Trust
We can’t change ourselves, in our own power: we can only place our trust, place our life, in the hands of Jesus, and let him change us. We can pass from death to life.
-Br. Geoffrey Tristram
Full Sermon: http://ssje.org/ssje/2011/10/09/whats-heaven-going-to-be-like-br-geoffrey-tristram/
Chico Hamilton Quintet – The Wind
I recently had a conversation with the guy who first began feeding me jazz music. He is probably the best teacher I ever had, although we worked in a record store together and there was no formal teacher / student dynamic established. Periodically I have to remind him of how grateful I am for his presence in my life. So much of the things I savor and cling to in life, the things which have made living worthwhile have come through the doors which he helped open to me. We had a great conversation and he mentioned he was currently on a big Chico Hamilton binge. Chico Hamilton has a huge body of work and I have found some things which I loved and some things which left me cold. Spurred on by my friend’s current focus on him, I decided to dig back into the Chico Hamilton catalog and see what I found. I found a lot of great stuff!! Included in that batch of greatness is this captivating song from Chico’s riveting and perhaps slightly unusual quintet, which featured a bass, cello, drums, guitar and saxophone. A lovely hybrid emerges of west coast openness and east coast intellectual pondering in the tracks I’ve heard. This, “The Wind”, seemed quite fitting for Br. Geoffrey’s meditation. Wind is something which invisibly shapes our lives, most often without us noticing. Here in Boston, the wind is almost constant. Even in meterological circles, the wind gets overlooked, as the real key to preparing for a day’s weather in Boston is the wind, not the temperature or the sun. Boston being right along the ocean’s edge, wind off the water very often blows clouds ashore and cools the air, which a few more miles inland may be as much as 10 or 20 degrees warmer. This wind stirs things up. God seems very much the same as wind – always present, usually overlooked or forgotten, but very much active and present in our lives. I pondered Br. Geoffrey’s words about changing on our own, of our own power, and allowing for the changing power of Christ. It is certainly possible that we change ourselves. And those changes can take hold. But I think this meditation is getting at something more nuanced. A collaborative change – change brought about through God with us, or perhaps through collaboration with others – those are changes which may have deeper roots within us. Our own will and self-power could be understood to be rooted in a discipline which must be maintained. Whereas the collaborative change may be understood as something fundamentally deeper. The change is not dependent upon the person maintaining a particular discipline. The change is somehow deeper, maybe more organic? For example, I think of the change initiated in me by all the music my friend turned me on to all those years ago. Somehow, it’s not just the music which changed me, it was also the friendship itself. And that seems to me to be what this meditation is offering; Christianity has a very communal aspect to it and when embraced, those external connections bring us somewhere we may not be able to get to on our own. We may get close, but it’s somehow a different experience with others, with God.