The Fermata Weekly: Notes of Rest Goes International!

Vancouver School of Theology

Fermata on Julian’s Note is the weekly recap & preview of my artistic activity, with special attention given to Notes of Rest, my contemplative-musical retreat, and The JuJu Exchange, my jazz-electronic fusion band.

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your patience with me these last two weeks. There has been so much afoot for Notes of Rest and my musical career that I chose to rest Fermata for a week and let myself breathe. It was a hard decision to not post last week, but the right one. I pray that you’re able to do the same with work commitments in your life. That is, when you discern your limits, I pray you can choose to let a commitment pause for a while that isn’t as urgent as you (or someone else) may think. We find healing from the violence and tyranny of this modern world when we discern “no more.”

Last week I was in Vancouver CA for the first-ever Notes of Rest in-person international appearance. It’s hard to believe that Notes began in June 2021 and now just over a year later I’ve been able to share this message and sound with thousands of people in multiple countries. Thanks be to God!

You can check out Thursday’s public lecture and concert below. It was a joy to dig into theology and history behind Notes and play for the audience. I was thankful to be so warmly received, and I was blessed by the robust conversation that we had Thursday night during the public lecture and Friday morning during the school-only retreat. I wanted to focus in on two comments from the lecture.

One professor came up to me at the end of the evening and said that the 20 minutes of my mini-concert held in the middle of the lecture was the longest he had sat still in quite some time. Aside from being thankful for this confirmation of my ability to engender rest with my music, I was thankful he shared this with me because it reminded me of the importance of our attention habits.

Music is a key vehicle for training our attention and focus. “Focus” is a generative way of defining the infinitive “to entertain”: as a means of holding one’s attention. We pay attention to what gives us pleasure or satisfaction. In our painfully fast world (there are now billboards out for iPhone 14), what if we listened to music more often in an active way such that we could focus our attention and still ourselves during a song, concert, or album? Sometimes music can be mere background, but sometimes it is calling for your full attention. Listen.

Another comment came from a student during the talkback at the end of the night, who said he realized that he didn’t want to rest even though he knew he should. The lecture helped him realize how he hardened his own heart towards God (just like the slave-driving Pharaoh did when he refused Moses’ request to free the Hebrew slaves in the book of Exodus.) The student admitted that even though his privilege as a straight White male in the loving Vancouver School of Theology community should lead to him feeling particularly rested, he didn’t. What a vulnerable confession to make publicly!

His admission highlighted an important point concerning restlessness in this era: rest is sometimes hard to come by because we’d rather not receive the gift. We’d rather deny ourselves that which we need. However, the good news of Jesus, though, is that God is bringing an era of rest that resists our resistance and bids us welcome anyway. Following Jesus draws us towards that eternal rest, one we can experience in part now and one day in full. What happened with this student is what I want to see happen with more people of faith. What if theology, faith, and religion impelled embracing deliberate rest alongside deliberate work instead of merely enshrining deliberate work? With the Earth screaming at us as she is, we would do well to think about how soft or hard our own hearts are.

There’s much more to discuss from the last week alone (a campus ministry lecture, a Chicago youth group Notes of Rest workshop, and clergy sessions in Washington state), but I’ll space that out over the coming weeks given I have a little less activity up ahead.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing. We are building something special here.

abundantly,

Julian

P.S. The trip to Vancouver School of Theology was made possible by my 90 year old grandpa-in-love (A-kong)! He lives in the Vancouver area and attends church with the President of VST, Rev. Dr. Richard Topping, so he made the move to connect us. Ain’t it funny how God works? My A-kong was my first international booking agent, haha.

Upcoming:

Oct 1 Notes of Rest for Closer than Breath Academy (9a - 10.30a central, virtual)

Oct 14 The JuJu Exchange at Soho House (members only)

Oct 16 Notes of Rest at North Shore UMC (10a central, Glencoe, IL)

Oct 20 Playing with BSA Gold (9p, Sleeping Village in Chicago)