Washington National Cathedral

Lloyd: Good morning. It’s wonderful to have you here today. This is something that has been in the planning for a long, long time, and we are thrilled to be underway with the Sunday Forum at the Washington National Cathedral. We’ve sensed for a long time that an important conversation is getting underway all across the country, and it was important for this Cathedral to be part of it. Religion is now on the agenda for America. And it seemed to us that a Cathedral that seeks to serve the nation ought to be jumping to be part of that conversation, and in this case, to bring the liveliest, most creative thinkers, both in Washington and beyond Washington, to come be part of the conversation with us.

Lloyd: Welcome all of you to this Sunday morning Forum, this new adventure in the life of the Cathedral. We intend week by week to take up the major issues of faith in public life and to have thoughtful conversations in which we actually listen to each other and try to learn from one another. Our hope that this can week by week be a place that people can turn to think more broadly about what their own faith means and what faith can mean for our public life together.

I want to welcome our two very special guests this morning, Emily Saliers, who is one half of the award-winning folk rock group, The Indigo Girls. She looks like more than a half, but she just counts as half. And her father Don Saliers, who is a very distinguished well-known theologian and church liturgist and jazz musician who recently retired from Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. They are here today to talk about the role of music in our spiritual lives. What music can mean for us, what it has meant for us, and how the experience of song, anthem, instrumental music, can deepen our own exploration into God. So today we’re going to start with an Indigo Girls song to get things going.

Emily, would you like to introduce the piece for us?

Emily: I’ll go grab my guitar and introduce the piece. I’m half of Indigo Girls today, but my dad is going to join me in being an Indigo Boy! This is actually the debut of this song for my dad as an Indigo Boy. First time we’ve ever performed it together in public together. It is a song that Amy and I recorded called “Power of Two”, and it’s very simply a love song, and it expresses the exponential power of love in its purity. So it’s just a feel-good little pop love song, and here we go.

(Song)

Thank you.

Lloyd: Thank you. That was wonderful. A beautiful love song right here in this Cathedral on Sunday morning. Does that make sense to you?

Emily: Makes perfect sense to me

Don: Why not?

Emily: It’s such a beautiful space for singing to the glory of the universe and God and it feels secular and sacred to me. It’s all one and the same. So a love song, a song of praise, they go hand in hand.

Lloyd: Secular and sacred, one in the same. Say some more about that. How do you see that?

Emily: I grew up in a family…we went to church and we sang sacred music and Dad’s an ordained Methodist minister, and so experienced the church and sacred music, but then I became part of a bar band. So Amy and I got fake IDs and went into bars and started playing, but what we experienced was the transformation of lives through music whether it was a motley crew of people gathered at the bar to come and sing and play and share all their trials and tribulations of life. And I experienced the same thing in church through sacred music and the words. So it’s all about the transformative power of music. And it can take place in any setting whether it’s deemed secular or sacred.

Don: And there’s a genetic account here too. My father was a New York jazz musician. So—

Emily: That’s right. We mixed it up.

Lloyd: Well, I want to stay with that for just a minute because I think you’re saying something intuitively makes sense to us, the notion that music can be transformative and something about listening to music together in a bar or a church can have a real power to it. But why do you think that’s so? What is it that music does in us and to us and both drives us deeper and pulls us together?

Don: Well, we could just begin with the simplest fact that music is so ephemeral and so passing, but it goes so deep, it goes so deep into the body and into the soul. I like that old definition, “Music is the language of the soul made audible, made palpable.” Now not all music does that. Let’s not just say music in general, but music that’s offered as a gift and music that’s offered for people to have communion. So here I am, a white guy in church, and she’s out there on Saturday night, but our conversation through the book we wrote together and through our own experiences has again and again circled around to the fact that music takes people very deeply into their own life, if they allow it. The problem is we live in a music-saturated culture where music does everything. So the whole question becomes, once again, of attunement, listening well, listening to each other, sharing the music.

Emily: I find too that music often times is the sound track of our lives. I know it’s true for me and my friends. We talk about songs that really move us and inform our lives and solidify our experiences and memory. And then in the future we look back and that music is associated all those things that have gone. So it’s a very powerful tool for memory and the extension of life. It’s sort of a travelogue. For lack of a better way to put it, but a sound track for our lives.

Lloyd: There are songs that when you hear, you are right back driving down the highway thirty years ago, and you’re there again. And that can be a powerful spiritual connection to who you are and who you’ve been becoming along the way. But you all engage the musical tradition and the spiritual dimension of music in different ways: a theologian reflecting theologically and teaching liturgy in the context of a school of theology—I guess you just retired from doing that; and you, out there performing and in the bars. Say something about how your common love of music and your own individual explorations have brought you to these different vocations.

Emily: That’s a hard question to answer. Well my singing partner, Amy Ray, we grew up together. We were sort of the trajectory of our lives I think was meant to be, and we both grew up going to church singing sacred music as I’d said. Early on when we became friends and started playing together, a lot of the influence of sacred music was there in our arrangements, either with descant parts or singing off each other, singing counter-part, but I think we found our comfort zone playing in those bars for whatever reason, didn’t make a specific choice to not carry on with sacred music but incorporate those influences into our own arrangements. And then just felt comfortable setting up our own tours and playing for people. At that time in Atlanta there was a huge music community, and our friends would come. Some would play flute. Someone was in a punk band. Someone played keyboard. Someone sang harmony. And it was like a congregation, like a secular congregation. And we found through that sort of hootenanny experience, that satisfied our souls in conjunction with music.

Don: In my case of course we all, especially those gathered here, know that there are some things that you don’t believe until you sing. Think, for example, of when you’ve been in deep grief and your voice cracks. You cannot sing. And yet a singer or brother beside you is singing “For All the Saints” or “When the Saints Come Marching In.” So for me, language takes on so many more dimensions when it’s set musically. And then the whole question how language is evoked by non-verbal music, by the sound of a cello. One of my grandest experiences you might say after Messiaen and Mahler and Saint Saens’ Symphony, etc., a single harmonica played from the back of a church playing “Amazing Grace.”

I’ve got a great story about, and I’m going to take all the time up—and Emily knows this story—I was interviewing people asking about singing practices in churches. And I was in the holy city, Charleston. And I was interviewing an octogenarian Sunday school class that had been together for sixty years. They called themselves the Young Women’s’ Class. Only in Methodism, and God has a sense of humor, but anyway, I asked them, “What are your favorite hymns?” and you could probably name them: “Amazing Grace,” “Blessed Assurance,” “I Come to the Garden Alone,” “How Great Thou Art,” the all time hit parade of those. And I asked, “why do they mean so much to you?” And here’s what they answered. One woman said, “When I hear that I hear my grandmother’s voice. When I hear that I’m back in the church basement, chicken suppers, or barbecue. When I hear that, funerals, weddings.” They were telling me about the body memory that those that music included.

There’s a humorous ending to this story. I said, “Do you know any new ones?” And one very diminutive woman, maybe 4’ 11”, I found out later she was 90, she stood up and she said, “Oh, I like this new hymn.” I said, “Oh, what’s that?” She said, “Lift High the Cross.” So she was adding to her own vocabulary.

Lloyd: Don, in your writing you make what is has come for a small group of us become a rather provocative comment. You say for a great many people the primary formative experience in their spiritual growth are hymns and the music that they sing. Now, we preachers aren’t so pleased to hear that. We like to think that we work very hard and we’re teaching them everything they need to know. But it’s—the music?

Don: Ah, there’s great preaching in this great Cathedral.

Lloyd: He had to say that.

Don: But, I’ll ask the assembly, isn’t it often that sermon is completed in a final hymn or in an anthem, or your mind after the sermon, goes back to an Introit or the singing of the Gloria. And suddenly those two are inter-animating? So, yes, I wouldn’t want to take anything away from great preaching. Great preaching, when you have it, and the way great music animates that.

Emily: Well, an example of Civil Rights Movement where it’s very important the Word is preached and spoken to motivate the people and the ideas are expressed for liberation of those who are oppressed. But then it’s when you really sing the songs that our souls are galvanized. So I don’t think you can have one without the other. The words and the music are just.....

Lloyd: You’re right, and there are a number of times when the preacher has done his or her best and they know it’s not so good, and they think, “It’s over to the choir and to the hymns to do the work for the day.”

Don: We’re from Atlanta, so it would be a characteristic of “Help him, Jesus. Help him, Jesus!” The thing I’ve admired so much about Emily and Amy’s work, those of you who know their work for nearly twenty years now, is how full of social justice it was. And when we began to write this book together we began to think about the great social movements, certainly the Civil Rights movement here, the anti-apartheid movement, and so on. I was with Bishop Tutu for a couple years. He was teaching at my institution, and we often shared this business about ‘no music/no anti-apartheid movement.’ And the same thing is true of the American Civil Rights movement, and labor movements and so on. And that’s what I have admired so much about your work has been so connected between music and social vision.

Emily: Well, it deepens the experience of performing. Any time we do a benefit concert or bring people together for a common cause especially with community issues, it’s so much more life informing than just playing a concert. There’s something happening there spiritually.

Lloyd: Say some more about Indigo Girls have been really committed to social justice. How did you find your way there? And how conscious are you in not a benefit but a regular concert that there needs to be a social justice dimension to what you are doing?

Emily: Well, I think very early on Amy and I were just raised with basic philosophies that you’re members of a community, we’re citizens of the world, we’re all in a human family, and there are many of us who are troubled or oppressed and that we have all work together to alleviate oppression whenever we can. We just found early on in our careers when we still a bar band, not that difficult to arrange a benefit concert, bring in other members of the musical community, bring in members of the community just to express concern and raise money and awareness for these issues, and we just played a show and everybody had a good time. So there were serious issues involved, but music lifted our hearts and we took it out into the world. It made us want to be more active. Amy and I now can’t separate our activism from our music. We’re married to each other, and as I say, there’s something very special about playing a benefit concert than just playing your own show. Every single time.

Lloyd: What are some of the great social activism songs? We think of course of “We Shall Overcome” that really changed history.

Emily: Well, for the Civil Rights movement, that was a key one. Woody Guthrie songs, “Songs for the Folk”. “Blowing in the Wind,” Bob Dylan.

Don: And you think of South Africa you think of “Siyahamba,” “We Are Marching in the Light of God.” It’s kind of a fun thing that the Church is finally listening to the world and the Christian world is receiving back from other cultures its own song. As tentative as we may be, crossing over, I think that’s another thing that music does. It causes us to cross over into one another’s lives, cultures, and so the Church for the last 10-20 years has been receiving the gifts of other cultures. “Siyahamba” would be one of the great examples of that.

Lloyd: You have written a book. We have just mentioned it. It is called “A Song to Sing: A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice.” Let’s talk about that spiritual practice. Now we have someone who has probably taught a lot of Bach and the great choral tradition and someone who is singing contemporary songs. How might those be part of the spiritual practice, a way of deepening our relationship with God?

Don: I think the first thing that needs to be said is that music sung well and sung attentively is very close to prayer. It’s very close to prayer. When you think physiologically alone, breathing, heartbeat, investing one’s own body in the melody and the harmony, and also being part of the community, singing as communities, it’s a rare and wonderful thing, and in our culture when so much music is done for us or to us, to be able to sing together, I think itself is a kind of spiritual gesture.

Then of course there’s the question of intensifying our experience over time. T.S. Eliot’s old line still works. When you hear music that deeply, you are the music while the music lasts. And I do think there are these connections between poetry and prayer and music and prayer. Not all music does that. We have to be honest about that. But that would be one starting point. And so the practice of music, the singing together is I think at least proto-prayer. And listening to each other is in our culture, listening to each other is an amazing gift in all kinds of ways. So there are multiple dimensions.

Emily: And as a song writer I think there’s the practice, well for Amy and me, we sit down and think about what’s going on in the world, what can be worked on, how are we related to each other. That’s what music does. It brings people together in common experience because we all know deep in our hearts we’re much more alike than we are different. And the world tends to factionalize us and it’s a fractured dysfunctional world needs help and love. And I think as an artist we are trying to think about those things, or write about those things, that is a spiritual practice because the ultimate goal or aim is to come to understanding and then to take that out in the world to alleviate suffering. And art plays such a role in deepening our lives, not just music, but all forms of art. And I think one of our roles as writers is to dig deep into the stuff of life and try and disseminate that as best we can in our own feeble ways sometimes, but in a way that brings us altogether and understanding.

Lloyd: I’m struck Sunday by Sunday here how much we look to the hymns to take us somewhere. Just every Sunday we start a service on a journey going deeper into the mystery of God and if we sing “Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven,” we may have come off the street just finishing reading the Washington Post and worried about the news of the world, or taken a phone call, or argued with a family member, and all of a sudden the powerful music and the words say ‘you’re part of a bigger world than you thought ten minutes ago.” And has this enormous power to reframe. The words alone wouldn’t do it. It’s the common bodies, common voices, singing together about this bigger vision of who we are and what we’re made for.

Don: I think music comes so close to us because it gives us the very shape of the very way we experience the world. And then when you think of the Biblical traditions, Hebrew and Christian traditions here for us, lament and doxology, right? I mean, we settle for so little in this culture, this domesticated, privatized little comfort zone. When the Church has a song that is wilder than that, and it certainly is wild outside the Church too, but I’m thinking, can we hear again the ancient words of lament, the world cries out, it cries and whispers in the streets and in songs we don’t sing. But the Church has the opportunity to put together this enormous emotional range before God. And God wishes to hear this. So the notion of singing and God as hearing us … Kierkegaard says God’s the audience … is a stunning experience. As you say, it reframes everything.

Lloyd: And so if we are starting at 11:15 this morning on a journey deeper into the whole mystery of God and the whole universe, words alone won’t take us there. What we need is melody and song and choral majesty and intimacy, all those things, to tap places in us that are pretty well defended that we won’t have access to unless music opens something up.

Don: Yes, as Henry Nouwen used to say, “Not with closed fists, but with open hands.” And music pries them open. I do think in that sense liturgical music combines words, music, gesture, palpable symbols, we eat and drink together, we bath, we have oil on us, we put ashes of mortality on us. There’s something about music and words at work in ritual context. And that’s why there are proto-quasi-rituals going on all the time. For example, any of you who’ve been to an Indigo Girls concert and they’ve right down there bodily there all the way through, and then ending the concert, as sometimes you guys do, with Finlandia, straight a cappella…if any of you have ever heard that… So another thing that music does is bring us to silence, and I think that’s another thing a space like this is conducive to the silence we do not have in our lives. So music can break the silence, but it can bring us to silence. And that’s spiritual I think.

Lloyd: Karl Barth who wrote magnificently about Mozart’s music especially, seems to me he said somewhere that up in heaven the angels when they’re on duty are singing Bach Chorales. But when they’re off duty and on their own they are singing Mozart.

Don: Yes, but they’re also listening to Duke Ellington.

Lloyd: Well, that was my question: are they listening to the Indigo Girls up there? That’s what I want to know! Is there a particular piece of music for each of you that’s been especially significant, life changing, transforming?

Emily: Well, in the classical world, for me, one of Elgar’s Variations, the Enigma Variation, #14, I had this experience when I was just a teenager on my way to choir practice or something, something productive. And there was a big storm like only Southern storms if you’ve experienced them in the summer, just huge thunder clouds, brewing and brooding, and you can smelling it in the air, and I’m driving, and I was listening to the classical station and this piece came on, this Variation. And I don’t know if know this particular Variation, or the Enigma Variations, but it has all that suspension and swelling and build, and all of a sudden this piece became what was happening outside in reality in the physical world but made it even larger than it was. And I was completely struck by that in that moment and felt that for me that was a transformative piece that spoke to the power of music.

Don: Well, she’s too modest, but there are many of their songs that are very special for me. One is “History of Us,” which starts out as a love song, but it’s really about the human condition and human passion. If I had to name one thing. Boy, that is tough.

Emily: It’s Bach though, for you, isn’t it?

Don: Okay, the Goldberg, early and late, Glen Gould. But I think Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” has it because it’s so takes us into the travail and the deep suffering, but also its requiem is also “Grant them eternal rest.” A final word for all of us and the whole world. That’s one for me that I can’t never tire of. I keep getting stuff from it.

Emily: Do you know Leonard Cohen’s “Alleluia”? Do you all know that one? Well, I can’t sing it. It’s a very deep song. It’s about inter-personal relationships, but the chorus has to do it. It’s a hallelujah all this life, this struggle, this love, and it brings together very clearly, well obviously sacred reference to Hallelujah, but the very secular feeling of how we just struggle through life and our relationships of loss, and it brings together, it’s a very mystical song. Maybe someone can better articulate it better than I can, but... brokenness, a broken hallelujah.

Don: And may I be personal? You guys did this at the loss of our youngest daughter, her younger sister, you all played it at graveside. I hadn’t heard it before. Well, need I say more?

Lloyd: You could probably name more pieces of music for each of you that reach back pretty far. Thinking about music in a church setting. Don, you’re a church musician. Emily, you operate more outside the church with what you do. There are a lot of debates now about what kinds of music belong in church. There’s a lot of pop music that’s appearing, a pop-style music in church. I’d love to get a thought from each of you about what seems to be happening in the culture wars about music in church, and what kinds of music you think are bearing fruit in a church setting. Don, from you first and then Emily.

Don: Okay. I’ve got a one liner on this one. It will not do justice to the complexity of your good question. How can you sing, Out of the depths I cry to you, in C major with 1-4-5-chord patterns? You can’t do it. “How out of the depths I cry to you Oh Lord, Oh Lord....” I mean, where the music idiom is incongruent with the depths of the text and where it’s going. I am not saying that you can’t have liveliness and you can’t have some sense of contemporary sound in there. What I’m asking is that the music idiom and the performance style be congruent with what the text has to say. And this means that it’s not just a question of style. It’s a question of the actual context of what’s going on there. So I would say. I have a very generous sense of what can work. But I am concerned that sometimes the most superficial aspects and worrisome aspects of the culture are actually being encoded. And it’s hard to get rid of that. You’ve heard me on that. But that’s a whole year’s conversation.

Emily: It’s interesting to me how heated a battle that actually is, when it comes down to what kind of music gets played or sung in church. People are angry about it if they feel they are losing what speaks to them. I can understand that. I personally, I’m not moved by folk services, even though I play acoustic guitar. That’s not what moves me in church, and I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t grow up in that tradition. I like the sound of the organ and the majestic Cathedral like this, and to me black gospel music moves me more than any other kind of music in church. But I know it can cause rifts in congregations, and it’s a very hard problem to solve. But I’ve had the experience of a certain kind of music in a church context that completely blocks my worship because I’m so distracted by the kind of music it is. Bums me out, but what can you do?

Lloyd: In a second, we’re going to take some questions from you all. And I’d love you to be thinking about what you might want to ask, and if you’ll raise your hand our producer Deryl Davis will direct our ushers to come find you one at a time. But before we do that, Don and Emily are going to perform another piece for us. This is a traditional Latin Hymn, “Dona Nobis Pacem,” “Give Us Peace,” set to a folk rock arrangement. Is that right?

Don: It’s our own arrangement. Some of you may know this. Gregory Norbert, who is a monastic, composed this, and this is our version with apologies to Father Gregory. But we’d like to have you join in because there is a refrain, “Dona Nobis Pacem.” It’s very simple. You’ll hear it, and you’ll want to sing, I think with us.

Emily: …tune this… because music prays better when it’s in tune, right, Dad?

“Dona Nobis Pacem” (music)

Lloyd: Funny, nobody wanted to clap after that. You took us to a different place.

Don: That’s exactly our point.

Emily: When you sing together something else happens too. Molecules are moved. Things change in a room. There aren’t that many opportunities to sing together, one is church and I guess the other is at an Indigo Girls concert. So that’s why they feel the same to me.

Lloyd: Well, you took us somewhere in that. We were taken to a different place. And questions from out there, yes?

Q: Emily, you described your relationship with organized religion as a lover’s quarrel. And Don being as deeply religious and involved as you are, I wonder if you can both speak to the time when it became obvious that Emily was in a sense going in a different direction. How did you feel about that from both of your perspectives, and how have you been able to keep the dialogue and the friendship going?

Don: When there’s love at the heart of a community, whether it’s a household or a church, and people grow and develop and finally state truths that you maybe weren’t prepared for, the love doesn’t stop. So for us it became included in our dialogue. As Luther used to say, “Singing in the car and talk around the table, those are the two great rituals of our family.” And so when it came time for Emily to say, “look this church thing, you know there’s a lot of stuff in the history of the church and the present behavior of the church toward all kinds of things, and I’m not part of that right now.” We needed to hear that. And so the transition for us was real, but sort of framed by this ongoing relationality that has been a gift. I don’t know what you want to say about this.

Emily: I appreciate all that you’ve said. And it’s true, as a gay person, it is impossible not to feel the hurt of the barrage of an organized really political body constantly telling you that you’re not valid, that you’re not worthy, and even some say that you’re going to hell. As much as I never struggled spiritually when I discovered my sexuality, and I never did, when you have those voices that are—and even now in the Church the great debate, the great schism over homosexuality, we talk about this all the time—but you know and I know there are plenty of people from the queer community who are faithful Christians and they are hanging in there. And there are congregations that are reconciling congregations. We have a Baptist church in Atlanta that got kicked out from the mother ship because they’re all inclusive. Those are the Christians of great courage. That’s where I find my home within the Church. The rest of it, I feel that it is my responsibility as a citizen to argue with those voices that are against us and to try to promote understanding through the context of us all getting to know each other better. So that’s my goal. But I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Don: One of the things is that this issue is only one, and what I’ve loved about the way you talk and the way you guys work is that the larger question is the social vision of the Church: where is the Church in some of the other things that are crying out? Where is our voice? And one of the things I keep hearing is that the voices often are outside the Church which we have to listen to. The prophetic side, I mean, where is Amos in the Church? Well, Amos is out there somehow crying deliverance in a song he writes. Does that help? Is that a start?

Q: Can you say that within the lyrics of the music is the hidden Christ, and as he touches us without the name? I had a great experience the first time I saw the Bolshoi dance. I did not know the word ballet, but I thought I saw something beyond, and I think through music when the subject and the object are indivisible, God, Christ, just illumines us. Would you like to comment on this?

Emily: I agree.

Don: Thank you, brother.

Lloyd: Could you restate that, Don, what he was saying, in your words?

Don: It’s the Christ who speaks to us Escondido, incognito, sine nomine. Thank you, Vaughn Williams. I mean we sing this Sine nomine tune. That cosmic Christ, that hidden Christ who speaks to us in the cries and in the joys and comes to us unbidden (I feel like Albert Schweitzer, it comes to us as of old, it comes unbidden), but this time in the songs of others. That’s a deep and profound mystical mysticism. The best kind of political mysticism I know. You said it so well. Nothing needs to be added.

Lloyd: Question here, on this side? And then I’ll have one from online I’ll put out.

Q: This is largely a question for Emily but when I think of the work you and Amy have done whether it’s the early questioning or “Closer to Fine” or sort of the praise of questioning in “Galileo,” and think of how much of your music is about a search and about questioning, I’m curious, do you see your music about questioning and the search to be part of your spirituality, or is it a critique or a challenge to the church. And a second part of that, do you find musical questioning to be a productive way to raise those challenges and perhaps to find some resolution to those questions?

Emily: Yes, I think it’s our modus operandi is to seek, to search and to make comment, but also to remain humble and try and glean understanding. I think, yes, when we’re writing songs, we’re really just combing through different issues and things that occupy our minds, or we’re combing through the stories of other people that brought their stories to us. And it is kind of like the big question of what’s it all about? It really is. And I find, for me, that is my spiritual pursuit. It’s not just so important to find the answers per se as it is to have the exploration of questioning and to put that to music and create art through that. To me it’s all about getting to love, really. Like getting to the core of love the best you can in challenging contexts. So the seeking is all about that. It’s all about where we treat each other better, love each other more, and to me, that’s a spiritual quest. And very cathartic to be able to write it in a song.

Lloyd: I have a question from on-line: The question is it seems that religion music, that is music other than hymns, reinforces an infantile view of faith. Should religious music be deeper than a feel good message?

Don: Sir, ma’am, yes. If we settle for the feel-good, then we’ve lost everything. And that’s why there has to be that element of prophecy, search, and above all, lavish attentiveness to the love of God. Now that can come in many forms, and some of us aren’t ready for the really heavy weight stuff that can come in the liturgy right at the heart of the Eucharist. So we also have to respect God’s respect for where we are. So some music may start as sort of lighter and lead some place. Think of our own lives. So I would say, no, if we reduce it all to feel-good, then well...

Emily: I don’t think we’re used to being so discerning about emotions and what’s actually going on. For me, “Dona Nobis Pacem” is very simple, it’s contemporary. You can play it on the guitar. It ain’t Bach. But to me it’s extremely moving. When I’m singing that and I hear you all and see you and I see my Dad and I get to experience this, it’s very moving and powerful to me. It makes me feel something. It feels simple in a way, but deep at the same time in conjunction with a piece that’s very simple musically. So I think you’ve got to be careful not to be judgmental or something about what music works for you spiritually in terms of how it’s constructed or how complex it is or what it’s history is. Because there’s always an opportunity to be moved.

Lloyd: We have time for one more very brief question. It must be brief.

Q: Not all pieces are quite like “Dona Nobis Pacem” which we all want. There are many religious pieces that are just nothing. And so that’s the only thing I would say that when it works it’s really marvelous. And we have to sort of recognize that because some of them, they’re out of date.

Don: Yes. Look, when the Church drowns in the language of Zion, it doesn’t breath anymore. I’m using deliberately baptismal imagery here. What we need, and that’s why sometimes I have to listen to music outside the Church in order to crawl out from under the cliches.

Q: Like rock music. I turned out on to rock music.

Don: That’s another discussion folks for another time. And I agree with you. There’s a lot of saccharin sentimentality parading in the name of theology. On the other hand, those women in that Church, I’m not going to take away what has been an idiom for their life. So that’s my pastoral side, my liturgical side, but I want the Church to sing into the mystery of faith, into our humanity, into God. That’s what animates us.

Emily: It’s getting more and more animated. I can feel it too.

Lloyd: Let me make a quick announcement and then we’ll wrap things up. Next week we have with us Francis Collins who’s the Director of the Human Genome Project, who’s going to help us look at this raging controversy between scientists, some of them atheists. Francis Collins is a scientist and is not. And what believers are saying these days. So, come be part of that conversation next week.

Just as we wrap up here, we invite you to stay for our 11:15 service of worship. People of any faith and none are welcome to join in as we take the journey that begins at 11:15 into the mystery of God. And finally, there’s coffee available back in the West End of the Cathedral in the Churchill porch just through the first set of doors. We’d love you to linger for some conversation as well.

Join me now in thanking our two wonderful guests today.