The Devil Can't Sing

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I have thought of the devil as a metaphorical character rather than an actual being as far back as high school, despite my fundamentalist upbringing. My explanation to those who disagreed was that my unbelief was the worst insult I could heap on the devil if “he” did exist!

But I am taken with Hildegard of Bingen’s notion that Satan can’t sing, because he opposes all harmony. Editor Barbara Newman explains that Hildegard’s morality plays predate commonly known morality plays by 150 years. One of them, Ordo Virtutum, is entirely sung except for Satan’s monologues, because Hildegard didn’t think the devil could carry a tune!

Opposed to all harmony, Satan could never join a choir or quartet, band or orchestra. He could never play well with others, so he could never join a team or a cause or a community or a theater troupe. He couldn’t dance or weave or paint or write—because all require some kind of harmonizing.

But he could join the conflicts in Washington, the Middle East, and dysfunctional churches. He could be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, elitist, bigoted, hierarchical, autocratic, intransigent, uncooperative, greedy, misanthropic, and more. So many bad things, so little time!

Satan is too often a role model for us. No wonder so many people believe in him.

Visit the first two posts of this blog:

Dolphins and Sharks

The Church of Rosacia

Other posts referencing Hildegard of Bingen:

The God Whom Anger Never Touched

The Soul Feels Its Worth

The Sound of Eden

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported solely by readers. Please click here for more information or to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you!

Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

The Sound of Eden

I look forward to seeing some of you at the Georgia Winter Institute next week.

These thoughts may not be ripe enough for picking for a post, but several encounters prompt this. Sunday I preached at St. Paul UCC in Barrington near Chicago during their lively monthly praise service. At the O’Hare Hilton that afternoon just before my flight home, I delightedly met two longtime friends who are gifted church musicians, Jan Graves and Mark Bowman, both of whom I worked alongside on the magazine Open Hands, and we talked about many things, including music in worship. I shared some of Hildegard of Bingen’s thoughts on the subject, which I had just read about on the flight to Chicago in preparation for a weekend course in February.

As many of you know, Hildegard was a visionary abbess of a Benedictine community of women in the 12^th century who composed music and verse for worship. While I personally stumble on her visions, I am taken with her attitudes toward music.

Hildegard scholar and editor Barbara Newman writes, “For Hildegard, not only inspired canticles but all music was associated with prophecy and the nostalgia for Eden. That is why, she says, ‘a person often sighs and moans upon hearing some melody, recalling the nature of the celestial harmony’” before human beings were, in Hildegard’s words from another context, “lured…away from the celestial harmony and the delights of paradise.”

Newman explains Hildegard’s view that “Music could not only express the prophetic spirit; it might even awaken that spirit,” offering the example of Elisha calling for a musician and, upon hearing the music, “the Spirit suddenly descended upon him and he prophesied” (2 Kings 3:15).

Newman observes that Augustine found the sensual nature of music problematic, but for Hildegard, “liturgical song was a medium that perfectly united soul and body.” Personally, I have thought of church music as an integration of word and sacrament, because it’s verbal as well as embodied.  Thus how appropriate that my sermon about “Discerning the Body of Christ” in one another enjoyed the context of a praise service led by four outstanding female singers, one of whom is the pastor. Hildegard viewed Christ as a second Adam, weaving the broken body of humanity into the one body which God shaped “in the primal dawn / before all creation.”

What also strikes me as I study Hildegard is that her theology of music was developed during a period when she and her community were forbidden by the church hierarchy to sing, a punishment for their refusal to exhume an “unworthy” body from their churchyard. Newman summarizes Hildegard’s adamant defense to church leaders in this way: “To silence music in the Church is to create an artificial rift between earth and heaven, to put asunder that which God has joined together.” Want often makes us more keenly aware of the meaning of what we’re denied.

Those of us who have been denied by the church because of our own embodied praise—women, LGBT, racial minorities, those with disabilities, those with reasoning brains, and so on—have our own theologies that the church needs to hear.  May we be as adamant as Hildegard opposing “an artificial rift between earth and heaven.”

Related post:

In Praise of Praise

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported solely by readers. Please click here to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you!

Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.