Sabbath Devotional :: Musical Sighs, the Mercy of God, and Collective Redemption

Note: I gave this as a talk on Easter Sunday, but as I was working on it, I was also thinking about my MWEG sisters, so it was written for you as well. I made a few minor adjustments to turn it into a devotional, but it is mostly as I gave it two weeks ago in Omaha, Nebraska.

Almost 300 years ago, on Good Friday 1727, in the town of Leipzig, Germany, there was a premiere performance of one of the greatest pieces of music ever written: “The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the Evangelist Matthew.” The composer was Johann Sebastian Bach, a man whom we revere now, but who at the time and for many years after his death was mostly known as the man in charge of music at a church, the ward music chairperson in a way.

The Passion sets the events of the 26th and 27th chapters of Matthew to music and is a poignant, solemn tribute to the last days of the Savior’s life. It is a grief-filled, emotional work, suitable for the wrenching events of Good Friday that lay the foundation for a glorious and hope-filled Easter Sunday.

To perform it, you need two choirs and two orchestras, in addition to five vocal soloists. The Passion includes solos, duets, choruses that dwell on moments and ideas, and a series of chorales, which are essentially hymns. In fact, one of the chorales is sung five different times throughout the two-and-a-half-hour work. You can actually find this as “O Savior, Thou Who Wearest a Crown”, hymn number 197 in our Latter-day Saint hymnbook.

If you open the hymn to take a look, you can follow along as I introduce an idea that I will be threading throughout this devotional. There are lots of different names for it and ways to describe it, but I am going to use the phrase “musical sigh.” Take a look at the second line of the hymn at the music that accompanies the phrase “meekly bearest.” Specifically, on the “ly” of “meekly” and the “bear” of bearest, there are moments where the soprano and alto are bumping right up against each other, creating what is called dissonance. During that moment when the notes are practically on top of each other, there is melodic tension, which is then quickly released when the notes settle back home on the “est” of bearest. But that release is short-lived, because in the next phrase it happens again AND the phrase ends with some harmonic tension. This tension and release happens throughout the piece.

When I am teaching my piano students to play these sorts of phrases, I often use the sigh as an example. When we sigh, it moves from loud and tense to a soft release at the end. From a physiological perspective, sighing is actually really important for healthy breathing function, working to reinflate small air sacs in our lungs.

On the keyboard, I instruct my students to lean into the dissonant moment, by putting on a little more pressure with their hand, wrist, and arm, and then to back off as it resolves, completing the movement with a slight lift of the wrist so that the ending of the phrase is gentle and sweet in its resolution. Lifting the wrist up too quickly results in an abrupt and unsatisfying ending. If you lean into the wrong part of the phrase, the result can also be very unsatisfactory for the listener.

These musical sighs are found throughout the entire St. Matthew Passion. Bach was masterful at setting up a series of tense musical moments, followed by sweet releases. I could write an entire devotional about the genius of his music. But instead, I want to write about what every musician knows — that the secrets to the universe are contained within the inspired work of Bach and other great creators. Let me explain what a musical sigh has to do with experiencing and sharing the love of Christ, my assigned topic.

First, let’s look at the big picture: Easter and the celebration of the resurrection fills us with such glorious feelings *because* of Good Friday that preceded it — that terrible day when our Lord and Savior was crucified. If today is filled with hope and celebration as we look to the resurrection of Christ, it is because the somber, dark feelings of Good Friday and the crucifixion set it up to be so. If we feel the celebratory, burning peace of knowing that someone who has passed on is safe in the bosom of Christ and we will be reunited with them one day, it is the deep grief at their passing that teaches us what love and loss truly is. Grief is an expression of profound love and it is through the sighs and tension of grief that we learn to recognize the miracle of the reunion made possible by our Savior.

Let’s take a closer look at these last days of Christ’s life by examining the personal and individual nature of the Atonement. We will use the aria “Erbarme Dich” or “Have mercy, Lord” to do so. It is the story of the Apostle Peter as he mourns over his betrayal of the Savior. It is essentially a weeping duet between a plaintive violin and an alto who conveys Peter’s distress with the following words:

Have mercy, Lord my God, let Thou my tears persuade Thee;

Look on me, look on me, how my heart doth weep for Thee, weep for Thee bitterly

Have mercy, Lord, my God.

My first experience with this particular aria over 25 years ago when I sang in the chorus remains one of the most pivotal spiritual experiences of my life. It represents the moment I started to grasp the doctrine of the Atonement and the role of repentance. The profound sorrow and humility that Peter demonstrates after his betrayal is felt in the music of the aria, as the violin and singer trade musical sigh after sigh, each briefly resolving before starting up again, over and over again, expressions of grief at the pain caused to the Savior by his actions. Peter has sinned and he is appealing to the Lord for forgiveness. And in the process of his appeal, Peter draws closer to his Savior, as found in the words of the chorale that follows:

Tho’ from Thee temptation lured me, Lord, to Thee I come again.

Thy forgiveness is assured me through thy Son’s despair and pain.

I do not deny my guilt, but Thy mercy, if Thou wilt,

Far exceeded my transgression, of which I must confess.

This is all a musician’s way of saying that the simplest answer to the first part of the question posed in my topic (how to experience Christ’s love) is to access and utilize the Atonement. My experience with this oratorio in 1997 drove me to truly try my hand at regular real and sincere repentance, modeled after Peter. And it is through the unbearable tension of the sighs of my life that I come to know Christ and the sweet relief of His forgiveness. When I, like Peter, have recognized and acknowledged the distance between me and God, then I could begin to close the gap and feel more moments of resolution.

Prior to this time, I had spent years trying to puzzle out the unknowable parts of how and why the atonement works like it does. I had developed a testimony of the restored gospel. But Christ and his Atonement felt abstract and opaque to me. I tried to wrap my brain around the juxtaposition of Christ as both human and divine and what that meant for us as children of God with a divine nature but who were simultaneously His enemies due to our state as “natural” men and women. I wondered endlessly about the balance between mercy and justice and what that looked like both in my personal life and in the lives of those around me. I spent hours pondering the phrase “faith without works is dead,” trying to figure out the right balance between working endlessly for salvation and sitting back and just assuming God’s grace would take care of it.

My transformation began when I stopped viewing all of these tensions as incompatible or as “bugs” in the system I needed to resolve, but instead looked to the ways that they could drive me closer to Jesus. For example, what if my flawed nature and my divinity as a daughter of God are not mutually incompatible, but as I focus on changing the former I can nourish the latter? (Becerra, pg. 32-33)

When a musician is first learning, she leans into the dissonance because, while it is uncomfortable, it makes the resolution sweeter by contrast. But, a mature musician will see the beauty in that moment of discomfort and will linger a little longer, allowing for different sounds and experiences than consonance.

Allowing myself to lean into the moments of tension, my cosmic musical sighs when two things are dissonant, just as I taught my piano students to do, has led to greater insights and personal transformation. For, as Elder Christofferson has said “Ours is not a religion of rationalization, nor a religion of perfectionism, but a religion of redemption — redemption through Jesus Christ.” If I don’t understand something in the gospel now, I don’t need to wait until I understand it perfectly to put it into practice. Uncertainty is both natural and spiritually productive if it leads us towards redemption. (Becerra, pg 62)

I wanted to point out a pattern in the words and sentences I wrote as I described my young adult practice with experiencing Christ’s love — it was all very self-focused. Which is fine and normal. In our teenage and young adult years, we are focused on figuring out who we are and how we relate to the world around us. We have intense emotions, our brains are rapidly changing, and it is almost like we are being re-born. An underdeveloped prefrontal cortex means that, during those years, we make a lot of mistakes, so we have a lot of material to work with. It is a really great time to develop a daily exercise of repentance that will set us up for a lifetime of rich spiritual experiences.

In order to make this point, I am going to substitute a phrase in for the tensions and sighs of my earlier metaphors. The phrase is “productive uneasiness” and credit goes to BYU professor Daniel Becerra for both the phrase and many of the ideas I am exploring here at the end.

He writes that the “realization of our distance from God may in turn serve to bring us closer to one another. In this sense, human imperfections can help us to know, love, and serve God and one another.”

Put more simply by me, the most meaningful experiences we will have with the Atonement will be communal. We will inevitably experience tension, sighs, and productive uneasiness when:

First, we see a gap between what we are and what God sees we can be due to our sins

and

Second, when the grief and pain of life make us wonder if resolution will ever come.

But the reward is that these difficult experiences can turn to joy when we lean into our uncertainty and use it to love and care for those around us. You only have to read 3rd Nephi to find that when Christ talks about “fullness of joy” it emerges from the successes of others.

It is good and right to repent in private, at home in our own closets, pouring out our souls to God and asking for the power of the Atonement to work in our lives. But we will know it is truly working when we feel and follow the desire to build Zion beyond our own hearts, by utilizing the profoundly compassionate power of our humility born of sorrow, uncertainty, and tension. According to Latter-day Saint scholar Deidre Nicole Green, “As an aspect of authentic communal life, particularly for a community striving to become like Zion, forgiveness allows a diverse group of imperfect people to remain cohesive.”

Which leads me back where I started — with the Passion of St. Matthew. The closing movement is a chorus, a final few minutes in which all the participants in the passion come together to collectively mourn and sigh over the grave of their beloved Christ. The music is a constant swirl of the dissonance and release that I spoke of at the beginning, never fully settling into a home, even at the very end. The performers sing the following:

We sit down with tears

And call to you in your tomb

Rest gently, gently rest!

Rest, you exhausted limbs!

Your grave and tombstone

For our anguished conscience shall be

A pillow that gives peace and comfort

And the place where our souls find rest.

With the greatest content there our eyes will close in sleep.

In partnership with these words, the music has a deep sense of uneasiness and loss, all the way to the final haunting notes. Bach was able to write this solemn work because he had faith in Easter Sunday. He knew the goodness and light that was to come and so was not afraid to face the solemnity and loss of Good Friday. And so, this is where I will end, testifying that our most somber and uncertain times can have a profound purpose in our lives if we let them. When we allow our uneasiness, our failings, and our sorrows to point us towards our Jesus, we can find relief. And if we take this humility and allow it to work within us to increase our compassion and desire to join in a collective and communal redemption, we will find it transformed into the fullness of joy that comes from abiding with our Lord and Savior.

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Note: When I performed the Passion over 25 years ago, the Alto part was sung by Lorraine Hunt (later Lorraine Hunt Lieberson). I have looked in vain for a recording of Lieberson singing “Erbarme Dich”, but I will forever remember the luminous moment when I first heard her voice in rehearsal and was positively captivated. Instead, I am providing you with two videos to accompany this devotional

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Emma Petty Addams is co-executive director at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

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