A More Perfect Union

The kind of unity that Scripture has just described to us is not an anything-goes, throw-up-your hands sort of tolerance. It’s not the sort of equivocation that pretends evil doesn’t exist – Paul is very clear on this – nor is it the sort of nihilism that claims truth can’t be known and personal opinion is all that matters. As our readings today tell us, unity requires justice, and it requires us not to match evil with evil.    

In a moment, the choir will sing Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein. Written in 1965, it has three movements, each of which includes text from two different psalms, all of them sung in Hebrew.

The first movement, centered around Psalm 100, “O be joyful in the Lord,” is indeed full of boisterous rejoicing. Its exuberance is actually a bit over-the-top, a bit manic, just a bit much. It conveys joy, all right, but a kind of oblivious joy, a joy that doesn’t acknowledge the presence of sorrow, a joy that borders perhaps on overconfidence.

With the second movement we get a cinematic cut to a different world: a soprano solo accompanied by harp. This combination of instruments and voice suggests a young King David singing and playing – perhaps suggesting the very moment where he sat down and composed the Twenty-Third Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd.” The music swells as the sopranos and altos join in, repeating the last line as a kind of refrain.

But Into this peaceful, naïve word comes a violent shout from the tenors and basses, followed by ominous muttering. These are the words of Psalm 2, “Why do the nations so furiously rage together? … The kings of the earth rise up, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and his anointed.” The Lord’s anointed, of course, is David himself, and Bernstein suggest that there may be something autobiographical about these words.

Then something extraordinary happens. While the tenors and basses continue furiously raging, the sopranos enter again with their opening melody. Bernstein writes in the scorethe heartbreaking phrase, “blissfully unaware of threat.” The competing visions of peace and violence don’t interact with each other; instead, they’re heard in parallel, superimposed one on the other. It seems like the Twenty-Third Psalm will win out, until at the very end we hear a chilling, ghostly death-rattle – the raging of the nationsreturning again in the organ and percussion, in the distance, without words, ending with a massive strike on the bass drum like a burst of gunfire. The second movement offers no resolution to this conflict, no answers given, but now we are very much aware of the presence and the power of evil in the world.

The third movement begins with an extended prelude for solo organ in C minor – thesame key that Beethoven famously used for his most serious music, including his Fifth Symphony. This passage represents an idea that Bernstein returned to over and over again– the failure of high art to solve the world’s problems. 

There is a famous quotation from Bernstein that gets posted online every so often: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” It comes from an address Bernstein made at Madison Square Garden immediately after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, at a time when the nation was reeling. And Bernstein did indeed do his best to make music more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before, but he knew very well that those words were somewhat hollow.

Bernstein dramatizes how pouring more intensity, more complexity, more intellectualism, more emotional grief, into art fails to break through. We try to emulate what we think of as the great figures of the past – Bernstein tries to measure up to Beethoven, and our present selves try to measure up to Bernstein – but we find we can’t. Bernstein’s anguished C minor music keeps losing energy, changing tempo, stalling out on painfully dissonant intervals in the organ.

The breakthrough instead comes with a radical reframing, a change of key, and the words of Psalm 131, “Lord, Lord, I am not high minded; I have no proud looks.” At this point the tenors and basses sing a beautiful melody in G major that is then taken up by everyone. But it’s not really developed, in the sense that it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s not changed; it simply repeats, and as it is repeated, we live in this world of inner stillness and beauty, until the text runs out and the whole choir continues singing this melody together on a wordless “Ah” – the song of the heart.

At the very end come the words of Psalm 133, “Oh how good and pleasant it is for kindred to dwell together in unity.” Bernstein’s music tells us that to live in a more perfect union requires neither empty toleration, nor partisan strife, but a faithful, active process of opposing hate with love, arrogance with humility, power with gentleness. This is the counterintuitive method that Paul instructs us. In Jewish worship, the text of Psalm 133 is used at the beginning of services, but Bernstein puts it at the end. Perhaps Bernstein is telling us that when we reach the end of this emotional journey in Chichester Psalms, when we arrive at the final measures of music, it is just then, in stillness and peace, that our worship is able properly to begin.