Blogs • Revd Tim Hurd (Former Chaplain)

Readers may be aware of the recent profile of Selwynesque band the DFenders.

The current College band is recording a song which will soon be heard on a promotional podcast for Selwyn, composed by current students, evocatively titled “Rise”.

The church congregations that meet across the fence from Selwyn (all 5 of us, embracing diverse traditions and ethnicities) were also honoured to have the Selwyn Small Choir perform for us at a gathering on Saturday night, where they ended by performing Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” - both a fab song (watch her perform it live - in a post-modern electronica sense - here), and a really interesting musical and lyrical statement. Best wishes to Small and Large Choirs for Wednesday’s choral competition with Knox!

I’m also beginning two precious weeks of Study Leave where I’ll be working on some of my own music. So forgive me, if I’ve got music on my mind.

Oh, and I’m currently listening to the latest offering from “national treasure” singer-songwriter, Dave Dobbyn, titled “Anotherland”. And rather enjoying it.

I have a book called “What language shall I borrow?” It’s about the way we speak about faith. Where we turn for a language to express joy and emptiness, love and hope.

And really, where we do our spirituality, many of us, is in our music. Music is the language we look to when language by itself proves to be too thin.

Music is the language that many of us turn to, whether we realise it or not, to ground ourselves, to make sense of what’s happening, to get beyond ourselves.

That’s the language of spirituality. Always has and always will be.

Dave Dobbyn is a case very much in point. His rediscovered faith and his music are so clearly and powerfully connected. You can clearly see the man on a journey, little statements of faith, little statements of hope, little questions of self, and those of us who’ve lived with the music are caught up in it.

There are tracks on that journey like “Lament for the numb”, “When I needed you most I couldn’t find language”, “Sudden staring at a naked flame”, “Beside you”. And the song that opened the album marking his overt claiming of faith was interestingly titled “Welcome home”, a wonderful statement of inclusion and identity in itself (see the video here - note the use of flags as markers of identity). I sang too at our gathering on Saturday Dobbyn’s setting of onetime Burns Fellow [50th anniversary this week] James K. Baxter’s “Song of the Years” (text at end).

With another Dobbyn album named after Auckland landmark, The Hopetoun Bridge, I challenge anyone to suggest that New Zealand music culture is not a place of deep spirituality. And it’s not just this one artist.

Why is it that music tends to engulf us at adolescence?

Because music is and has always been about meaning and identifying and… something we just can’t put our fingers on.

The language of the soul.

SONG OF THE YEARS James K. Baxter

When from my mother’s womb I came
Disputandum was my name.

Weeping, hoping, threatening,
beyond myself I had no King.

I drew in with each hour’s breath
the grey dust of the second death.

And when my childhood days were spent
it was to Venus I grew suppliant.

Little tremors woke and died
within the mountain of my pride.

Singing on the gallows cart,
created beauty held my heart,

The aardvark and the onager
were stabled at my sepulchre.

And in that deep den the King of Bliss
broke my heart and gave me his.

“This for your doom and penance take:
be merry always for my sake.”

He gave me a white stone to bear
with my true name written there.

And without end I’ll say
Laus tibi Domine!

My nephew has a job as a waiter. At least he did last night.

All of 5 1/4, he and his Primary colleagues from St Francis Xavier school cooked, served and entertained last night for their parents and families. What did they prepare? What else: burgers.

Now, I’m told the food was actually very good.

But in a moment of cynicism I can’t help but make the unfair and totally unfounded leap… So just what is our education system preparing us for?

A job at McCafe? Surely not.

A role further up the corporate McLadder? Maybe.

Does education - and especially tertiary education - only fit us for a career, or is it supposed to do something else as well? Or even instead?

Back in the 1990s we moved - at least financially - from the idea that higher education benefited society as a whole, to acknowledging that it benefited the individual concerned. Hence the advent of student fees, student loans, and the ongoing remodeling of institutions.

If you approved, this remodeling was about making education relevant, outcome-oriented, and bringing a medieval institution kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat (for you Terry Pratchett fans).

If you did not, this was the age when our Polytechnics wanted to become Universities, and our Universities tried their very hardest to become Polytechnics: vocational training centres, where knowledge and learning for its own sake was a perverse and flabby indulgence.

Both descriptions of course are caricatures, but in a world where George W. Bush is electable and reality TV still pulls the punters, what do we make of wisdom?

With a capital “W”, wisdom is one of the biblical descriptions, personifications or attributes of God.

Our University motto is Sapere aude: “Dare to be wise”.

What does it mean to “dare to be wise” in our world, and our still “tall-poppy” culture?

What does it mean to be a literal philosopher, a “lover of wisdom”?

Do we study to be moulded or enlarged?

To answer questions or to ask them?

Perhaps in that’s the difference between the burger and El Bulli (ref. Monday’s interview on National Radio).

Go on. Be wise. I dare ya.

Not so much an entry, but a chance to share some great Spring words and music…

Theistic, but perhaps equally evocative for those simply pondering the wonder of existence?

Music and image here.

  XAIPE, 65

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of allnothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Music by contemporary US composer Eric Whitacre, performed by Polyphony on Cloudburst.