the audience doesn't even notice. Yet collectively, we're indispensable and sometimes magnificent…The moderately talented have a particular kind of courage -- not the courage of those who climb mountains, but the courage of those who show up and practice….It puzzles and amazes me. The obvious rewards -- money and recognition -- aren't there, and the price is high. It would be so much less trouble to sit home and watch television.

This glorious insanity, it seems to me, has to do with an invisible instrument we carry inside us -- a creative spirit that must be expressed if the soul is not to die….There is never enough time. You are never as good as you want to be. There is never a perfect performance…You will ask yourself what you're doing here after a day's work at your day job, when you don't feel that good anyway, and your spouse is mad at you, and your kids say you never get anything right, and there isn't enough money to pay the bills.

Then suddenly it all flows -- a bar, a phrase, perhaps even a whole movement -- and you are quite literally the instrument of something higher. Then you know again creation's assignment: to learn the notes, to find your music… ___________________________________________________________________________________

The Amateur Hour
Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, November 11, 2001

Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, "Religion cannot exist without music. It is too abstract. Music comes before religion as emotion comes before thought, and sound before sense…[Music] lies deeper than thought, as sound strikes deeper in us than sight. …I believe one of [humankind's] earliest emotions was in response to a solemn sound."

Music is one of the most elemental of human creations. There is no culture in the world that we have ever known that is without music. It may be music very foreign to our Western ears, but it is there: tonal or a-tonal, chanted or sung, beaten out on drums, danced or played on a dizzying variety of instruments that human hands have made through millennia. Who first discovered that something like the sound of a bird's call could be made with finger and grass blade or reed? Who first learned that twine or gut strung over a gourd could suddenly give that gourd a voice born from plucking the strings? Who first stretched an animal hide over a log or a bowl and discovered a way to beat out rhythms that urged the feet into a dance?

And before all of these earliest of musicians came the first time the human voice was raised in something that would have to be called song. When did it happen? It must have been at nearly the same time that a human voice was used for speech, because music in all of its forms is that elemental for us, that basic, that essential. It has always given us ways to speak out the grief and the joy and the yearnings that run too deeply for words. It lets us tap into our hearts' overflow even when we don't know a name for the feelings that are held there.

Over a hundred and fifty years ago, Lydia Marie Child wrote, "While I listened, music was to my soul what the atmosphere is to my body; it was the breath of my inward life. I felt, more deeply than ever, that music is the highest symbol of the infinite and holy…With renewed force, I felt what I have often said, that the secret of creation lay in music…Sound led the stars into their places."

All of us can name a time in which music carried us to a new place, and many of us have had it happen so often we wouldn't know where to start in naming the times. Maybe it was in a regular worship service, when the notes of the piano stopped and it was only in that moment that we realized that while they were sounding, we had been carried entirely out of ourselves, immersed in the secrets that those notes could tell us.

It might have been when a choir took flight, each singular voice matched so perfectly to the music and the music to our mood that something seemed almost to break open, something got released, and we found ourselves in tears, or in a state of transcendent calm. Maybe it was at a rock concert, or in a jazz café; maybe it was when a group of friends gathered spontaneously and found the perfect harmonies. Or maybe it came on a busy downtown corner through a grubby street musician, or through a random spin on the radio stations, or a stranger humming or whistling on the subway.

When I was twenty-four I lived for one of the most glorious and liberated years of my life in Barcelona, learning Spanish, teaching English and waiting to find out what I would do with the rest of my life. I loved Barcelona and I thought, more than half the time, that I might end up living there for the rest of my life. After I'd been there more than a year I was utterly immersed in the language and the culture, to the point where my brain sometimes felt slow and sticky when I tried to write or think in English and even my dreams were happening in Spanish.

I was walking late one afternoon down Las Ramblas, the main avenue through the old section of town, when I suddenly heard a street musician playing saxophone with such a powerful, distinctive jazz abandon that I knew immediately it was an American playing. In the moment of recognition I was stabbed with the most ferocious homesickness I had ever felt. There were lots of reasons I ended up returning to the U.S. two months later, but the turn of mind that started my decision began with how my heart was moved by that wild and anonymous music from a footloose compatriot.

So music can change our hearts or our minds, sometimes in ways we don't expect and can't predict. But the most powerful thing about music is how thoroughly it belongs to us all, whether or not we are musicians ourselves, whether or not we can even carry a tune when we sing. I know people who are utterly tone deaf, who would never dream of singing outside of the shower and often not even there, who nevertheless take into themselves like the very air a piece of music they love.

Music doesn't depend on our ability to play it or sing it, only to receive it. And although I cannot quite imagine the experience of deafness and do not know how music might be received by the deaf, I know that it can be. I watch the fluent, flowing hands of the sign language interpreter for a group like "Sweet Honey in the Rock" and I know her hands are singing, and that the music translated through her is received by those who cannot hear. And my colleague Vic Carpenter raised a daughter who was born deaf, and who defied even the wildest predictions for her life by becoming a professional ballet dancer. Drawn by the passion she felt for rhythms she could see, she learned to count the music and bring it to life through her body.

Music belongs to everyone, and in that sense every human being is an amateur musician. The root of the word 'amateur' is the same as the Spanish word 'amor', 'love', and the English 'amorous'. An amateur is someone who does it for love, who makes or receives music because the music is rooted in our hearts. It is that heart-connection of music that makes it so essential in worship. We are a wordy bunch, and it would be a rare service indeed that did not feature the spoken word in a prominent way. But I believe it's the music that lifts our language above the prosaic and moves us into the realm of worship. And I believe it's the music, whether we are singing it or playing it ourselves or simply receiving it in gratitude, that binds us to one another most deeply, and has the greatest potential to carry us together to a new place of heart and mind. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer's words, "Song makes it possible to speak and to pray in the same word at the same time…The burden of our song goes far beyond all human words."

A fellow UU minister, Mark Belletini, writes, "The poetic phrase 'music of the spheres' came out of the Pythagorean theory that the order of the cosmos was found both in the rhythms of geometry and in the rhythms of music. Other Greek philosophers found the spiritual power of music in its physical quality…chants of the Buddhists and Vadantists resonate in the body as images of the larger harmony of the outward universe. A mantra may serve as an agent of healing. A drone may serve to immerse us into the indivisible whole….

The rhythms of Life itself, respiration, pulse, waking and sleeping, living and dying, prompt music and invite religious response. The sigh before a sunset or at the deathbed is the beginning of a hymn. The Biblical poets knew this. They used the word for throat to express the idea of spirit, and the word for breath to express an idea that [would later be called] psyche or soul."

This Sunday in particular we are celebrating the power of music in the part of our lives that is lived here, in this religious community. Our beloved Linda Pawelek has been with us as choir director for an extraordinary thirty years, and we are celebrating her tenacity today as well as her talent. There are hundreds of things that could be said in tribute to Linda for the choir she has guided, the music she has chosen, the unbelievable numbers of musicals and holiday concerts she has structured for us. But to me the most important of all her gifts is that Linda knows how to find the music within us, and she knows what to do to make it stronger, to give it back to us in harmonies we didn't know we had. She is the supreme amateur, in that her love for music colors every way in which she touches us and shapes this religious community to hear its own inner music and bring it out.

It seems particularly appropriate that the spoken word should yield to music on this Sunday, of all Sundays, and in a form that allows Linda to simply receive it for once instead of helping to create it. But behind the power of this choir and its guest director, Alan McCormack, and behind Bill Braun with all his gifts, and behind even Linda with the thirty years of shaping she has given to us, lies the music. And as the words of this hymn cry out, 'Wherever emptiness is found, let there be joy and glorious sound/ May the music never die in us.'. AMEN.