Meditations on WELLS

Denson Sacred Harp 28b

 

 

Life is the time to serve the Lord,
  The time t’insure the great reward;
      And while the lamp holds out to burn
The vilest sinner may return.

    Life is the hour that God has giv’n,
 To escape hell and fly to heav’n;
    The day of grace, and mortals may
Secure the blessings of the day.
                       
     The living know that they must die,
But all the dead forgotten lie;
          Their mem’ry and their sense is gone,
Alike unknowing and unknown.

 

The original poem by Isaac Watts consisted of six stanzas
(based on Ecclesiastes 9:4-5)*.
These meditations arise from the first three of these,
constituting the full text of the Sacred Harp song. 

The shape-note song Wells is sung at a very slow and sober pace.
It is this deliberateness that strengthens the song’s powerful evocative radiance.
Its meditative stateliness makes it one of the most compelling
of the nearly 600 songs in the collection we call The Sacred Harp.

These three verses of Watts’ poem are so intimately and organically allied with
the music carrying them that his words take on a richer meaning,
as it were a new dimension.

In this set of twelve meditations, one on each line of the poem,
the question asked is always “What do these words have to say to me?
What are they telling me about my life,
the interaction of my beliefs,
and my attitude toward my eventual end?”
What they might have meant in Ecclesiastes or to the poet
does not enter into the meditations.
They focus on examining each thought for its personal, internal message.

                        

* Ecclesiastes (KJV) Chapter IX

4  For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope:
for a living dog is better than a dead lion.
5  For the living know that they shall die:
but the dead know not any thing,
neither have they any more a reward;
for the memory of them is forgotten.

 

STANZA I

1. Life is the time to serve the Lord

 

The opening word ‘life’ is a whole note filling the entire first measure.
It leads forcefully and without preliminaries into the twelve lines of the poem.
These words are going to guide my steps through reflections
on what it means to be endowed with a life to live.

*

There are three great questions that each must spend a lifetime journey
trying to find and live the answers to.
Where do I come from?
What am I here for?
Where am I going?
I have been endowed with a brief physical existence,
a life that is mine to find ways of living,
the content of this life undertaking the great journey
to find out who I am and what I am called to be.
The individual physical body I have means that I cannot escape
thinking and feeling as an individual and it is this individuality
that generates the three Great Questions.
Can the inescapable existence of my physical self
be what is creating the arduous journey to the center of myself?
I am unalterably in possession of a conscious, individual life
so my purpose for being here must surely be
to discover what this unique ‘me’ means.

*

‘Serving’ is ‘obeying’.
But the idea of obedience is not much in favor nowadays.
Obedience to what or to whom?
‘Serving’ and ‘obeying’ are humble words,
I am accepting the role of reaching toward something more powerful.
Serving the Lord is nothing less than the call to adventure:
to an awakened and full life—yes, an obedient one.
This is everyone’s dream, whether or not this dream is called into reality.
I am called to listen to and obey the voice deep within
—that is at one and the same time the most centrally ‘me’
and the most essentially ‘outside of me’—
that can only be heard in complete stillness;
in reconciling both to find, and keep in focus, what is most central in me.
There is no way I can circumvent meditating on this paradox.
This brings over the horizon
the question that the rest of these reflections
are going to have to try to answer:
Just what is this voice?

2. The time to insure the great reward

What reward could be greater than the quest to discover
who I am and what I am called to be
and work to nurture it in me and in others? 
When I learn to listen within, the truest reward is
to be empowered to listen to the voice in another.
But learning attunement to the other’s harmonies
is more than I have the self-knowledge to ask for:
an opening arising from my erratic learning to listen
to the harmonies within me.
I want to understand the mystery
of the Presence of some immortal Spirit
at my true center and ground—however that may be found.
While I live I am a constantly changing individual of unfolding presence
yet the unmistakable individuality of ‘me’ remains.
I am completely unchanging only at some true center.
So I need to continually ask myself the question
“What is ‘eternal’ in what I am searching for?”
Eternal = without end,
meaning not the ‘horizontal’ measurement of endlessness in years
but the ‘vertical’ living of life of growth and insight.
There is some place deep within me
that is different from—but not separate from—my familiar physical life:
a place that no ‘created, temporal thing’ has access to
or can have contact with.
A voice, often a still small one.

*

Creation is not something that happened long ago
but something that takes place at every moment of our lives.

 

3. And while the lamp holds out to burn

Chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew opens with
the parable of the bridesmaids’ lamps,
my human life span, the bright or dimmed flame of my consciousness.
The lamps that are prudently kept burning through the hours
are an admonition to me to be always awakened,
to be ready all the while I live, prepared at each moment
 to mind the light within.
The light that is at the center of me
and that I spend a lifetime trying to see in its greatest radiance.
We as Quakers easily talk of ‘the Light within’,
but do we know what we really mean by this?
The light in me is what is not part of my physical existence.
even though I sense no separation from it.
It is the ‘other’ at the center of myself.
Again, the paradox of verse 1:
The point where the Light is, the most securely ‘me’,
not deflected and pulled in all directions
by the distractions and temptations around me
is at the very same time precisely what is not me,
the call from without and sometimes through another.
 The only way I can reach this point at the center
is by being most truly myself, grounded—
the first steps the stilling and centering of meditation.
In deepest meditation, could the fading of the sense
of my own weight and the boundaries of my physical self
be a sign that I am approaching this clear center?
In the Cloud of Unknowing are the words
“What is nowhere to the bodily senses
is everywhere spiritually.”
It is only when my heart is as it were ‘clean’
that the light can be clearly seen
and when it is at its brightest in me I am clear and simple.
During the entire span of years that are allotted to me to live,
I retain the power to continue the quest.
Or paraphrased: If I was granted this life for a reason,
I have been set on a path that impels me to continue seeking
for the whole lengtOn the surface, the words ‘hold out’ here mean simply continue.
But they also have in them a stronger sense:
I want to physically ‘hold out’, persist
as long as I can to experience life to the fullest possible.
It is only the intensity of living
that in affirming my being fulfills my destiny here.
I have persisted to my present age, the final stage in my journey
where I have the strongest need to understand the ‘eternal home’.
Aging is a special gift, and the elder senses the light becoming brighter
and knows that what is happening at this moment is of a special intensity,
almost as if the fire of youth were rekindled at a new level.
This advanced stage of life is telling me clearly
that I am no longer willing to dissipate my inner energy on anything
that does not nourish my true self—
answering my responsibility to share this with another.
For the aging elder has the inescapable—and unquestioned—responsibility
to help disclose the emerging true nature in another—
(in this other, nothing can be realized that is not already there).
What has been opened through the years of a lived life must be shared,
or that life has not been fully lived.  

 

4. The vilest sinner may return

In what sense am I a sinner, a vile or for that matter an unvile one? 
‘Sin’: my long-evolving understanding of what the church taught me so long ago
now tells me that losing contact with and losing sight of the eternal
at the center of what I am, that’s what sin is.
It is any separation from the light, the voice within.
That light is always going to flicker occasionally
or fade from sight for a while.
But no matter how much or how long I let it slip out of sight,
it never disappears
and I always have the option of reconnecting with it;
the door to this innermost secret room remains always open.
But my life is a human one—
when drowning in the seas of the negative,
there is always one small headland of good that remains;
but likewise even when my heart is the best and most awakened
there remains at least an island of the negative. 

*

Is this sin ‘original sin’?
The inescapable burden of physical existence is the impossibility
of hearing the voice, seeing the light,
unmixed and without interruption,
in other words ‘sin’ in the seasoned sense it has for the present me.
The potentiality of responding to the light and listening to the voice
is present at every moment that I am living
but it constantly requires my full focus to reach out to it.
Once I have sensed the power of true presence at my center,
I have a sense of ‘coming home’.
The return will be a celebration of all that I have lived to awakening.
I can ‘return’ from wandering because I have been—and am—
a traveler, a sojourner still on the journey.

*

But ‘sin’ is also the route to self-knowledge;
Is it possible that it could be the only way to self-knowledge?
When I am straying widely from the quest I am on,
I have even greater potential
for accessing the knowledge necessary for return to it.
The idea of ‘original sin’ in the usual sense may say little,
but in the sense above,
it is a reality of the physical life I have been endowed with:
of necessity life brings with it
all the errors, flaws, deep imperfections, alienations of ordinary existence.
It is this need for striving
that takes me along creative pathways
that otherwise I might never have discovered.

STANZA II

5. Life is the hour that God has given

The brief life I have goes by in an ‘hour’,
it is almost too short for the enormous demanding quest ahead.
But this lifetime is the only ‘hour’ I have
and I have no access to anything before or after.
There is another meaning in these words:  
I am conscious here of not the entire span of life,
but perpendicularly of each moment.
What is here called an ‘hour’ means ‘now’, this ever-moving moment,
the sole home of potentiality.
This is the only place where I have the choice
between finding the true depth of life
and the fullest richness of the world of life around me
and allowing myself to be diverted from it.
The eternal, the light, is what some call God, the acting and attracting principle in all.
There are many other names
such as the Spirit, the Eternal Presence, the Inner Guide.
What lives is not what I call it
but how I become aware and respond to it.
When I am truly attentive to the guidance beyond my own desires and control
I can take on a humility of spirit, as the prophet Micah reminds me to
... walk humbly with thy God.
This humility if it is genuine quiets me
and allows me to hear the movement of the still small voice in another.
So guidance is not a flash of mystical experience
But a gentle motion at the center within.

*

Realizing that this hour of life has been ‘given’ to me
asks the first of the three great questions:
Where do I come from?
What has set me on the path of life?
Do I come from a timeless realm of life to be sent out on this brief adventure?

6. To escape hell and fly to heaven

Avoiding ‘hell’ and entering ‘heaven’:
what is the meaning for me of the choices between these two?
Artists and writers throughout the ages
have brought their imagination and creativity to bear
in depicting the agonies and alienation of torment.
Imagination piled upon imagination as ‘hell’ was depicted as a place
(Dante’s Inferno—in the hands of Doré—one of the most vivid),
though some knew, as the medieval mystics perceived,
that hell is a state of the human heart:
complete alienation from the true depths of the individual self.
The engulfing and tormenting flames
are the missed splendors of a lived life, blindness to the divine within. 
This is why in traditional Christian terminology ‘sin’ leads to ‘hell’.
Hell has a reality, albeit a world removed from the place of my Baptist past:
it is being unawakened, at its most merciless
the denial of the existence of a Divine Presence.

*

I am in ‘heaven’ when I am in contact
with the eternal presence at the true center.
I ‘fly’ there—after all in my culture good things are ‘up’—
and because at moments such as these I have risen, I am light.
I can only do this by casting off all dragging weight,
Scrooge’s ponderous though invisible chains.
The Light within that I am striving toward is sometimes splendor
and at times forbidding flames.
But most of the time it is fitful, sometimes hardly visible, usually flickering.
Every so often there comes a quickly passing moment of surpassing beauty
—mountains forest flowers, music, words, a person, a thought—
when I sense with a sureness not to be denied
that something divine has reached out and touched me.

*

These two separate words suggest something mutually exclusive:
either one or the other.
But they are in a living dialectic with each other,
during my life one is never without the other.
Ongoing ordinary life is a mix—maybe rather a delicate balance—
of heaven and hell
which is the crucial place where my life’s choices are.
This dynamic interaction, the tension between ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’
forms the energy that impels all movement
and creates the ever-moving kaleidoscope of my life.

7. The day of grace, and mortals may

In music, a ‘grace note’ is a decoration
consisting of notes that do not belong to the basic melody or its harmony.
In other words an addition, a special gift
not part of the anticipated structure of the whole.
The word ‘grace’ is one with more far-reaching implications
than we usually find in it today,
even the dictionaries stop short of exploring its richest senses.
It is a gift, something good that comes to me unasked for
and often unanticipated.
Looked at this way, since I did not even ask for this life,
the very fact that I am here is an act of grace.

*

The modern society I am immersed in teaches me
that there is a 1:1 correlation between what I put in and what I get out,
a straight commercial trade: I receive what I pay for
and I am entitled to that but no more.
But grace denies this and supersedes it—
I can always find more than I ‘bargained for’.
My whole attitude shifts as soon as I realize that everything I receive
goes beyond what I have bought and paid for.   
It may come to me through a channel
someone who bestows the gift on me without their needing to do so.
The grace of a gift need not be material:
it may be some act of presence.
There need be no intermediary will at all whether divine or human.
Every day is the ‘day of grace’.
I can only perceive grace through an attitude of silent anticipation,
of withdrawing from my usual stance of evaluating and directing.
It is only in this silence that I can find myself steeped in the whole of creation
and never lose sight of the world as a gift.

*

If ‘grace’ is an act, ‘gratitude’ is a response.
When I experience gratitude, I am acting in harmony with creation.
If ‘grace’ is something, ‘gracious’ is a description.
When I have a gracious mind,
I am able to act with understanding and compassion,
compassion being present to another and hearing the voice in another.
This is what adds a living dimension of presence to me.
So the route to my own awakening goes via enlightenment in others.
There has to be light in me before it can reach out to others,
but paradoxically my measure of light
can only grow from what others have gifted me with.
This sharing of the light
is what happens in Friends’ meeting for worship
where we can intensify the light in each other
as if each were the lighthouse’s polished lenses
that focus the beam.

8. Secure the blessings of the day

Ultimately grace resides in my ability to mindfully perceive it.
I can find grace everywhere,
I am potentially surrounded by it at any moment,
it is a side of all my activity
and these are the ‘blessings of the day’.  
The day’s blessing, looked at from a different angle,
is in the passing away each day of the old,
the distractions that I am letting go of.
Blessing is the letting go of the burdening weight of the past.
The innermost self wants to be as free and light in weight as possible.
It is only while I am living
that I am able to secure, that is to find and make my own,
the grace, the blessings, of the day.
This means awakening to the blessings that invisibly surround me,
the web of grace that unites all things,
and this can only be accomplished by the retreat to the still place,
the ‘eternal’, at my center
and as such it is the major task of the living.

*

But I can at the same time be not only a recipient
but a channel of grace.
I can see everywhere the opportunities to give
—whether something concrete or an attitude of presence—
an occasion of grace.
Grace contains in itself the qualities of compassion and generosity,
wisdom and intuition, humor and joy, gratitude and humility.
So grace opens my heart and carries me across the chasms
of my own weaknesses of understanding.

STANZA III

9.  The living know that they must die

Commercial society seduces me in endless ways to try to live forever
and pretend that death hardly exists;
it is all geared toward denial of the part that it plays in life.
Each of us knows that our life must some day end in death.
Being fully alive means not only being conscious of this inescapable reality
but making its certainty a part of my life itself,
a living presence in my life,
a creative companionship that I have built.
Awareness of death throws the events of my life into a powerful perspective
and I am enabled to live with focused intensity.
This awareness of my journey into the unknown
gives shape to how I am living toward it.
My life is a preparation, what I do in this life echoes unendingly.
When I am at one with myself
I am at one with the whole of creation.
In the words of another Sacred Harp song—
O may my heart in tune be found  
  Like David’s harp of solemn sound
—the harmony within me, not only in tune with itself
but with the often unheard melody of all creation.
While I am living I am co-creating,
my human creativity helps add to creation:
My living a full life means that I am adding to the glory of creation.
In my life I always have the choice of being ‘present’ to myself
and—in direct consequence—to others,
and death is the transformation and refinement of this presence
so that I become part of the eternal presence.
The closer I am able to get to the center of my true self
the more I am living in eternity.
What I have co-created outside of time has become
a permanent part of creation and cannot vanish.
Dying becomes a part of my life only when I realize
that death does not have the power to destroy me
to cancel all that I have lived.
Death will discard the body but the life I have lived
in undertaking the quest for the center of myself and others
—haven’t I earned the right to trust
that this passes undamaged into timelessness?

*

In the third line of the poem the words were
“the lamp holds out to burn”,
which besides ‘life continues’ also means to me
that with sober diet, abundant exercise, secure relationships, inner peace
I ‘persist’, extend my life as long as I can.
Am I thus putting off dying because I am denying it or afraid of it?
No, it is because the gift of life accumulates more riches
from past and future into the present
the longer it can persist.
The lived richness of life makes death more meaningful,
less and less a punishment.     

 

10.  But all the dead forgotten lie

At a Quaker Memorial Meeting what is dead is not present.
The deceased body is irrelevant and there is no casket.
So in this sense the dead are indeed ‘forgotten’
because not focused upon.
Our ‘forgetting’ here is the same as ‘letting go’.
A Memorial Meeting is a celebration of the life that has been lived.
In that hour, the individual who has lived comes fully alive
as Friends join in putting together all the ways
the central individuality of that self,  the journey that has just ended,
has touched us.
We have all been enriched by it
and take some reflections of that life with us.
This remembering, and not the forgotten
reflects the true life of the deceased. 

*

Many have told me what they think immortality is:
The memory of me, whatever impact I have had on those still living,
continues to echo in them and accompany their journeys.
But this is only a pale reflection of me
and through a generation or two
it fades and diffuses into unrecognizability.
But somehow all this intricate interweaving of my experienced life,
this radiance of all I have lived,
grows—I trust—exempt from loss into the stillness of permanence.
The living spiritual energy that permeated the entire body
has not evaporated.
The dead are not forgotten at all,
because they have been conveyed to a place of stillness
where their subtle presence continues to grow deeper.

 

11.  Their memory and their sense is gone

The deceased has been released from the life in time,
and in this sense the dead are no longer able to  ‘remember’ anything.
But their lived experience has not simply vanished
but passed into the unknown realm:
the life that has ended is in timelessness, in eternity.
What is gone is their memory and their sense,
their physically and temporally limited striving toward the Sacred.
But as soon as the narrow scope of their memory and sense no longer limits,
they join the universal memory and the eternal sense.
What lives now in these is the brightness of the light
they have struggled to find and nurtured in life.


Eternity is not an endless extension of time
but the dimensionless present for those who have learned to live in it.
Eternity is nothing less or more than the deeper nature of time. 
Gone are the past and the future, leaving only the present.
The memory is of the past, the sense is of what is coming.
And yet, past and future are not equal counterparts.
The future is continually becoming the present,
a constant flow of future possibility emerging into present reality
and it is here that I live.
So while living I have the power to give form to the future.
The past, all that I have lived, and the future, full potentiality,
both together are not something to be escaped from,
because each in its own way enriches and gives content to the present.
In the stillness I must find the riches.
But myself I am also constantly changing and potentially being reborn,
the true meaning of my baptism so many years ago.
When I die, past and future are going to disappear
but to live totally in the present
is to cast off the weight of physical existence
and I am no longer weighted by the perishable things of the world.
There is only one world, not a ‘transitory’ one and an ‘eternal’ one.
It is all in how I live in the one world that there is.   
Living is a constant letting go of things,
until at the end all memory of them vanishes
as does all sense of what might be coming.
The innermost voice is heard, the light shines unshaded
only when both past and future are completely stilled.

*

When I think of my life as a ‘journey’,
could this word be misdirecting my thought about the timeless?
A journey means a progressing through space,
and therefore inescapably through time.
But my life quest is the search for precisely what is not time!
Doesn’t that word ‘journey’ ignore the whole perpendicular dimension? 

 

12.  Alike unknowing and unknown

At the end I am left with the great Mystery at the center,
the mystery at the center of myself.
The Mystery is at the same time active and passive.
I am ‘unknowing’ and unable to reach its ultimate depths,
and it is ‘unknown’, unreachable to anyone in life.
The presence of an immortal spirit in me is something I sense
but can never know.
It must remain a mystery for me,
enabling me to spend an entire lifetime’s quest striving toward it.
Silent meditation is a daily period of listening
for the voice at the center,
past and future enriching the present,
the part of me that is eternal but yet only fitfully audible.  
Contemplation, whether withdrawn or in the midst of active life,
 is the celebration of this unknowable mystery of life.
I can only live toward it in the faith that it is a reality:
Behold the fundamental paradox.
The deepest human reality is unattainable,
precisely because I am an ordinary human being.
And yet, unless I have caught sight of the center and striven toward it
I have missed the point of living my human life.
‘Unknown’: it goes beyond my knowing things,
part of my earthly existence and thus not part of the great quest.
Upon death I am ‘unknowing’
in the sense that the physical pursuit of all that is bound by time
vanishes, memory and sense—past and future.
The active unknowing and the passive unknown
are two sides of the same;
I am the unknowing and it is the unknown,
one and the same complete identity.
The unknowability of the mysterious cycle of birth, living and dying
is the essence of my living to the fullest.

*

The three stanzas of the poem have drawn my thoughts
around the second great question
What am I here for?
But the first and the third are the great Mystery
that throughout life can never be any but a mystery:
Where do I come from?
Where am I going?
Suppose that both are the same—
could the poet’s ‘return’ perhaps embrace a wider sense
than the one he intended?
Am I in a cycle that returns me
to the ‘place’ from whence I was sent into this life?
What no one will ever ‘know’ as we usually mean that
is whether the eternity from which we emerge into the world at birth
is one and the same as the eternity we return to at death…
While I live, in the stillness within I hear the music of creation;
I hear the Divine melody and can be attuned to and sing the great song.
   Soon I will strike the heav’nly lyre
With saints of great renown,
           And join that great harmonious choir ...
—yet another Sacred Harp song.
Beyond my inner silence and stillness
there is a more profound silence
and this is where the harmony of creation is heard.

*

Like the opening word ‘life’,
the closing word ‘(un)known’ is sung as a whole note filling the final measure.
When the assembled singers have come to the end of this third verse,
the resounding word ‘unknown’ echoes in the room
and lingers in our consciousness...
...Some time in my early teens I declared the number 47 to be
my very own magic ‘lucky number’
(and discovered only years later that it was a prime number,
in the most literal sense an individual),
and for almost seven decades it has remained ‘me’.
Psalm 47 begins with the words
... O sing unto God with the voice of melody,
and a modern paraphrase* invites us to
Acclaim the Creator with loud songs of joy.
When our voices join in the stately WELLS,
even the unbelieving singers are no less a part
of this melody and this acclamation,
it is unmistakably loud and it is infectiously joyous. 

*

May the song and its messages continue to resonate
with the rhythms of my own life.
And with yours—though your own inner harmonies
be in resonance with very different outer ones.

W. Z. Shetter
Written 2009