"The Singing Underneath"

By Mark R. Orten, B.A., M.Div.
Director of Religious and Spiritual Life, University Chaplain

The Singing Underneath Baccalaureate 2013

The Summer of 2011 was when "it" came into our house. We have at home a CD with the label, "Ann's Vaca Mix", scrawled across it. Ann Gardner, a Granville resident, burned it for us.

Ann has been a wonderful caregiver for our four girls throughout her high school and college years. We invited Ann to come along on a trip to the beach two summers ago to assist with the children. Along with Ann, however, also came her music that is now forever emblazoned upon our family with that self-lauded "Vaca Mix". The music — against their father's initial strong wishes — became a huge hit for my daughters that week… and since (truth be told), as a kind of refrain. The mix kicks off with none other than, you guessed it: Justin Bieber!

Some of you in this room, willingly or not, already know the truly catchy song of Justin's (who, word has it, has fallen in and out of grace a bit in the two years since — can't believe I know that!), that infernally catchy song, which is now forever bound to us:

Song plays: "…Baby, baby, baby. Oh! ...Thought you'd always be mine. Mine."

Ahhh… See? Now you're stuck with it! And all I can say is, well, "You're welcome!"

There's something about the way these things just stick with you, and I know it might not be so kind of me, but it helps to introduce the theme for today; plus, I just wanted you to have it. You'll find it recurring in your skull now throughout the day. When people are talking to you, you'll see their lips moving but all you'll hear coming out is "Baby, baby, baby, oh." Consider it a Commencement party favor.

And not just for today. Tomorrow, during the ceremony, President Knobel, when you're giving your final address and as you're doling out degrees in the temperate Mayday sun, and you discern out across the throng of people, shoulders bobbing and heads nodding this way and that "Baby, baby, baby, oh."

And when the grounds' crew comes along later to sweep away the chairs, unusual divots in the flattened green grass will be detectible where toes were privately tapping all through the ceremony to the memory of today's baccalaureate… "Baby, baby, baby, oh!"

As I say, "You're welcome!"

Every year a phrase, like a musical refrain or melody, ferments in me through each of the seasons until Baccalaureate comes around again. The title for this year's address is such a phrase: The Singing Underneath. I must have come across the title of Jeffrey Harrison's poem by the same name somewhere along the way, months ago, but I didn't actually read the poem until recently, because the title caught hold of me like a Bieber tune, and it spoke to me (unlike a Bieber). It led me, among other things, to revisit verses of an old song I love, written as a hymn over a century ago, that has been recorded by so many artists through the decades (from Pete Seeger to Eva Cassidy to Enya). Do you know it?

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth's lamentation,
I hear the sweet, tho' far-off hymn
That hails a new creation;
Thro' all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul —
How can I keep from singing?

My life flows on in endless song. What a wonderfully descriptive metaphor. And yet, in all three of these examples in my own life just cited: the catchy-ness of the Bieber tune, Harrison's poem title that implies something underlying our living, and this haunting hymn alluding to the music of life which compels us to join in the singing, music really does feel to be even more than just a metaphor for something of consequence happening inside us or around us, what we call life. There is a way, wouldn't you agree, in which music itself actually is the accompaniment of Life to all that moves us. Music, like life, just is, with no full explanation, no thoroughgoing rationale, no absolutely radical formula for understanding it however we may break it down and examine it in all kinds of really fascinating ways.

It's music! And an echo of the music that plays on, through everything that life may deal us, through every storm, in every adversity and in every loss and grief, is the Song—wherever any song may be found — underneath it all. The Upanishad likens it to joy, much the same, in saying, "For from Joy all beings have come, by Joy they all live, and unto Joy they all return." There is, to put it this other way, a singing underneath.

Thro' all the tumult and the strife I hear the music ringing; It finds an echo in my soul — how can I keep from singing?

This is a phenomenon not unique to us as humans. It does have resonance in all creation. Annie Dillard, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, gives this slightly extended description of the singing of birds and a way to make commentary on the beauty, which resounds in them for her each year in springtime.

The birds have started singing in the valley. Their February squawks and naked chirps are fully fledged now, and long lyrics fly in the air. Birdsong catches in the mountains' rim and pools in the valley; it threads through forests, it slides down creeks. …The mockingbird's invention is limitless; he strews newness about as casually as a god.

…Some reputable scientists, even today, are not wholly satisfied with the notion that the song of birds is strictly and solely a territorial claim. It's an important point. We've been on earth all these years and we still don't know for certain why birds sing.

…It's not that they know something we don't; we know much more than they do, and surely they don't even know why they sing. No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. …The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? (pp. 105-6).

"Why," Dillard asks, "is it beautiful?"

omeone once said, "I care not who writes the laws of a people if you let me write their music." Why is it beautiful? Wherein is its power? These are the questions that actually do undergird all of our quite legitimate scientific inquiry and other artful expressions in this place; they all come of what Einstein, himself, dubbed "a holy curiosity." It is an apt way of perceiving what we do.

It is why a scholar can dedicate her life's work to the wavelength of a cricket's chirp: not just to know what is being said: is it temperature? Does it indicate time to mate? Or danger approaching? Not only those possible interpretations of the chirping, but the real underlying fascination is in the beauty that it chirps at all. She studies. The cricket chirps. There is a certain kind of reflexive quality of fascination in the fact that we study the cricket at all, to the fact that the cricket chirps at all. Why is it beautiful for us to know and for the cricket to chirp?

These questions themselves are at the heart of the nature of our Being! They speak of Joy unutterable otherwise that undergirds all of Life, including perhaps even especially its' fragility. The fragility of Life is the source of its intricacies, and therefore much of its beauty, which does, yes, bring us pain sometimes. Deep pain. But in all of Life's splintering and fracturing a wholeness is unveiled, revealed, that we do recognize… and for which we are made. As the song says, 

Above earth's lamentation,
I hear the sweet, tho' far-off hymn
That hails a new creation….

The Kabbalists refer to it as the mystery of the splintering of the vessel. All that amuses or intrigues us, or concerns or befuddles, all that breaks our hearts and crushes us, consequently in a way that is mysteriously related, also gives us Joy. Joy actually comes as a result of the fragility of the vessel and intricacies of the Vessel broken. All we may do sometimes is step back and behold it doing what it does. What it must. Like Meister Eckhart says of God doing unto us, overflowing into us: "just as… the sun must overflow into [air] and cannot refrain from doing that…."

When we come to those places in our lives that we do not know what to do with, events or circumstances we just do not understand, when things happen that we cannot seem to bear because they cannot be justified, we have from our better moments in a clearer field a greater knowledge that even what is broken still coheres. A note singly played without its intended setting can be painful, until it is joined by the larger symphony of which it is only part, and then the sense of it becomes what it must become, an acceptable occasion, that would not be, could not be, if ever it were intended for itself alone.

We must see all things in life, as parts of the whole, or else we lose our definition and all perspective, and misery consumes. How do we know the whole? What vision could we possibly have of that?

We see it in music, among other things. We recognize the beauty and the power as we behold what cannot be fully understood when only broken down into its constituent parts.

You might ask, finally, what relevance does this have for this occasion, as a reflection on a college career upon the eve of Commencement?

In speaking with seniors quite a bit over twenty years in this work, I have learned to hear from them, each one, the major transition in their lives this represents. In this particular year, I am also mindful of the transition this is for us collectively as an institution as President Knobel observes his own commencement. And as a personal note, it has been a real pleasure and a distinct honor to have served this institution under his leadership, as a chaplain and as a friend, during the time we have shared here. He will be sorely missed, along with Tina, and their departure brings an acute emotion. What is true of them is also true of quite a few seniors for me this year as well.

Relative to The Singing Underneath, and that which gives us perspective on the parts when we are "tuned in" to the whole, how do we make sense of, or give proper assent to, those myriad moments which comprise a career here as a student [or even as President]? What singing lies underneath those remembrances?

Like the first time we were ill at school and maybe didn't have the familiar comforts of home to help nurse us back to health. Or what about that unexpected first real pang of homesickness? Or remember when you first sensed an unanticipated pride of school at an athletic event, or at a presentation in the Arts, or at the concert of an a cappella group? What about the adjustment to eating at the dining hall, and resigning yourself to the schedule, when it opened and when it closed? Remembering that feeling in our guts when our views were first challenged in class or on a paper by a teacher at a serious, intellectual level? To have our ignorance carefully exposed and our horizon expanded. How about when our liberation from strict parental oversight resulted in post-adolescent freedom that had an unexpected consequence? Or the feeling that first time you skipped class, legitimately? Right? (Only rarely, after that first time, I know!) What about the life-changing conversation with that person you will never forget and who will forever now be a part of your life's narrative? Perhaps there was more than one of these.

And then there were moments of awe on certain days when the absolute privilege of what this college experience affords us in the world could overtake us, even if we couldn't say for sure what that opportunity might look like in the near and uncertain future. We walked about and did our thing like the mockingbird, strewing newness on the world casually as gods.

The Metta Sutta says "Standing or walking, sitting or lying down, during all one's waking hours, may one remain mindful of this heart and this way of living that is the best in the world."

These are the parts that comprise the whole experience. Each challenging encounter. Each inspiring relationship. Each engagement with the unknown. So we come to this moment with gratitude and nostalgia and a rightful sense of obligation because the whole thing, taken together, carries us into that larger context of life beyond Denison. Life beyond any particular experience or place.

We cannot describe it, exactly. We cannot say precisely what it is, but we know it in glimpses… like when we hear music. It catches us up, and maybe we sing along, and tap our feet — or all-out dance.

"Don't worry…!" says Rumi. "If one of our instruments breaks, it doesn't matter.

“We have fallen into the place where everything is music."

Sending Forth

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest
And let the spirits fly in and out.