May 28, 2010
Taking the Time to Make a Difference
Of words and music and culture
BY PAUL R. LEINGANG
(Listen to Paul read this column | Weekly podcast)
My childhood friend Karl and I were leaving my house to go out to play in the wooded area near my family home. One of the family dogs started to follow us, until I turned to shout, “Gehst du heim, Hund!”
Karl, a native of German who had moved to the United States with his mother a few years earlier, turned to me and said, “You don’t have to impress me by speaking German.”
I was puzzled, not knowing I was speaking German, merely repeating words I heard from my mother and father, the words a person used to tell a dog to go back home.
Our dogs always understood German, of course, as well as anybody in the household. My parents and my older brother and sisters could speak and understand much more than I could as the youngest, but I and the dogs and the farm animals knew what was meant, if only from the tone and the volume of what was said.
Perhaps this learning was not very different from the prayers before meals we always said, even before I knew the meaning of the words.
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The first jazz recordings I heard in my life quickly became my favorites, long before I came to understand their “church music” foundation.
I don’t know enough about music to explain the connections I know are there — but I hear them — the Gospel harmonies, the call and response, the theme and variations, the chants and the rhythms and even the dances unwritten but somehow universal.
My mother loved to dance — and once I heard her worry that some of the hymns from church made her want to dance.
My father did not dance, and I take after him in that regard. But I must share something of my mother’s spirit, her love of music and poetry.
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The Vatican Information Service recently reported that Pope Benedict had attended a concert which included pieces by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian composers, as part of the initiative “Days of Russian Culture and Spirituality in the Vatican.”
“Deep in these works,” the pope was quoted, “is the soul of the Russian people, and therewith the Christian faith, both of which find extraordinary expression in divine liturgy and in the liturgical chants with which it is always accompanied.”
Pope Benedict emphasized the place of Christianity in the history of Europe, and the need to “restore a soul not only to believers, but to all peoples of the continent, promote trust and hope, rooting them in the millennial experience of the Christian faith.”
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Some months ago, I went to a Guadalupe Festival and experienced for the first time some of the sounds and emotions springing from the Yacqui Deer Dance.
Now I know that these deeply founded elements are as natural to some of our Hispanic brothers and sisters as are German words to me.
What place does your faith hold in your life? Do you have ears to hear, to acknowledge what is deep inside of you? Do you accept the complexity of another’s soul, as Christian as yours, but using the words and phrasing of another culture?
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Take the time to enjoy your own heritage, to accept the influences of culture and time on your formation.
Take the time to choose, if you can, the portions and the practices of your own upbringing to pass along to your children.
Take the time to enjoy the words and songs of another culture. Help a new family, sharing your own culture while acknowledging the value of theirs.
Recall the central truth of our older brothers and sisters at the Seder meal, that we were all slaves at one time, no matter what the color of our skin or the languages we used.
If God has made a difference in our lives, it is truly our calling to do what we can to restore a soul, to help another to find the way home.
Comments are welcome at office@cfm.org or the Christian Family Movement, P.O. Box 925, Evansvsille, IN 47706-0925