I wrote the following devotion ten years ago and share it with my theory students each Christmas.
January 1, 2011
by Charles J. Hulin IV
The times were tedious
And the people were oppressed.
Mary and Joseph, a contemplative and a visionary,
Wrapped in the Holy Spirit,
Gave birth to a humble child –
A heavenly child.
A star illuminates the scene,
Then and now.
Each new year I begin without my parents, I think more deeply about the
ways in which they shaped me as a person and an artist.
By being my mother’s son, I absorbed a sense of aesthetics. She painted,
planted, and played to fill every space and moment with beauty. This was
at no time more evident than at Christmas when visiting our thoroughly
decorated home could be a spiritual experience akin to visiting the most
ornate and thoughtfully-designed chapel.
When free to do so, my mother turned to thoughts of lines to sketch,
colors to coordinate, meals to prepare, and always, the elegant work of
her favorite singer, Jose Carreras. At one point, she lost sixty pounds
by walking four hours a day and dieting. She found the energy to keep
going during those otherwise drab hours of plodding along by listening to
Carreras on headphones. On returning from her walks, she often played a
single word or phrase from a recording for me, expressing some detail of
how beautiful the sounds were. In addition to listening while walking, she
also deprived herself of listening to Carreras while dining so that her
aesthetic desires could help her stand against her physical appetite.
My mother committed to this health regimen after her mother developed a
heart problem. My mother thought of her fear of losing her own mother and
wanted to be around for me for many years. She never hesitated to feel and
reflect in such a way as to bring about godly change in her own life.
Thank you, Mom.
My father was an orator. He had many gifts as a pastor – compassion,
commitment, and “no ulterior bone in his body” as my mother once put it.
But his passion was preaching.
He was focused on scripture and interpreting it “with the spirit and with
understanding.” He could see life-giving words in many passages that
others could not see, and he proclaimed those words with an urgency and
earnestness that matched both their gravity and joy. His great theme was
God’s love, and on that theme, he was unwavering.
Not only was he a great communicator in the pulpit, but his heart and
delivery matched the meaning of his message in every context in which he
spoke. He was loving with little children, fun with family, humble in
apologizing, and thoroughly honest in dying.
We need many more like him.
The gifts my parents gave me were very great. I pray that each one of you
can see the riches of personality and wisdom with which you have been
blessed through families and mentors, especially while those people are
still in this world with us.
Thanks to these thoughts on my own parents, I have started to see Mary and
Joseph differently this season.
The outstanding detail of Mary’s personality that I always remember being
explicitly stated in scripture is that she pondered things in her heart.
There is a warmth and sweetness about that, and I’ve always recognized it.
But might not this pondering go beyond the preciousness we sometimes
assign to it? Might not Mary have been a true contemplative?
Mary pondered things in her heart. She stayed connected with her
experiences and kept them growing within her. She was mental and
emotional. She felt and thought her way down paths where more light was
shed because she committed her effort to the most important things of
life. She could burst forth in inspired song because she dwelt in the
place of inspiration.
To me, Joseph’s behavior seems to have been that of a visionary. That is,
he was able to see, articulate, and pursue new ways of being. He was
willing to take the radical step of taking Mary as his wife and accepting
her child as a miracle. And when the time came to leave familiar land and
culture behind, he did not hesitate to take his family to Egypt.
And all of Mary’s contemplations and Joseph’s visions were tuned to God’s
purposes by their trust in the Holy Spirit.
As 2011 dawns, and as we are each poised in a moment in which our energies
might be gathered for moves in new directions, I want to suggest a
Christmas vision for our lives as artists that proceeds from these
thoughts.
As performers, I think we all need to be contemplatives AND visionaries. I
believe we already are. Maybe these words will help us to articulate our
nature and the nature of our work more consciously.
Surely we are contemplatives. We study scores, recordings, performances,
acoustics, audience responses, and even our selves. Particularly our
selves!
But we do not always recognize the holiness of these studies.
The actual moments of performance are rather brief. The musician’s life is
really about these studies, about practicing, about developing engagement
with pieces of music through an ever-growing relationship with them in the
practice room and the rehearsal hall as well as in quiet and informal
moments in which we find ourselves daydreaming about the unique character
of some melody that has become intertwined with who we are.
We need all of this contemplative activity because it opens us to
inspiration as well as to more nuanced thought and feeling. And we need
all the other more traditional contemplative activities for the same
reasons and for the health of our hearts – quiet things like prayer we
share only with God and looking for life-giving words on the pages of
scripture as well as more jubilant things like sharing in the diversity of
worship with a community of believers.
We must also be visionaries. I believe that any time we perform music, we
proclaim and model an eternally fresh and better way - a way in which
human emotion and the desire for order come together to create beauty, not
chaos; a way in which each part finds its true purpose functioning within
the whole; a way in which conflicts are resolved without destruction; a
way in which we all journey together and live up to the creative image of
God.
But to most actively engage in this proclamation, we need to believe in
our purpose and respond to it with our whole lives. We cannot play
beautifully but behave badly and expect God’s message to make it through
with clarity. Performer and listener alike need to be intentional about
integrating the sublime new way of the music into our living. Time and
again I feel that the gifts of art are squandered if we do not condition
ourselves to leave the concert hall in a spirit of prayer and goodwill
towards all people.
Another word I need to hear regarding being a visionary is that I must
communicate well. While it is not good to manipulate with emotion, it is
good to feel and to match one’s energy to that of the music at hand. While
I should not forget that there is an audience with me with whom I am
speaking though music, I should be honest about myself and my involvement
with music.
At the end of all my experiments with faith and music and all my
ruminations, after the occasional performance in which I feel that this
has truly been as it should be, I see that the only thing that will ever
be good enough is for me to be myself. Clear communication requires that.
Healing connection requires that. Love requires that.
This raises a question to which I think we probably need to return
throughout our lives – Who am I?
My intuition is that we are each probably more and less than we think we are.
Who we really are is definitely going to be good enough. All the voices
that say otherwise are not us.
At the same time, all the pushing we do and that we convince ourselves is
part of our personalities is not us either. In many ways, finding who we
are is a matter of removing notes that don’t belong in the music of our
lives.
Lately, I have had a fresh feeling about many passages of scripture with
which I have been familiar for a long time. As I thought about my
identity, it occurred to me that the words of scripture that exhort us to
do things might tell us things that children of God would be good at,
things that might just show us who we are.
For instance, “Be not conformed . . . but be ye TRANSFORMED . . .” I do
not do well when I push myself into molds, and others do not do well when
I seek to make them conform. But I can be transformed by what goes on in
my mind.
Or “LOVE the Lord your God . . .” I may struggle with how to behave, but
I might live better by seeing my whole life as an expression of love to
the Lord.
Many other words ring out as I quickly survey the parts of passages that
are in my mind – “COMMIT,” “REST,” “BEAR,”“GIVE,” “REJOICE,” “SING.”
In conclusion,
may we come to our work this year from the grounded-ness of contemplation.
May we communicate simply as the visionaries we were designed to be.
And may we learn how to do it all through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Then, maybe we, too, can bring something heavenly into the world.
