Making melody – 17 August 2018

Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:18-20)

The phrase in there which arrests my attention is where Paul writes: …singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God.  He adds other little bits, such as at all times, and for everything…  It reminds me about a human reality so humdrum that normally, unless it is annoying us, we scarcely give it a second thought – and that is the common experience of having a tune, some song perhaps, or hymn, or a theme from pop or some classical work, replaying incessantly in our heads.  It can continue until we’re sick of it, but still can’t expunge it.  Maybe Paul didn’t have exactly this in mind – making melody in your hearts – Paul didn’t have radio or TV or smart phones.  But they had melodies, and here, to the church at Ephesus, Paul advocates singing in your hearts as an alternative to getting drunk with wine which is debauchery. 

I know I am already sounding facetious.  If you don’t ever have some relentless tune taking possession of the neurones, then you may not know what I am talking about.  But I realised that inner singing, another kind of mantra, you might say, can be turned to good effect.  But if the tune that installed itself uninvited in my synapses is, as recently, a wretched song they had played on TV1’s Hymns for Sunday Morning, to the accompaniment of Salvation Army ladies swinging tambourines, both words and music equally execrable, then it strains my slender virtues of hospitality.  It was eradicated finally by my donning noise-cancelling headphones and playing Fauré’s lovely Cantique.  By spiritual defiance I turned it into an inner song of thanks and praise to God. 

Possibly Paul is having a bit of fun here.  It may be that the Ephesus Mothers’ Union had sent him a complaint about wine consumption in the Ministers Fraternal.  So he alludes to two radically different approaches to life.  One of them is prevalent and powerful in our day, and I recently heard it called, repeatedly, at a funeral, “Having a Laugh”.  Plenty of things had gone wrong, various speakers said, and it had all ended in disaster, “but we had a laugh”.  Whether these choices for life are fuelled by alcohol, or obsessive sport, or drugs or partying… it is essentially a feeding of self.  An sizeable proportion of the population seems to know no other way.  There is another way.  It is living by gratitude and wonder, what Paul calls giving thanks.  Self is dethroned.  These changes begin to happen in the silence and stillness of prayer.  We discover our wonder and thanks for the gifts that are sustaining us… life itself, and breath, air, forests and oceans, birth and death, memory, understanding and forgiveness, the lessons of adversity and pain… everything we did not create, and can by no means control.   In Paul’s words: giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything.  He wrote that in prison, you know, in Rome.  And he has music in his heart, songs of love and gratitude.  Perhaps one way you can describe the Christian contemplative life is just that – simply making melody, and being thankful.