It may seem strange, but I'm not really going to offer a definition of what authenticity means. Instead, I'm going to try to sort out my own intellectual and experiential history with the notion of authenticity--whatever it means!
One of the books I enjoyed reading the most during my graduate studies in modern Chinese history at USC was titled: Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchuko and the East Asian Modern. It's been a while since I read it, but the most important thing that remains with me from my reading of it is that authenticity--and more importantly, claims to authenticity--have powerful effects.
I'm getting snippets of this in my Introduction to New Testament Interpretation course, where we are learning about the historical backdrop of the Gospels and the conjectures surrounding issues of authorship and audience. Which Gospel was written first? At what time? For what audience? No, really. We truly want to know the who, when, what, why, and where of all of this!
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| So much reading to do!! |
I attended a conference yesterday on Sustainability in New Haven, hosted at the Divinity School. One of the speakers presented ideas of embodiment and authenticity within Christian liturgy--specifically in the context of communion. He mentioned that authenticity involves embodiment and is always considered to be "better" than non-authenticity. Authenticity is also culturally generated and has a moral component.
What is "authentic" for one group of people may be completely contrived for another, and I've begun to pick up on this as I attend chapels and concerts involving ritual and/or performance. When I first arrived at Yale, chapel services were an amazing breath of fresh air. Coming from evangelical churches in Southern California, my soul was starving for a worship sequence that was acoustic rather than amplified, intuitive rather than explained. And I got exactly what I wanted.
I remember being blown away during my very first chapel service at the musical competency and sensitivity of both those leading and those participating in worship. A simple breath or hand gesture on the part of the song leader was adequate enough of a signal to the congregation to slow down or soften its singing. Human voices, accompanied by a piano or djembe, came together in unison (and moments of harmony) in an enclosed yet airy space lighted by the sun coming in from large windows, reverberating and surrounding us in an organic way. In the Evangelical services I was used to, the singing of the congregation was often overpowered by the amped-up voices of the worship leader, shattered by the haphazard beating of the drum set, and undergirded claustrophobically by the bass guitar. Only in select moments, when the worship leader motioned to his band to stop playing, would one actually heard the congregation singing.
As a classically trained musician, the Evangelical way of worship as an aesthetic experience never sat well with me. My ears were insulted at every turn by some musical blunder--or simply by the un-sublime feeling that the sounds created in my being. But worship is worship, and once I turned off my ears "in the flesh", as it were, and allowed my spirit to posture itself under what the true meaning of worship was, I became a willing part of the service, able to be touched to the core by what I was experiencing. I was able to experience authentic worship with my whole being.
Still, I longed to experience a more liturgical/"traditional" style of doing church. The few times in my life that I'd attended church with Catholics or Episcopalians, I'd appreciated the timbre of acoustic instruments and the sound of voices that were singing properly--from the diaphragm and not the throat, hitting the right pitches without sliding up and down between notes. For someone who has adverse physiological reactions to certain types of sounds, these services were a healing balm for a body that was too often "hurting" because of "bad music" in the church.
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| The beginning of fall obstructing my view of Marquand Chapel on the Divinity School campus. See the steeple behind the leaves? Is fall as a phenomenon more "authentic" in places like Connecticut than in my native state of California? |
But last night, sitting inside an Episcopal church and listening to Oxford's "Schola Cantorium" perform various (unaccompanied) choral works in English and Latin, I found myself strangely uncomfortable. Looking around the sea of (mostly white) faces around me, and at the choir in front, directed by a congenial man with a British accent, I felt a bit alienated from it all--and then got upset with myself for feeling that way. The performance was professional and well-done, the audience courteous and quiet. Wasn't that as good as it gets?
My mind flitted back to a folk music festival in the park that I'd attended a few weeks back with friends. I thought about my trip to Nashville back in April and my love for country music. In that moment, the folk and country styles of music felt more "real" to me--more authentic…
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| Inside Christ Church |
This morning, I navigated my way through several chapters of John Dewey's Art as Experience. I reflected on his notion that "an esthetic experience, the work of art in its actuality, is perception" (169). My perception of the concert last night (initially, at least), was that it was a very white affair. I could not situate myself in that experience as a young woman of color, even though my classical music sensibilities should have been thrilled at the quality of "authentic" music and performance. Interestingly, though, in the spirit of Dewey's ideas that “all objects of art are matters of perception and perception is not instantaneous” (191), I found myself more amenable to the music by the second half of the concert. I discovered that if I closed my eyes and simply listened to the music, that it spoke to me and allowed me to integrate and process the thoughts going through my head. When
something is art, says John Dewey, “integration is always effected” (270).
“ Art is a quality that permeates experience”, and “esthetic experience is always more than esthetic”…**
I'd like to end this post with a reflection on silence and how silence may be the most authentic kind of sound, when all is said and done. (If I had time, I'd go through all the examples of silence in Scripture...perhaps another project for another day!)
As mentioned in my previous post, I attended a performance of Mahler's "Resurrection Symphony" on Friday evening. After the first movement, the conductor observed a 5-minute period of silence, something that, according to the program notes, "Mahler requests" but is "rarely observed in performance". In Mahler's ideal world, I suppose, that 5-minute silence would be just that…"so that the audience may collect their thoughts" (Berlien, Ben. "Gustav Mahler 1860-1911: Symphony No. 2, 'Resurrection'." Notes on the Program. Yale Philharmonia. Woolsey Hall, New Haven. 19 September 2014.) But in this performance, many things were happening during that span of time. The orchestra tuned for a bit. People coughed and shuffled their feet. Audience members glanced around to see what was going on and finally resorted to their program notes for a clue. It wasn't the best environment in which to collect one's thoughts on the life that precedes both death and resurrection, but it was, for me at least, a pretty authentic way to take in what going to a concert was all about--the stage, the audience, and the sounds produced by each.
I have a feeling that my search for the layers of authenticity in aesthetic and religious experience is going to be an ongoing process during my time in Divinity School. Stay tuned for more thoughts in the coming days!
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* p. 339
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