The Key of Longing ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 26, 2023
“Bring your broken hallelujah here…
We all bring some broken things, songs and dreams, and long lost hopes…”
There was a civil war, in the 1990’s, in Bosnia, in Eastern Europe. The city of Sarajevo, just a few years before the site of the 1984 Winter Olympics, was under siege by Bosnian Serbs. As a city ringed by hills, it was easy for the insurgents to cut it off, and then to lay siege to it by installing mortars and deploying snipers on the hillsides to fire into the city. Normal life quickly came to a halt, and food and water became scarce. On May 27, 1992, a line formed in a city square outside of a bakery that was still operating. A mortar shell struck and killed 22 people.
The next day a cellist appeared, in his formal clothing, sat down among the ruins and played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. The cellist, a man named Vedran Smailovich, who had been present but uninjured by the shelling, returned for 21 more days, until he had played once for every life lost. He played one of the saddest compositions we know, and one of the most beautiful. It was a broken hallelujah.
It’s easy to talk about his bravery, sitting among the destruction, as bullets continued to fly past. But today we will talk about other emotions, especially poignancy. About sadness, and the human longing for beauty in the midst of brokenness.
“We all bring some broken things, songs and dreams and long lost hopes…”
This month, our theme has been Vulnerability. We’ve looked at being vulnerable through different lenses – discovering the paradox that in displaying vulnerability, in taking risks, we can become safer and stronger. We can discover help and support that we didn’t know were present. We also looked honestly at how vulnerability can be a privilege for those who live in relative safety. Marginalized people often cannot take risks or allow themselves to be seen as vulnerable.
And today, we are exploring sadness, and longing. We know without being told that grief, feelings of sadness and depression, make us feel vulnerable. Loss and sadness keep us from feeling whole; all is not well, we can feel isolated, disengaged, alone.
According to Susan Cain, the author of Bittersweet, whose story about the haiku master Issa we heard just now, our culture tends to focus on how to make ourselves happy. After all, the pursuit of happiness is right there in the founding documents of our country, in the Declaration of Independence. We seek out happiness, joy, comedy instead of tragedy. It is easy, in a culture such as ours, to think of happiness as truly the natural human condition, and what we should aspire to. We equate happiness and success. If we’re not happy, perhaps we need help.
But we have another side to our natures. As the English poet William Blake wrote,
“Joy and woe are woven fine…
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
and when this we rightly know,
Safely through the world we go.” (Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”)
We are more than our joy, our desire for sunshine and laughter. We also possess senses of longing and poignancy. We are meant to be able to see the beauty in the shadows. And according to Susan Cain, who describes herself as a ‘happy melancholic’, it is these emotions – long and poignancy – and the weaving of the joyful and the poignant, that can help us to be much more whole and healthy people.
Susan Cain’s exploration of the emotion of longing began with her interest in sad music, and she opens her book with the story of the Cellist of Sarajevo. For there he sat, day after day, playing an almost unbearably sad piece. And the memory of that, over 30 years ago now, fired our imaginations, and helped us all to recognize the nobility and the beauty that could be present in the human spirit. We could see and feel the beauty.
Much of our joy has a poignant edge to it, something of a sharp edge, although Ms. Cain notes that some people are more aware of this than others. Our joy in watching a young child mastering a new skill, or giving us a hug and kiss, can be tempered with a sense of those moments as fleeting. We know that someday that loving little one will roll their eyes when we say hello to them in front of their friends. But would we feel as much joy in the moment if we didn’t recognize that moment as poignant, as bittersweet?
Part of our sense of sadness comes from longing, or yearning. We often associate yearning with romantic love, but Susan Cain points out that such love is only one manifestation of yearning. We yearn for lost loved ones perhaps most of all. We long for, yearn for, beauty in many different forms: for creativity, for completeness. Music, especially sad music, is an important way for us to access and to express these feelings, and to reach for the beauty. Art and literature also call to us to help us respond to our sense of longing.
In our first reading we heard these words, by the poet Steve Garnaas-Holmes:
“Grief is not a thing we have,
like a stone in your pocket, or a boil;
it’s music deep within us and around us,
music of love in the key of longing…” (“Grief Music,” by Steve Garnaas-Holmes)
Music of love in the key of longing.
Susan Cain reports on the research of neuroscientists into the effect of sad music on people. These neuroscientists posited that “yearning melodies help our bodies to achieve homeostasis – a state in which our emotions and physiologies function within optimal range. Studies even show that babies in intensive care units who listen to often mournful lullabies have stronger breathing, feeding patterns, and heart rates than infants hearing other kinds of music!” (Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. 2022. P.35.). It appears that other types of music do not elevate our emotions the way that sad music does.
Cain, the self-styled ‘happy melancholic’, proposes that we like the combination – the balance between the sadness and the beauty, the bitter and the sweet, the joy and woe woven fine. We respond to poignancy, to longing. This calls to mind the music of Leonard Cohen, especially his Hallelujah, the ‘cold and broken hallelujah’.
The key of longing is everywhere, within us and outside of us. It is part of our sadness. Does the longing, the music, weaken us, or strengthen us?
The evidence points to sadness and longing as strengthening us. Being able to experience sadness, to feel grief and loss and longing, is an important part of being able to feel compassion, to be empathetic. Think about it – if we turn away from sadness, from allowing ourselves to feel loss, how will we be able to extend our compassion to others who need it? To be whole, to be able to offer our compassion, we must be able to feel the poignancy of life, and to accept the bitter as well as the sweet. The more compassionate we are, the stronger we are as a society.
It’s a day for poetry and for stories about music and musicians. Susan Cain tells the story of the violinist Min Kym, a Korean virtuoso and child prodigy living in England. Min lived the life we might expect of a child prodigy; completely focused, as she grew, on her musical attainments. As a young woman she was offered the chance to purchase a Stradivarius, and when she first played it, her life changed in that moment. Min described the experience as meeting her soul mate. She felt whole, complete.
It turns out that there is a huge black market for violins such as Min’s, and one day, hers was stolen. Min fell apart. She stopped performing. Essentially, for a time, she stopped living. When the violin was recovered, she had already spent the insurance money on another, and she couldn’t afford to buy it back.
Over time, Min Kym began to look at her life, at her whole story, and she found a new channel for her creativity. She wrote a memoir of growing up as a child prodigy, and she looked squarely at her life until that point. She found a new way – writing – to express her longing for creativity. And Min has gone on to live a fuller life, with romantic relationships, collaborations with other artists. She said this: “I’ve been reborn…There’s space for a new me to emerge. It’s not something I would have chosen. I would happily have been a complete unit with my violin for the rest of my life. But when you do recover from any loss – when you heal, when your soul starts to heal from the shock – a new part grows, and that’s where I am now.” (Ibid., p. 79.). Min used her sadness, her longing, and became whole.
It’s when our hearts break that they can open and expand, and we can grow. Many of us are likely thinking of the famous Leonard Cohen lyric in this moment: “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”
We fear loss and grief. We fear becoming diminished, less than we were before the unimaginable happens – the lover leaves us, the beloved child dies, the violin is stolen. We don’t know whether we can go on. We might not be able to hear the music at all for a time, as one of you said the other day – even the sad music.
But even so. But even so.
We live our lives balancing between the ordinary daily tasks and the joys and losses. As our poet wrote, “A friend is dying and I am sweeping the garage.” Our understanding of life as bittersweet, as poignant, as both joy and woe, strengthens us. How so?
Our grief, our losses connect us. We discover, going from house to house as did Kisa Gotami, that no house is left untouched by sorrow. We take our places in the story that makes us the most human, the story that asks the question, “How shall we live, knowing that we and everything we love, must die?
Our sadness, our longing, prepare us to ask that question, and to answer it for ourselves. We prepare by growing in empathy and compassion for all those around us, all those having to confront the same question. How will we live, knowing that we must die?
And we prepare, and we are strengthened by the realization that no house is left untouched, that all those who have gone before us and all those who will come after us will ask and answer the same question.
But even so.
A laugh track, a comedy show, won’t help us answer that ultimate question. As it turns out, our very brains are wired to respond to the sadness as well as the joy, and to feel our longing as a path toward wholeness. And we know in our bones that we are neither the first people to experience great loss, nor will we be the last.
May we take comfort from this knowledge, and may we be listening for the music of longing in our hearts, and find a way to sing along, in a great chorus.
May it be so.
Amen.
