Soul of a Nation:
Jazz at the Heart

A sermon offered by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia 

Readings

The readings today are not my words and the sermon is very little about my experience – but it is shot into my soul, too.  Like glittering red and black thread shot through my muscles.  Not the memory of my family’s history – we have all had our own suffering and rough threads – this is the memory of our nation.  A fact we have been cursed to have, in part, shaped and toward which we can open our souls in evolutionary hope.

Dream Boogie
Langston Hughes in 1951

Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?

Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a --

   You think
   It's a happy beat?

Listen to it closely:
Ain't you heard
something underneath
like a --

   What did I say?

Sure,
I'm happy!
Take it away!

   Hey, pop!
   Re-bop!
   Mop!

   Y-e-a-h!

In Transcendental Etude Adrienne Rich wrote:

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
-- And in fact we can't live like that we take on
everything at once before we've even begun
to read or mark time, we're forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born. 

Jazzonia
Langston Hughes

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve’s eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

Sermon

What is the soul of a nation?

Is it the laws, the constitution, the leadership, the religion, the land – the people – can a nation have a soul?  I would say yes -- so you’ll want to know what I mean when I say soul. In this case -- soul is the enduring heart of a people or a person – the yearning to thrive, the will to endure, the creative power, the core – whole or broken – the center of the being – the imprint of a life lived or a history unfolded.  Yes, perhaps the soul of a nation is all of those things – but I would say that the soul of a nation is – above all – its culture – its artistic culture.  In culture, you can experience the range of the soul -- it can be creative or destructive – but it is a miracle and wonder – the transformations by the human hand. 

It has always dazzled me – the triumph of imagination over blank paper, blank canvass, shapeless rock, and silence.  If it is hidden in the night, kept out of sight – if it is noble or debased – if it is creative or propagandistic – if it is made by the market or by the heart – the culture of the people is the soul of the people – the culture of a nation is the soul of a nation.

Slaves escaping used quilts to send messages – directions, warnings, every secret code they could find they used to mark the trail to freedom.  And what they learned and what they taught us through generations is that freedom is a state of mind – as well as a condition of the body.  That in the softest thread or the shrillest note or the safe darkness of the night freedom moves.  How do people keep hoping – or keep living – how does the human heart endure in despair and in suffering?  Jazz arose out of this curse and question and blessed us. 

Paul Whiteman, said that “Jazz came to America in chains.”  It was hidden in the stomp of ancient rhythms of free feet and free voices, it was warbled in the bayou, it was rattled in the shackles of slaves, the calling out of the marketplace, the drag of weary feet, the moment of freedom in the deep of night, the tearful moans and the grieving cries, the cadence of prayer, the crack of the whip, it was rewritten in struggle and failure, and the rushing of feet.  It evolved out of our land.  Jazz was evolved from African roots – but those roots twined with New World beats, tunes, the merging of a score of cultures, and the sounds of new machines.  Jazz lives in the present – but history plays in every chord.  You can pick up a book about it any time – but listen when Roy plays – with his skeptic’s will and his free mind soaring and his good heart breathing life into the clarinet or the saxophone and you can hear a world in his playing.

What I have to day today is not just about jazz – it is about the struggle between love and despair – a struggle captured almost perfectly in the warmth and wince of a clarinet, the call and cry of a sax, in the stride and syncopation of a jazz piano.  Jazz and the blues are partners in illuminating the soul of America – for they take every material – each instrument that human hands may touch and they demand a devotion to form, order, and coherence, while establishing the ground for astounding creativity and daring.  What I have to say today is about the soul of a nation – of our nation.

Last week, we celebrated the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr –but I also challenged us to think and look beyond the dream.  To awaken into new vision.  Without vision, the Bible says, the people perish. And I answer back in anger and longing – yet the people perish when vision is false or frozen.

I can hear that famous voice still, though, conjuring up a dream –a good dream – but not one that we can rest upon.  I still hope, in my weakest moments, for the day that justice will flow down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.  Nevertheless, I do see the desert around me.  Sharon Welch wrote: “Old dreams of progress, of unbridled and unlimited economic growth, no longer resonate, no longer inspire and motivate.  What is left?  Apathy, despair, cynicism, a focus on merely individual well-being?   No – It is possible to live fully and well without hope for ultimate victory and certain vindication.  I celebrate the energy and joy of politics without Utopia….”

To be honest – so do I – I long for but even more I fear Utopias.  I cannot flourish on the dreams of the past.  And remember – nostalgia is a trap.  Doris Lessing, in the Canopus on Argives series, describes a morass, a mire of nostalgia, a people so stuck in memory that their feeet simply can’t move.  Thus, I ask again, what I asked last week – how do we hold, integrate, and learn from the past without enshrining or living in it?  I think that the patterns and sounds of jazz and the blues carry some answers.

Ralph Ellison, writer and musician, wrote of the blues, “it is a music of remembrance without being a music of the romance of remembrance, it is not a music of regret.”  It is the music of reality – What we play is life – said Louis Armstrong.  And Cornel West said, “that’s I claim that when we really look at jazz and the blues, we’re really talking about a certain existential way of being in the world.”  Yes – I think that it is – a reality based way of being – realistic and resisting both at the same time.  “Sometimes I’m up and sometimes down.”  Not a music of regret – so I turn to it as to a new day – for the capacity to awaken – down to our souls – and rise to the challenge of that day. We don’t do that if we are infants – they sleep most of the time – you know they’re circuits have finally switched on when they are awake more and more.  They are getting ready for reality.  It takes what both Cornel West and Wynton Marsalis call a soul – maturity.  An awakened quality – the old spiritual goes – In the morning when I rise – In the morning – when I rise – in the morning when I want to rise holy, holy, yeah – when I rise.”  Whole and holy – entirely. 

Jazz is about that risk to wake up – with all the pain and promise of the morning.  Duke Ellington said, “Jazz is freedom.”  It is freedom – it is that freedom to rise – beyond the illusions of the market place and the hype and touch reality.  Deep art is the freedom to rise – that is where imagination is so important too – not to create fantasies but to build that newer and truer vision.

            In high school, I worked on a production of the musical Hair.  And you know it was a lovely thing – just wringing with sentiment and promise – somehow a new day was dawning – it might bring Frank Mills or it might bring the dawning of the Age of Aquarius – harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding – or maybe revolution.  Either way things were going to be – better.  And that kept me working – which was good – but when I and millions of other idealists ran into the hard wall of history – ouch -- we found despair.  We lost hope.

It’s only just out of reach, down the block on the beach, under a tree – something’s coming … Talking with Bill Moyers about her Communist past Doris Lessing said:  “We genuinely believed that sort of like 15 years after the war, Paradise would reign in the world, you know, Utopia. Everything bad would be banished, you know, capitalism, and that cruelty, and the unkindness to children, and unkindness to women, and you name it. And we believed this rubbish.” And Moyers responded to her:

“But dreams are not rubbish.”  And the towering, aging writer responded – “They're rubbish if they lead you to very unrealistic actions. That's what's bad about them. If you're dreaming about wonderful Utopias, and great horizons, and great dawns and all that, you're not really seeing what's there, and what could be done.” 

Where’s the music when nothing new is coming – it’s just the struggle and the work and the love and the dedication – that is art.

So – you know – Camelot never quite came together.  And for every advance there were other set backs.  And the hunger for justice and peace and wholeness and holiness goes unsatisfied.  Then – remember when the Funding for the Arts started vanishing?  It was considered immoral.  In that moment culture was curtailed and protest stifled.  It was a warning shot fired into the soul of a nation.

            Somehow, at the same time, the homes got more elegant, the toys more elaborate, the entertainment more spectacular.  The arts are not a luxury – they are our vision – our imagination – our music – our ability to set down roots and belong to this land and this world and our time.  We can be too easily distracted and our children too easily sucked away into the mass culture.  Into private Sim worlds.  We are distracted not out of bad faith – but because it is so hard to tell the real thing from the simulation.  You know I am a devotee of West Wing.  Now, there is a new program I haven’t yet seen called Mr. Sterling.  But from the previews I saw during West Wing it looks like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – like Frank Capra takes on the 21^st century.  And, I’ll admit it worries me – and, as long as I am standing here, I may as well say – I hope that it worries you.  When the media ramps up a motif they are trying to sell it to us – the glamorous world of spies, the rosy family, the silly bigoted upwardly mobile black man – it is wall paper over the world.

            The thing about art – deep and true and faithful to the core of human experience is that although it moves things around and manipulates them – it is created but not simulated – it bears the truth and faces the truth.  It wrestles with the soul – that’s how Cornel West put it – “Soul wrestling has to do with when you have enough courage to wrestle with yourself in the midst of doubt, mystery, and uncertainty.”  Doubt mystery and uncertainty – like when a whole society says you don’t exist – but you decide that you do, when a country says that you don’t count – but you hold the faith that you do, you do, when a world reviles your faith and history – but your cherish its remnants.  That is soul wrestling.  Something I feel almost certain that every person in this room knows about – or you would never have found your way here.

For a long time I cherished a theory – not a theory without exceptions, I grant you – but a theory nonetheless – that America would have no culture without Blacks, Jews, and Queers.  When correctly applied the theory is accurate to within a keen percentage.  I won’t do a list now – but let’s sometime.  The medium is the message – the musicals, operas, the jazz in night clubs, the color and light, the intensity of a Richard the 3^rd, the truth, the imagination of art comes from not letting the wool fall over your eyes – but weaving it into an amazing tapestry.  A tapestry of suffering and struggle and triumph.

            Speaking of amazing tapestries – I made it up to Chicago a few weeks ago to see the collection at the Art Institute of Medici treasures.  So much of the art was – propagandistic – it was the Medici’s dedicating works of art to glorifying themselves – as mythic figures, as godlike.  But amidst it all were the amazing sinuous bodies of Michaelangelo, the Renaissance – a few centuries before the one in Harlem – the celebration of the human form and the human spirit.  Woven into the tapestries, carved into the statues were messages that – like the secret patterns in slave quilt taught a new vision – that the human form was a miracle – that human being had substance, worthy flesh, sweet earthiness, deep feeling, and power.  That sort of power could bring on Reformations and topple Empires. 

            Plato feared art – because it took liberties with reality – but in fact he had it backward – reality has liberty and art simply says that aloud.  You cannot boil the world down to a New Order – life is change and shift and truth evolves as we touch it and seek it and know it and evolve ourselves.  Plato wanted to strictly control art in his ideal society – and so should any Utopia. any real room to breathe – and art will destroy the status quo.  The illusion of the ideal.

One of the things that really impressed me about Duke Ellington was that he wrote for his band – not for his band – but for the individuals in it – if the trumpet was missing a note, if a stop was damaged, if an instrument had a limitation he would write that into the music – that the power of the sound came from the reality of the musicians, their instruments, strengths, and limitations.  When ideas and not reality are portrayed the art lacks heart – and therefore it lacks the ability to change the world or the human spirit in anyway. 

Ah sugar – honey honey honey you are my candy girl… no mistaking that for art. 

            Art is power – the power of people expressing themselves with authenticity – like Duke Ellington writing a piece of music based on those footsteps he heard tapping down the street in the night.  If you think about it for a moment – the cold street might grab you and your awareness will change – you can lay there with that child whose world is about to change – whose blackness will begin to determine his every move.  You can walk through the quiet street with that person – moving, tired, hoping, going somewhere – or perhaps nowhere in the night.  Even the smallest sound has meaning to the ear of the artist. 

            And that is one of the great powers of jazz – that it gathers people – in all their strengths and limitations and asks that they work together --  that they hear one another and create on the spot – from the heart with the hand – create something new – together.  Ellington said: “Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.  In its beginnings, the United States spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom
yet produced in this country."   Then I can hear the words of Doctor King again – saying that the spirit of democracy will not be trampled – that Black Americans – while in chains, have held democracy in trust. Practiced as an art form and given back to this nation in frightening clarity.

Culture – art  -- brings self awareness – and self awareness makes it possible to claim a place in the world.  Without art change never happens because it cannot be imagined.  Art is freedom.  Dizzy Gillespie called jazz “ The search for truth.”  The search for truth – so is this Unitarian Universalism – jazz?  It is as long it is allowed to change and respond to real people and real time – as long as it is kept true to its heart – but is free to explore the range of possibilities.  I believe that at our best we are to religion what jazz is to music and to life. 

Art is not enough – but it’s the beginning.  Ossie Davis said “Somebody's got to ring that bell, write that poem, sing that song, dance that dance that says to us all, rise. You're larger than that. It's up to you to define the final meaning of America. We're not there, but we're on the way.”

When I reflect on his words – I feel a thrill of fear and a surge of challenge – because what he is saying is that this time, our world, this country is our work of art it shows the shape of our souls and yet we shape it – but we have step forward to do that.  Like any dance we have to move our feet – do the work.  Today we are in the business of saving souls – the souls, the soul of a nation – not from hell after death – but from hell in this life.  

May creativity take shape in our hands and move our lives toward justice.  Let us take the daring leap – beyond the mass market lives laid like a thick shroud to still the soul – and leap into that transcendence – where what we will find is not a heaven on a distant shore – but our own wholeness, the heartbeat of those we love, and our freedom.  Apart from that there are no guarantees, only that we will find joy and life under these heavens – so precious and blue.  You’re larger than that – we’re larger than all that – it’s up to you and the soul you bring to this nation..