Why is it that it most always takes a major crisis in our lives to bring about the wisdom and ultimate peace found in the act of surrendering? We come to find ourselves completely and utterly broken; a brokenness that forces us to our knees with a subsequent surrender to a higher power has precious, life changing lessons for us but only when we can learn to say "yes" to all things that come into our lives.
"The highest aim of any spiritual path is surrender. Although you may associate the word surrender with defeat or weakness, it is the most powerful spiritual action, offering you infinite freedom and possibilities. Surrender is trusting that God, the Universe, or a higher intelligence can accomplish anything, even when you can’t foresee the outcome of a situation.
"At the level of spirit, everything is always unfolding perfectly, and you don’t have to struggle or force situations to go your way. It is only your ego-mind that believes you are an isolated individual trying to survive in a hostile world. In truth, you are a spiritual being. By surrendering to Spirit, you end the struggle, freeing yourself from fear and doubt and releasing the obstacles your ego has created."
True surrender is being grateful for and learning to express heartfelt gratitude for whatever is currently going on in our lives, regardless of our current perception of what those events, conditions, and circumstances that we are experiencing may consist of.
Once we are able to effectively initiate this gratitude, we will find that those events, conditions, and circumstances that may appear to be unpleasant or working against our desired outcomes will, with almost magical certainty, cease to exist. We'll then begin to be able to see them change and begin turning into events, conditions, and circumstances that clearly are bringing us closer to our desired outcomes. Here are some songs that can help us open to the idea of surrender with new eyes, ears and hearts.
EXCERPT: “In your love I find release/A haven from my unbelief/Take my life and let me be/A living prayer, my God to Thee.”
REFLECTION: The Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians, “Lord, I believe. Help me with my disbelief.” Alison Krauss comes in a close second here evoking the same message as she relays that in God’s love we can find a “peace that passes all understanding” if we surrender our beliefs and life to a higher power. Surrendering does not mean we lose anything, it means we can let our lives, through surrender be “living prayers” to God and all beings.
EXCERPT: “This desperation, dislocation, separation, condemnation, revelation, in temptation, isolation, desolation/Let it go/And so fade away…/Surrender.”
REFLECTION: Bono’s vague lyrics here are open to interpretation but are reportedly about a friend's heroin addiction. We can use these words to remind us whatever we are experiencing that is undesirable can be let go of, that we can let our experience, our story pass into the presence of that which accepts all our faults without judgment. In this song Bono's voice soars into the realms of both pain and exasperation, as well as velvety consolation in an effort to convey the experience of moving aside and letting all things “fade away.”
EXCERPT: “Yes is the answer/And you know that for sure/Yes is surrender/You got to let it, you got to let it go.”
REFLECTION: John Lennon was inspired to write "Mind Games" from a book authored by Robert Masters and Jean Houston which accentuated the force of the human brain to induce various states of consciousness. The song's positive message reminds us that saying "yes" IS the key to surrender and allowing for answers to come. By expressing "yes" we move into a higher state of being and from this openness, a space for peace and healing expands and possibilities are endless.
YOUR TURN: What songs speak to you about surrendering and letting go of preconceived outcomes allowing for new possibilities and insight?
RockOm Round-up is a quick glance at what's going on around the world in the areas of music and spirituality...
Iran singer gets jail term for Koran disrespect - An Iranian singer and composer who has been likened to Bob Dylan has received a five-year jail sentence in absentia for disrespecting religious sanctities, according to Iranian television. (Reuters, Yahoo! News)
All in the Family - The band Elliot: “'We’re Christians by faith, not by musical genre,' Parnell said. 'We want our music to inspire faith and spirituality in people, and moral thoughts, and we want people to do good because of it.'" (BendBulletin.com)
Rakim Ready To Release 'The Seventh Seal' - Rapper Rakim says "I've always tried to insert consciousness and spirituality in my records, interpreting the writings of all cultures and religions and how they apply to life." (Billboard.com)
New book explores U2’s quest for spiritual meaning - Throughout [We Get to Carry Each Other: The Gospel according to U2], we get a picture of the spirituality that flows from U2's music and how it has shaped our lives and our world." (7thspace.com)
Doctors are discovering that music has very real power to heal
It's hardly news that listening to music can make you feel good. In a valley full of all stripes of therapy, music therapy is one of the most intuitive types around. But doctors, including one just down the road at Mass. General Hospital, are discovering the scientific side of why that's true, and what potential exists for specific medical uses of music. They're also discovering the details of why, for instance, playing rock at ear-bleed volume brought Manuel Noriega out of hiding during the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama (one wonders how often they played Van Halen's "Panama").
Research efforts and the clinical use of music have offered very specific results so far. In a recent MSNBC story, author Bill Briggs enumerated much of that research. Briggs reports that, though we may not necessarily realize it's happening, heart rates sometimes change to match a tempo. That's according to Dr. Claudius Conrad, a senior surgical resident at Harvard Medical School, who told Briggs, "Research has already shown that if you play a piece—like Mozart—at a certain slow beat, the listener will adapt their heart beat to the beat of the music."
Wild as that alone may sound, that's just the beginning. Briggs continues: "Based on interviews with neurologists and cardiologists, the journey from an instrument string to your heart strings goes something like this: Sound waves travel through the air into the ears and buzz the eardrums and bones in the middle ears. To decode the vibration, your brain transforms that mechanical energy into electrical energy, sending the signal to its cerebral cortex—a hub for thought, perception and memory. Within that control tower, the auditory cortex forwards the message on to brain centers that direct emotion, arousal, anxiety, pleasure and creativity. And there's another stop upstairs: that electrical cue hits the hypothalamus which controls heart rate and respiration, plus your stomach and skin nerves, explaining why a melody may give you butterflies or goose bumps. ... But what surprised Conrad is that the patients also showed a 50 percent spike in pituitary growth hormone, which is known to stimulate healing."
Several studies are underway, and music-savvy doctors are employing music (primarily classical, it seems) in hospital rooms and even surgical suites to aid healing.
In an age when nanotechnology, tissue-cloning and even human-machine interfaces point toward a high-tech, sometimes anxiety-producing vision of the future, there's something quite comforting about the notion of a very old and pleasant form of human interaction proving so useful. Maybe the future will be more Ursula LeGuin than Robert Heinlein, and that's probably a good thing. Rather than weird vision enhancements and Swiss-Army-knife robot arms, maybe we'll get implants to dial up the right tune to calm psoriasis, dilate blood vessels, or recover from heart surgery.
A related story on the same site points the way: turns out that the perfect tune for timing CPR compressions is the BeeGee's "Stayin' Alive." The possibilities for a personal health playlist seem endless, and surely one's gut instinct, the same one that tells us that music's power is obvious, can point the way. I don't know why, exactly, but it seems like Cream's "White Room" would probably aid constipation. Need a good dose of sedation? Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb."
So it's probably more of a rocket-science thing than that, but taking musical-medical matters into one's hands certainly seems to offer promise. It may even provide an alternative to single-payer healthcare if the Congress doesn't come through. We could put Bono in charge—much as I like him, he seems to nearly be a politician already. (On the other hand, hearing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" during surgery might not be the most comforting idea.)
Kidding aside, research seems to point toward the efficacy of the harp in particular, with its unfettered vibrations of many strings. That kind of ancient tug at the heart strings, like the warmth of cello or the timeless drone of didgeridoo, makes sense as a helpful regulator of health, and connecting the ancient to the contemporary ought to make future medicine a lot more pleasant.
Rock band's gritty gospel, spiritual depth touch hearts - "A good example he offers is the "U2charist" - communion services in which the hymns are U2 songs and the sermon and offering are oriented toward the One Movement, an advocacy campaign co-founded by U2's lead singer, Bono." (The Baptist Standard)
Spirituality shines over New Orleans Jazz Fest - Aaron Neville says, "I feel God in every song. God gave me my voice. My hope is that you hear him no matter what I'm singing... The songs and the love of God who creates the songs will set you free." (Catholic Star Herald)
Bruce Cockburn: Water into wine - "If it's a political song, a spiritual song or a song about sex it's all the same." (JamBase.com)
Man on a Mission - Musician Michael Franti says, "But there's also that 'divine light' factor. You figure if you're on the side of positivity and goodness, and you're sharing something with people ... music just breaks down those doors." (Connect Savannah)
"This is the most thoroughly Christian thing they've done yet."
That was my initial reaction to the last two U2 albums in 2000 and 2004. In retrospect, that was just as true of the triad of albums U2 released in the 1990s, but I admit that wasn't what I thought on first listen to them. Their nuanced irony required a few more listens and a good bit of rewarding theological reflection to get there.
Once again, my early impression of No Line on the Horizon, released March 3 in the United States, has been, "This is the most thoroughly Christian thing they've done yet."
No Line on the Horizon is the 12th studio album by the Irish rock band U2. (Interscope Records)
Like the last two albums, No Line is much more overt in its Christian rendering of the world, what with lyrics like "Justified until we die/You and I will magnify/Oh, the Magnificent" from the album's second track. (So Bono is a fifth-point Calvinist. Who knew?) Yet what qualifies this album as thoroughly Christian is not so much its pervasive biblical/theological images as its overarching eschatological vision.
For those uninitiated in my profession's art of unclear communication, "eschatology" is the technical term for the division of theology that deals with "last things," from the Greek eschatos, "last," and logos, "ordered thought" about something. But eschatology isn't only about what happens at the end.
Baptist theologian James Wm. McClendon Jr. helpfully defined eschatology much more broadly: it's "about what lasts; it is also about what comes last, and about the history that leads from the one to the other."
In other words, eschatology has to do with God's goals for all creation, from creation to consummation and everything in between, as well as our participation in what God is doing to realize these goals in a world in which they are manifestly not yet realized.
U2's music has long occupied the tension between the present experience of what lasts -- "all that you can't leave behind" -- and the present absence of its full realization -- "I still haven't found what I'm looking for."
In the formative years of the band, U2 even found a way to express this tension through the distinctive instrumental sound they created. They eschewed the overly realized eschatology of major chords as well as the eschatological pessimism of minor chords. As guitarist The Edge later reflected on their early musical experimentation, “the third became our enemy,” and he dropped it from his chords, leaving the root, the fifth, and the octave of the root, creating a sound neither obviously major nor obviously minor. It was the sound of the already/not-yet eschatology of the Bible translated into the idiom of post-punk rock music.
Early snippets from No Line that traveled through cyberspace prior to the album’s release hinted that the essence of that sound is back in creatively re-imagined form. But after the 2006 between-albums single “Window in the Skies,” which came awfully close to reveling in the full realization of the vision, and the announcement of a forthcoming album title that suggested the erasure of the line that separates heaven and earth, one could be excused for worrying that this time around the band might stray from what has made the U2 catalog more authentically Christian than the vast majority of what the CCM industry has produced.
Those worries seemed justified when it was widely rumored that No Line’s cover would feature a seascape by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto in which sea and sky blend into one another with no discernable boundary. In the end, the band settled on another Sugimoto image more appropriate to the quintessential U2 eschatological vision: “Boden Sea, Uttwil,” in which, despite the album title, there is still a clear line on the horizon.
The basic message of No Line is that earth is not yet heaven, and therefore the album summons us to "Get On Your Boots" and work toward the day when things will fully be on earth as they are in heaven -- when heaven and earth will be indistinguishable, and there will at last be no line on the horizon.
Moving in that direction requires the triumph "of vision over visibility" ("Moment of Surrender"), an echo of an earlier formulation of the same insight: that the things that last and that come at the last constitute "a place that has to be believed to be seen" ("Walk On" from 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind). It also requires an inner transformation wrought by a receptive hearing of the voice of God ("Unknown Caller") and a faithful reception of the love of God which requires that one both "stand up" for it and "sit down" to receive it ("Stand Up Comedy").
The central eschatological metaphor of No Line is the sound of the divine song, heard only by those who have the ears to hear it, yet unconsciously sought by everyone, for all people were created to hear and sing this song. Seven of the album's 11 songs invoke that metaphor in one way or another. Key expressions of it are the lines "Let me in the sound…meet me in the sound" from "Get On Your Boots," reprised at the beginning of "FEZ -- Being Born," and the concluding declaration of "Breathe," "I've found grace inside a sound."
Within this framework, No Line also calls our attention to the discordant dimensions of our world. For me the album's highlight is "White As Snow," set as the dying thoughts of a soldier fatally wounded by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan to a melody loosely inspired by the medieval plainsong tune for the thoroughly eschatological hymn "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." The song's musical and narrative zenith, accompanied by crescendoing French horns, is the soldier's remembrance of his baptism, having received the forgiveness of "the lamb as white as snow." But he also remembers his post-baptismal life with regret, for neither his heart nor the hearts of others who have brought him, and the world, to this point have been "as white as snow."
The album's final song "Cedars of Lebanon," cast as the world-weary random musings of a foreign correspondent, closes with a question addressed to God -- "Where are you in the cedars of Lebanon?" -- and a warning: "Choose your enemies carefully 'cause they will define you/Make them interesting 'cause in some ways they will mind you." We're still asking the question voiced earlier in the album: "Where might we find the lamb as white as snow?"
The theologian in me can't resist pointing out that Karl Barth, who incidentally shared a May 10 birthday with Bono, likely would have resonated with this couplet from "Stand Up Comedy" in light of his aversion to rational apologetics: "But while I'm getting over certainty/Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady." And the laughing theologian probably would have chuckled in agreement with the assertion of "Get On Your Boots" that "laughter is eternity if joy is real."
Did I forget to mention that the sound U2 is now hearing and inviting others to hear sounds really, really good?
Steven R. Harmon is associate professor of divinity at Samford University's Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Ala.
Jewish-Arab duo faces criticism ahead of songfest - "Israel is sending a Jewish-Arab duo to represent it with a song of peace at Europe's best-known song competition at a particularly fraught moment for relations between the country's Jews and Arabs..."
Everyone's favorite philanthropic rock band, U2, streams their entire new album on MySpace this week leading up the album's release on March 3rd. (RockOm note: Did they remove the full album and just leave that one song up... or are we missing something?)
The creator of what's now cliché
had some funny words to say
”All you little things are incomplete”
Why did he speak of us that way?
I don't cry, no, 'cause I don't care
It's very hard to feel the way we used to feel up there
The creator of what's now cliché
Wants us little things to cry and feel alone
But no, don't don't lose hope - no, no, no, no
No, no, no, don't feel sad
'Cause it's a violent world
But there's still beauty
I'll take care of you if you take care of me
I like to sit and listen to the sound
Of the snowflakes landing on the trees
But I can't get used to feeling cold
I can't get used to what has happened
here to you and me
There's no escaping so I won't try
It's just the heaviness that comes
with knowing you will never die
But no, don't don't lose hope - no, no, no, no
No, no, no, don't feel sad
'Cause it's a violent world
But there's still beauty
I'll take care of you if you take care of me
There's something about this song that moves me in a way that few songs ever do. Much like the music from the previous entry of this series, Cake's "End of the Movie" and "Tougher Than It Is," Of Montreal's "The Repudiated Immortals" is an anomalously profound and intimate offering from a band that usually revels in silliness, and so it penetrates my unsuspecting mind much deeper than it otherwise might. As Stuart Davis likes to say of his own music, this track "Brings God back where it belongs - in the hook of a three-minute pop song." (This one clocks in at an even-slimmer 2:18) Of Montreal's psychedelic cacophony is temporarily contained, and in its stead appears this incredible bauble, a precious statement that holds in its spare and prosaic couplets an impossible poetry.
Maybe this is a funny (or "funny") song to play at a funeral: a peppy, poppy diddy about the incredible frustration of immmortality as a small and splintered self, struggling to accept the limitations of embodiment in the face of divine disdain. But beneath the veneer of its bouncing bassline, frail tenor, and drum machine kitsch, "The Repudiated Immortals" is simultaneously one of the saddest and most reassuring songs I have ever heard. It points to a truth so deep and meaningful that it is among the rare and precious pieces of music that clearly communicate the double bind of life and death as I know it. It is this embrace of paradox, this comfortable expression of the polarity and ambiguity of existence, that touches me more deeply than any straightforward and univalent declaration. Popular spiritual anthems like U2's "One" can make a glorious statement, but usually lack this depth of subtlety. Existence doesn't offer us a single easy answer; it bombards us with conflicting pluralisms that we have no way to rationally digest.
I don't know how other people perceive this song - whether they think it's a joke, or what. To me, it's as true as the Bhagavad Gita. (And considerably more concise.) At the risk of sounding crazy (and when was the last time that stopped me?), here's why.
Last week I was hanging out in the graveyard with a friend of mine, one of several that enjoys the reverent innocence of cavorting among the resting spirits and marble-etched profundities (go find yourself a copy of The Bible and look up Psalm 39:4-5, and see what I mean). Sitting in the crook of an ancient tree, we pulled our coats up around our necks, fluffing like birds in the cold brightness of the sun as it slid behind the mountains. I made some comment about the cold and she said, "I'm used to being cold."
She grew up in Boulder, but I grew up in Los Angeles and Orlando. The cold is as foreign to me as the warm winters of my childhood years must have been to my Kansas City mother. It's another reminder of my confusing embodiment - born with crooked feet and a crooked nose, I lope through the world with an awkward bouncing stride and breathe through one nostril more than the other. Sinus trouble keeps me from diving more than a few feet underwater. I teeter and twirl, my movements generally experimental, a fledgling bird's. My mind seems timelessly ancient, but in this life I feel newer than most. Not younger - just a more recent arrival to form. Beauty makes sense to me in a way that many things do not, and so:
I like to sit and listen to the sound
Of the snowflakes landing on the trees
But I can't get used to feeling cold
I can't get used to what has happened here to you and me
Like many of my friends, I am working through not being quite comfortably human. The world is easy to imagine, but difficult to meet. Existence was a bait and switch with which I am now trying to make best.
And so it's little surprise that I had a dream last spring in which my friends and I all convened between lives to share stories and excitement for our next foray. When the time came to dive back into new separate selves and individual limitedess, I fell, a simple swooning of inability, a submission beyond choice. The graft hadn't taken. I had gotten my one life as a human being; it was something for which I was not really cut out, and now - that mission over - something I would never do again. No failure, no shame, and only the shadow of yearning - not rejoining my beloved souls on Earth was as inevitable and as matter-of-fact as the first moment after unimaginable news, before interpretation, when the ground and body disappear from beneath and the spinning and falling are everything, no cause, no effect. Plainly and inarguably, human nature was a coat that hadn't fit. Only the smallest cry of sadness lay like a black pearl in the gut of my uninhibited weeping. The suffering was crystal clear and imminent, but not mine - it gushed forth in waves of affectless intensity while I effulged compassion from a thousand miles above. Collapsing onto what I thought was a bed, I landed on the shock of a hard floor - no yielding relief, even as an immaterial idea. Not embracing brokenness in full flush as a human being was no guarantee against the pain of existential mystery.
I suppose a lot of people are familiar with this feeling in one way or another. We are all slightly incredulous to the limits of our being. But:
There's no escaping so I won't try
It's just the heaviness that comes with knowing you will never die
The narrator of this song is Christ on the Cross. This song is for everyone nailed to the painful intersection between the vivid and intimate knowing of our own divinity and the bafflement of physical constraint, any of us who have yet to resolve the paradox of being.
Tibetan Buddhism speaks of the boddhisattvas, enlightened beings who made the promise to return again and again forever, until the entire world remembers its liberated essence. When that happens, the game begins anew. All of us are buddhas with amnesia, fumbling home drunk and lonely. We are all eternal but spend half the time in ignorance of the agreement.
Down here, at the bottom of our well of incompleteness, the bright light of the surface warm but out of reach, what is there for us to do but recognize our common plight? What greater comfort can we find than in the mutual consolation that we each face this strangeness together? In the divide, there is a deeper union. In that union, a deeper divide. With no explanation and no offramp, we make the best of what's around. Sometimes it feels like we are trapped; but if we are trapped, we are trapped together. And it's actually quite pretty down here - look! My first word was "good."
No, don't don't lose hope - no, no, no, no
No, no, no, don't feel sad
'Cause it's a violent world
But there's still beauty
I'll take care of you if you take care of me
We trade one vow for another, back and forth. When we are the sleeping meek, we lie protected beyond our knowing, secure in the palms of saints. Sooner or later, our turn comes to offer midwifing and hospice. We hold the sobbing child, and then we are the sobbing child, love in a circuit flowing forever.
And that's why I love this song.
Appendix: I read the following passage, from "Alternative Cosmologies and Altered States," by Stanislav Grof, last night and feel compelled to include it here. Grof's argument is that we must seriously consider the overwhelming empirical evidence that suggests the survival of consciousness after death - knowing that confirmed awareness of an immortal soul (in whatever guise) would radically transform our contemporary morality.
"Whether or not we believe in survival of consciousness after death, reincarnation, and karma, it has very serious implications for our behavior. The idea that belief in immortality has profound moral implications can be found already in Plato, who in Laws has Socrates say that disconcern for the postmortem consequences of one's deeds would be 'a boon to the wicked.' Modern authors such as Alan Harrington and Ernest Becker have emphasized that massive denial of death leads to social pathologies that have dangerous consequences for humanity. Modern consciousness research certainly supports this point of view.
At a time when a combination of unbridled greed, malignant aggression, and existence of weapons of mass destruction threatens the survival of humanity and possibly life on this planet, we should seriously consider any avenue that offers some hope. While this is not a sufficient reason for embracing uncritically the material suggesting survival of consciousness after death, it should be an additional incentive for reviewing the existing data with an open mind and in the spirit of true science. The same applies to the powerful experiential technologies involving non-ordinary states of consciousness that make it possible to confront the fear of death and can facilitate deep positive personality changes and spiritual opening. A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.
[1] "Whenever I start working on a song, I immediately try to forget everything, to empty my hands and head of anything that may be hanging over from another song or album. I try to approach it like, 'This is the first time I've ever played a guitar. What am I going to do?'" [The Edge, U2]
[2] "Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. 'It is overfull. No more will go in!' 'Like this cup,' Nan-in said, 'you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?'" [Zen Flesh Zen Bones]
SONG: “Living Prayer” by Alison Krauss (listen)
SONG: “Bad” by U2 (listen)
SONG: “Mind Games” by John Lennon (listen)
Doctors are discovering that music has very real power to heal
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