"Echolocation" by Eric Wall

Seminary is, among other things, a Hearing Place.

Texts, languages, ideas, and community voices: all are chiming, echoing. Revelation, beauty, vocation, the Spirit’s nudging: all are Hearing, writ large—not to mention Seeing, Tasting, Feeling, Touching. These co-mingle, sometimes so much that we feel a Holy Absurdity, as if we are in Shakespeare’s Midsummer: “the eye … hath not heard, the ear … hath not seen … the hand is not able to taste.” First John 1:1-2 describes this sensory overflow: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it.”

“What do you hear?” A pastor for whom I worked always asked us this single question after we had read, in worship preparation, whatever scripture text would be anchoring the liturgy. It’s a different question than “What is this about?” or “What does this mean?” The pastors in those meetings heard some things, the educator heard other things, and I, the musician, heard still other things.

Musicians (as you may well know!) often seem oddly preoccupied. They tap rhythms, mouth words, sway in place. They may seem simultaneously present and far away, or pass you unseeing in the hall, or sit “alone in a crowd,” trance-like. It is because they are listening. Even in “silence,” sound is at work in an inner ear. Try proving it to yourself: take a moment and hear, to whatever degree you can, a heartsong of your faith: a church hymn, a children’s Bible song, a youth group song, something from a season or from a funeral or from wherever. Listen to it in your head. Songs mysteriously come and go within our inner worlds, as they do in community worship. Edward Said, twentieth century intellectual, postcolonial scholar, professor of literature, was also a pianist and a remarkable music critic. He said that music is the most silent of the arts. What he meant was that music is always pushing against silence, invading silence, and returning to silence—that the sound of music itself calls paradoxical attention to the reality of silence. Our songs emerge and recede, still present, whole or fragmentary, in our inner ear, in memory, in heart.

So while they last, while they sound, what happens? Because music is something that happens. I have often said to students here that I hope for them this postseminary takeway: choosing songs is not just a choice of words. Music comes along for the ride. My current analogy for this is the bicycle. A hymn has words and music—a text and a tune—and like the two wheels of a bike, one doesn’t move without the other. For the whole thing to go, both have to be in motion, and none of it will move without a rider—which, for hymns, means the singer: you and me. Just as those bike wheels travel with air inside them, so is singing set in motion by our breath. Sometimes we downshift and sing gently, slowly. Sometimes we need training wheels to learn new songs. Sometimes when life or faith makes it too hard for us to sing, the community sings, pedaling for us and buckling us up securely as passengers in prayer. Songs, after all, are both life-giving and complicated. They may give us joy; they may also make us mad, with words that push us or tunes that we haven’t heard. Like preaching, they are sometimes an assurance and sometimes a challenge. Like the other parts of liturgy, they rehearse the life of faith. As prayer, they invite our whole being to be with God.

Biking and singing share one other thing: they won’t happen unless you keep going. The more you keep pedaling, the easier the ride is. The more we sing, the surer we are, the further we go, the more we discover. Where and how do we make those discoveries about songs in worship? One way is through textbooks: the very specific textbooks that often sit right in front of us, books that we may not call textbooks. We usually call them hymnals or songbooks or song collections. Yet books of texts they are: texts of words, texts of music. They are pedagogical resources. They are anthologies, with centuries’ worth of authors and composers. Church history? It’s in there. Theology? It’s in there. Glory to God: the Presbyterian Hymnal has 853 mini-lectures. The African American Heritage Hymnal has 686 prayers. Santo Santo Santo has 723 devotions. The United Methodist Hymnal has 678 readings and commentaries.

What do we find on the page of a hymnbook? Multiple languages, for one thing: the languages of words (sometimes more than one, in the case of multilingual songs), but also the language of music. Some of that language is on paper, but those symbols and lines are a small part of music—its real utterance is in sound, and whether you “read music” or not, you “speak music” whenever you sing.

We find names: authors and composers. On page 79 of Glory to God, we discover that the hymn “Light Dawns on a Weary World” began with music composed by William P. Rowan; the words, by Mary Louise Bringle, followed, arising out of author’s absorption of the music. This tells us that authors and composers, words and music, are in relationship, and that songs come to be in certain times and places and by certain people. We learn age, gender, countries of origin. We see notes about publishers and copyrights, which remind us that matters of economic justice and fairness are connected to what we sing. These may kick up other questions: What and who are present before us? What is hidden? What needs research? What is problematic? Songs are flesh-and-blood; they have particularity; they are among us.

We may find the weave of theology, history, politics. On page 382 of Glory to God, we find “El cielo canta alegría/Heaven Is Singing for Joy,” by Pablo Sosa. We find three languages on the page: Spanish, English, and the Argentinian folk song-dance called carnavalito. We also discover that this song, written for a picnic of theological students in 1958, was the first 20th-century Christian hymn to make use of Latin American folk music. So we know that this hymn is not just text-and-tune: it is a political act and a theological claim.

Sometimes we need more than one book. Page 399 of Glory to God is Richard Smallwood’s hymn, “I Love the Lord, Who Heard My Cry.” The single page tells us to sing the two stanzas and stop. But page 395 in The African American Heritage Hymnal tells us more: an additional page, with a coda designed for repeated, open-ended singing. It isn’t the same song—it’s bigger, open-ended, fluid, more complete and yet unfinished. We don’t know exactly how the song will unfold. We become caught up in it, and holy surprises may await.

We can be grateful that Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary is a place Pablo Sosa and Richard Smallwood and Mary Louise Bringle and William Rowan and innumerable other creators are all heard and sung and at home. Recently, the student beadles and I were up in the chapel balcony for some AV training. As we looked down from the balcony, one of them made the comment that it was a beautiful thing to see the variety of hymnals. In the seminary journey, those books and those texts wait for us. In all of them, texts and music and ideas are echoing. Sometimes (in seminary and in any faith journey) we may want to put on the noise-cancelling headphones and shut the echoes out; other times, we’ll need to put a hand to ear and find those echoes. Sometimes they won’t be echoes at all, but instead things that we hear freshly, for the first time, or the things we speak and sing in this place, setting up more echoes.

If you know Austin, you probably know about the bats: thousands and thousands and thousands of bats who, at dusk, erupt from beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge downtown. Bats, of course, navigate by sound: it’s called echolocation. They make sounds and wait for the echoes to come back; it’s how they know where they are: sounds enable them to locate themselves. And these bats make their home under a bridge.

Until a new analogy occurs to me, I can’t think of a better metaphor (except bicycles) for songs and music in church and in the life of faith. Songs and texts are bridges and bridge builders, and the echoes of word and art and prayer help us discover where we are, who the whole people of God are, what bridges we have to cross, what bridges we have to build. So let’s keep pedaling the song-bikes: the church needs those wheels to spin on the Spirit’s breath, for the sake of the world.

Eric Wall is The Gene Alice Sherman Associate Professor of Sacred Music and dean of the chapel at Austin Seminary. This essay was adapted from the Opening Convocation Address he delivered in September of this year. In the photo he is conducting the choir during the Hopson Symposium at Austin Seminary in 2017.