Monk and Hancock...

Most of this MLK day was spent listening to Monk and Hancock as part of my jazz crash course - and it has bee sweet. I've learned a lot - what grabs me first and most deeply, what I can hear if I pay attention as well as what I don't like. That's an important part of peace-making work, it seems to me, knowing what doesn't ring true aesthetically, emotionally, politically or spiritually. It doesn't make the other wrong, it just doesn't touch or move you, right?

+ I don't like hard bop - I get it intellectually and celebrate the passion, freedom and creativity it expresses - it just doesn't speak to my soul. Same is true with Mahler - or smooth jazz - or most trash rock: they speak to somebody, it just isn't me. Give me the Miles Davis of the 50s and mid 60s rather than a wildass Coltrane. Or maybe just Monk's, "Straight, No Chaser."

+ Same is true with some forms of religious expression or political ideology: I love high church Anglican worship, my wife doesn't. In retirement I could be at peace with a "smells and bells" Eucharist every morning; at the same time, the almost identical liturgy in a Roman Catholic setting leaves me frustrated and empty. The exclusively masculo-centric language of the Roman liturgy is part of the problem for me, but it is also political and a matter of liturgical aesthetics and ecclesiology. The Book of Common Prayer speaks to me - I use it in my private devotions - and I believe that women should be ordained. (Makes me think of the old Mark Twain zinger about "infant baptism." When the old man was asked, "Do you believe in infant baptism?" he quickly quipped, "Believe in it? Hell, man, I've SEEN it!" So, do I believe in women priests? Well, you get it...)

I am not saying that objective evil isn't real - or that morality is all a matter of relativity - that would be simplistic and naive. Believe in evil... I've seen Nazis and race-hatred and rape and war. It is real.

But I am saying that when it comes to music and politics and art and love it makes so much more sense to me to give one another a whole LOT of space and save our judgment for matters of life and death. This morning Fr. Richard Rohr wrote about judgment saying: too often most of our harsh judgments are not only half-baked, but they are destructive because so often they don't really matter. I love certain types of jazz guitar - and am bored senseless by other styles - I love the cool improvisation of Hancock and Miles and hot jamming of Dizzy not so much. Some cats don't consider the Chicago school of blues "real jazz" while others do (myself included.) Some can't handle any ballads written after 1950, while others like Herbie Hancock are still mining the world of music for what is best.

How did the later rock and roll theologian, Peter Green, put it? Oh well...

My friend from Thunder Bay, Ontario - Peter - has a quote on his blog from the poet Chris Abani - that gets this just about right: “What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa they have a phrase called ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.”