Sacred Rhythms

What if sacredness’s rhythm is idiosyncratic? Or in the words of a teenager, “Sacredness has a weird rhythm all its own.”  The sacred does not maintain a hair-tossing ‘80’s rock band beat nor a quick step bossa nova beat of the ‘60’s.  What if what is sacred marches to its own unusual pulse?

I know a bit about keeping time.  As one of two women in our college percussion section, I majored in rhythm.  My percussion study in the 1990’s included a lot of instruments from timpani to vibraphone and from triangle to claves.  Percussionists or drummers might be likened to playing a mile-wide worth of instruments (I even performed on a paper bag once, for goodness sake!), but at an inch of depth.  So perhaps you could say that I know the most about how to make a brilliantly stupid mistake sound and look like it was meant to be! 

One thing remains unmistakable: drummers drum.  We keep time so that others around us can march, dance, or ‘noodle’ over our solid groove. Drummers along with a steady bass player, keep things in sync while saxophones wail and throaty sopranos croon the blues. Drummers, if they are worth their pay, keep things tight.

Tidiness might be what drew me into the percussion section many decades ago.  Neat and tidy is often the opposite of life’s unpredictability and instability.  Who does not desire a sense of security within the fickleness of life?!  Safe space is created when a solid groove keeps on going. Why do you think thousands of people flock to ‘revel’ and ‘worship’ at the feet of great rock bands even though they know all the songs by memory and have heard the band perform them before?  It is the experience of the music performed which captures human being’s souls, I think.  The atmosphere and environment created by good quality music suspends life’s time clock which then creates a sacred moment uniquely its own.     

This kind of experience reveals something to us about the nature of our God.  God in Jesus: who is beyond time, in time, and through time; moves to a unique beat.  God’s eternal timing and my finite timing by their very natures cannot be the same.  That is probably why earlier theologians in the Christian church differentiated human time as Kronos from God’s timing as Kairos. I imagine God chuckles at humanity’s insane need to subdivide time (which is a measurement we established ourselves) into small and large segments as if we can ‘manage’ it any better.  Indeed, the Divine pulses differently than we do.    

You may have already noticed this difference of rhythm within your own prayer life.  I have.  Sometimes I am frustrated that God moves too slowly in my life to answer a petitioned prayer or rid me of an annoying sinful habit which I would like removed yesterday; please and thank you!  There are other moments in which God’s timing accelerates rapidly into my neatly organized plans and that the mess sounds like 6^th grade band students trying to perform an accelerando together for the first time!  If you have not attended a 6^th grade band concert, then imagine 500 honking geese flocking to their summer home before a major storm. Yes, the rhythm of the sacred is peculiar into itself and unlike any hip hop, reggae, funk or other human-created back beats.    

I will never forget when my percussion instructor taught us a lesson on timing that later became a wisdom moment for me.  During a percussion ensemble rehearsal when our counting became tangled over one another he said, “Interest in music is created through the pauses. This is why rhythm is an essential element in music along with tone and harmony.  Therefore, give the pause it’s due.”  Then he turned up the metronome’s volume as we tried to perform the troubling section again. 

Give the pause it’s due.  Not too fast.  Not too slow.  Let it be what it is.  When I pause in my frustration that God is not responding as quickly or as slow as I would prefer; I remember percussion ensemble rehearsal.  I give the pause or rhythm between God and me it’s due.  After all I am not the Maestro: God is.  God sets the rhythm and tempo of answered prayer, newly opened doors, healing, spiritual growth in myself or someone I love. 

My timing is not God’s timing, but maybe my time here on earth is to learn more about God’s rhythmic style than my own.  Or possibly I simply need to honor God as the kind of Divine Drummer God is!  Rock on, Jesus!  Rock on!