Fermata 27 May 2022: Our invitation from nature to rest
UMC Northern Illinois Pastors & Chicago Children's Choir
Fermata is the weekly newsletter describing some of the past week’s highlights from Notes of Rest, my contemplative-musical retreat that interweaves 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 for your church, seminary, or affinity group. Feel free to reply to this email to start the conversation! (I also include details about The JuJu Exchange, my jazz-electronic fusion band.)
Upcoming Appearances:
The JuJu Exchange with Sophia Galaté at Schubas Tavern (June 2, 8p, 3519 N Southport, Chicago)
Notes of Rest at North Shore United Methodist Church (June 5, 10a Central, 213 Hazel Avenue, Glencoe, IL 60022)
Hi everyone,
This week was packed, wow! I had my biggest Notes of Rest session to date and premiered with The JuJu Exchange a commissioned piece with the Chicago Children’s Choir about climate change.
On Tuesday I hosted a Notes of Rest session at the United Methodist Church Northern Illinois Conference Clergy Session, where I was able to play for the 270 clergy who serve this region. We sat with Jesus and the disciples in the windswept boat of Mark 4: 35-41. We contended with what rest looked like for us and our storm-tossed communities. I love being able to give pastors a space to contemplate how well they rest because I know how inaccessible rest can feel to them.
One of the more generative questions for the group was What are you learning from nature about resting in The Lord in this season? I asked this because the disciples were miffed by how Jesus was able to call the wind and waves to be silent and still. (“Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”) The author juxtaposes the obedience and resultant restfulness of nature with the confusion and restlessness of the disciples.
I was pleasantly surprised to see how much they latched onto this phrase “in this season”! The people who shared their responses publicly interpreted “this season” to mean spring. One pastor spoke to the irony of asking about rest in spring when spring connotes increased activity, not a pause from it. But then he stopped himself, for he also observed that “season” is relative to your position in the world. Whereas the Northern Hemisphere now enters spring and fall, the Southern Hemisphere now enters Autumn and Winter. He concluded that because we experience spring alongside others’ experience of autumn, we can tap globally into the sense of rest offered by being connected to our neighbors. So even as the North revs up with the activity of the warmer months, we can still be reminded of the need to rest given other parts of the world cooling off.
This pastor’s contextualizing of spring touches on an important quality of rest: rest too always has a context, it doesn’t just mean pausing from work or sleeping. We may be in a season where we have to work a lot - and certainly that’s the case for pastors more often than not - but we can do so still from a place of restfulness, whereby we refrain from needless conflict and embrace our sense of purpose. What season of life are you in, and what kind of rest do you need to be leaning into as a result (sleep, on refraining from needless conflict, on embracing death, on pausing from overworking, or searching for purpose)? Is that different than the season of those around you? Lord knows the US needs rest in all of these ways given what’s been happening these past few weeks.
On yesterday I premiered Look Into the Sky, a commission that I undertook with Ayanna Woods and the Chicago Children’s Choir and that I performed with my band The JuJu Exchange. You can see it here. This piece centered on the young people’s feelings about our present disharmonies with nature. We had the chance to premiere it yesterday in Millennium Park here in Chicago, which was significant not only because it’s a beautiful venue but also because a young person was shot and killed there just a few weeks ago. Talk about the need for notes of rest!
One of the refrains that Ayanna and I wrote touches on the crux of Notes of Rest: What is the note your voice will play?/It takes a chorus to find a way/ What is the note your voice will play?/To lift it up/Or give it up? At stake for us in writing this piece was amplifying young peoples’ voice everywhere to the fact we adults need to give a lot up if future generations are going to have inhabitable land. My hope with Notes of Rest - and all work that I do - is that it helps us move towards the rest God has made for all creation. I hope this piece helps you reflect on what you need to pause from.
abundantly,
Julian