The Holy Month of Ramadaan makes me think of a performance by the Maranatha Male Choir of Bellville, some time ago. I dedicate this writing to my deceased mother, who was Moslem by birth. “Maranatha” means “the Lord is coming”, and derives from I Corinthians 16:22: “Don’t be anathema unto God, for Jesus is coming.”
The afternoon was part of a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the choir. A comprehensively long history lies behind this, of which, for obvious reasons, I give only a short summary.
The binding concept is “song”, and, related to it, the notions of religion, emotion and thought.
“Singing,” says one source, “is as much a natural function of the human voice as speaking is.” Human life could, indeed, not be without song, for “songs are thoughts expressed with the breath when people are moved by great forces, and ordinary speech no longer suffices”.
A supreme instance of this is the idea of Jesus as “the Word made flesh”, spoken of at John I:14 – a thought that takes the mind by storm, emotionally so forceful that plain words cannot express it. Only singing helps, also the singing of angels.
The notion of God itself is an example of such thought. How, after all, is “God” couched into description when the very concept takes the mind apart? All there is left to do (since we have to make some utterance, anyway), is to turn to song, and dance (the movement of, say, Hinduism’s benign Vishnu).
There is also the contemplativeness of the Buddha which – explosively! – compels one to silence.
Poets, over the ages, confirm the innateness of song and music to life. King David hallowed life with his harp and psalms, and his son gave us the Song of Solomon.
But the philosopher Plato had nothing good to say about poets and artists – and their songs! He considered art to arise from irrationality, a kind of “human madness”. It was nothing like reality, he thought.
I have always found it hard to follow Plato’s reasoning in this matter – great and boldly risqué as it is (all of this, of course, against the background of his “Theory of Forms”, on which we cannot dwell here, except for saying that it is sublime thinking… )
Off the point: to Plato’s credit, he was never enthused by politicians; their pranks, it is said, “disgusted” him!
I am saddened to think, however, that Plato would distance himself even from the wonderful poetry of Dylan Thomas, whose work offers unsurpassable lines such as in his portrayal of the experience of childhood as “the first declension of the flesh”, in which “the body prospered”, and everything was “a singing house”, in which he
learnt man’s tongue,
to twist the shapes of thoughts
into the stony idiom of the brain,
to shade and knit anew the patch of words
left by the dead...
There is no way Plato’s rebellion against art (hence song) can overthrow Thomas’s “singing house”. It is a house of odes that the great poets have served well: Shelley; Keats; Wordsworth... The tradition dates back to antiquity: Pindar; Horace; writers of ancient Egypt, where “many musical instruments were played, including clarinets, drums, harps and lutes, to accompany singers and dancers”. Native Americans of old practised music, dancing and song “accompanied by the rhythm of rattles, clappers, and drums”.
Some tribes also “used flutes and whistles”, and “panpipes were common in the Caribbean and South America”: religion “controlled every part of life” (and the ceremonies were also “aimed at assuring a plentiful supply of food” for the people).
The hymns and choirs of the Church all speak of this – the ritual of the mass, for instance. This does not mean that song is necessarily religious. On the whole, religion – organised, in particular – channels people’s deep emotions, of which, mostly, they seem to be afraid, like they are of their own deep thoughts. Song, then, becomes helpful!
It remains a question, though, whether song can lie outside the province of religion. Does uplifting song not always have a religiosity about it? Even “worldly” (!) songs, like Bette Midler’s The Rose; or Percy Sledge’s What am I living for?; or the songs of Harry Belafonte...
Perhaps there is no better place for experiencing the entrancement of honest religiosity than the Cathedral on Montmartre Hill in Paris; the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur. The priests, here, conduct the services of praise around the clock, the chanting never stops.
The air stays filled with song. (It was my good fortune to experience this: the walking of the celebrants between altars; the singing; the burning incense; and the breathtaking view of the Basilica at a distance – from a café across the way!)
It is purposefully that I mention the song of Montmartre’s church: the “breath” of the singing in the entirely different setting of the Bellville church-with-no-embellishment, was as beautiful as Sacré-Coeur’s! The two churches, from two different traditions, both bring us splendid song...
The colleague who invited us to the Maranatha singing is thoroughly Dutch Reformed and “Evangelical”, and may all those Reformed people be blessed who did not mind sitting beneath the colourful posters, all in good Catholic Latin: “Gloria in excelsis Deo”, and the like!
Concerning “Maranatha”: the Jews at the time thought of a Messiah who would lead Judea to freedom (from every kind of bondage); but, as time passed, there were special expectations of this Messiah, the “Anointed”: he should be an ideal king – a sovereign bringing “redemption” in the sense of peace and justice for Judea and the whole Earth, a king such as there was never before, and would never again be.
In the unfolding of Christian reality, there came the march up to the Crucifixion of Jesus: His preaching in general and, specifically, his sermonising on the Mount of Olives and elsewhere; His prayerful anguish in Gethsemane; His arrest after being betrayed by Judas Iscariot; His denial by Peter; His walk up Calvary Hill; His Crucifixion; His arising from Death; His Ascension to Heaven...
The Ascension was a central part of the rendition of the Maranatha singers: how Jesus rose up, in His own power,
folded in singing clouds,
at last joining again
His Father and the angels...
from where, as promised by Him,
He will come to us again...
This longish verse of mine, Jesus, ‘n Laaste Profesie’(Klawerjas), considers Jesus’s total commitment to humanness and forgiveness. He finds it impossible to come to terms with a Father relentlessly focused on retribution (towards those who transgress His Will). The poem suggests that over a long, long time, Jesus engages His Father in reasoning: Is it necessary, He contests, to be unbending like this, leaning towards condemnation rather than forgiveness?
He persuades His Father! And there is “a triumphant outcome” for Him, in that he convinces God of the world-changing meaning of what God Himself had desired anyway: the turning of the Godhead to humanness – the idea that the Earth should be “drenched” in humanity, and Jesus, in the end, had not suffered in vain...
Thus the old, intransigent God passes on, “God is dead”, as Nietzsche proclaimed, but now He lives on with a new Face of compassion, and Jesus becomes the centre of all things:
Heaven has now moved to Earth:
there is a New Earth indeed !
The angels, now, are ordinary people,
and Mary, “Mother of God”,
is no longer the unreachable Virgin,
but a woman full of humanness.
Our entire relationship with the Universe
has shifted from the fear of a God
at a distance far-off,
to a thorough love of God,
in Jesus,
close and warm.
“Everything is, at last,
invested with humanness!
Truthfully, now, the angels – with human voice – can be clearly heard in song, and “Maranatha” comes to mean not “The Lord is coming”, but “The Lord is here”. With us, like Ramadaan now!