Fermata 10 Jun 2022: Introducing Notes of Rest Concerts
United Methodist Pastors of the Greater Northwest and Notes of Rest Concert
Fermata is the weekly newsletter describing some of the past week’s highlights from Notes of Rest, my contemplative-musical set of offerings that interweave text, music, and questions for the sake of cultivating stillness, introspection, and creativity in communities so that all may rest. I'd love to host a Notes of Rest Retreat, Lecture, or Concert for your church, seminary, or affinity group. Feel free to reply to this email to start the conversation! (I also sometimes include updates about The JuJu Exchange, my jazz-electronic fusion band.)
Hi everyone,
Thank you to everyone who showed concern over the last week as I’ve sojourned with COVID. Though my case was relatively mild, it’s been a journey nonetheless and I still have a lingering post-viral cough. Through it all, I give God thanks for all the ways I’ve been shown care during this, chief among them being my wife Carmen’s steadfast companionship.
One beauty of Notes of Rest is that it covers a topic that all of us know something about, meaning all of us can teach one another. That’s what happened yesterday in the session with United Methodist pastors throughout the Pacific Northwest and Oregon & Idaho. We sat with Mark 6:30-37, where Jesus offers a moment of respite to his newly minted disciples. I picked this passage because I wanted to draw connections between the initial apostles need for rest - the text says they didn’t even have time to eat! - and the extremely busy pastors I was serving. Man, there were some resonances for sure.
Some of the great insights came in response to my question about interruption. The text states that after Jesus invited the disciples to a space alone, the crowds that the disciples attempted to peel away from ended up following them in order to receive more teaching from Jesus. On my reading of the text, the disciples were having their rest interrupted by the persistent congregants. But two pastors on the call pushed back on this and taught me something invaluable about rest. One said that they never see themselves as interrupted because they understand themselves to be wherever God needs them to be in that moment. So when the crowds come to their place of rest, this isn’t an interruption but rather a new start, the next scene of the story.
Picking up on that theme, another pastor riffed on the idea of a musical rest (e.g., quarter rest, half rest, whole rest). They noted that different rests share the same function - a cessation of sound - but not the same value. That is, a whole note rest is longer than a half note rest, and a half note longer than a quarter note. The challenge, then, is to figure out how long your rest is supposed to be!
In music, you can tell when somebody is rushing the rests - when they’re not waiting the full length of the quarter note or whole note before resuming play. You can also hear when someone has rested for too long. The magic of resting just the right amount is that it allows the beauty of the piece of music to unfold - silence and sound in balance.
So too is it with Jesus and our lives. The rests that God gives us might only be a quarter note long even when we desire a whole note. Overstepping that boundary hurts the quality of the song of our lives when we have people seeking our care like the congregants in the story. You can hear when people are overstepping their boundaries, seeking too much rest at the expense of others. (This is a way to read what the disciples’ response was to Jesus’ injunction to them to feed the throngs.) But on the other hand, sometimes our rest should be a whole note and yet we only take a quarter. And you can certainly hear that too, when music comes in too early and now the whole song is thrown off. How much of our restlessness in society and in our personal lives comes from not differentiating our quarter note rests from our whole note rests?
May God help us all play our music!
On Holy Saturday this year, I played the inaugural full-length Notes of Rest Concert at Chicago First Presbyterian Church. It was a time of sounding the grief of losing Jesus the day before (Good Friday). But even though the concert was a commemoration of death, for me it was also a commemoration of new life, because it was the beginning of this new side of Notes of Rest. Alongside the Notes of Rest Retreats and Lectures, I am now offering Notes of Rest Concerts which are extended spaces of musical contemplation that give you space to engage the restlessness in your lives and seek out the notes of restfulness possible amidst it. One of my favorite elements of the concert is that I don’t really talk during it. There is talking at the beginning and at the end, but then throughout is just a musical journey with no interruption (ha, there’s that word again). The ongoing sound then becomes a room for you to move in, to hear rest in your life.
In that sense the Notes of Rest Concert is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the Notes of Rest Lecture, where I am speaking the whole time about my approach to contemplative life grounded in my faith, Black life, and music. (You can see an example of that lecture here.) And the Notes of Rest Retreat of course lives in the middle, marrying speech with play. Below is the link for the whole show should you wish to enter this space of meditation. I was so thankful to collaborate on this offering with the great artists Maddie Ma and Max Li.
I’d love to come play a Concert, host a Retreat, and/or give a Lecture for you and your community. Feel free to respond to this note if you’re interested in starting that conversation.
abundantly,
Julian