[Oe List ...] 2/17/11, Spong: Why I Value Valentine’s Day and How I Lost my Hat on Broadway

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Why I Value Valentine’s Day and How I Lost my Hat on Broadway
On February 14, I took my wife to the Valentine concert at the Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. This concert featured the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under the gifted direction of Harvard graduate Alan Gilbert in a presentation of some of the works of Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Lehar, Falla, Lara and Leonard Bernstein. On this night the guest artists included the legendary Placido Domingo, Sonya Yoncheva, a rising soprano star from Bulgaria, making her debut with the Philharmonic, and a Spanish dancer named Nuria Pomares. There were several non-musical but memorable events that marked that night and there were two primary insights I gained from the performance itself, both of which caused me to spend much time contemplating what it means to be human.
First, let me comment briefly on the non-musical memorable events. The first thing to occur was that in the row in front of us on the Grand Tier of the balcony there was a man and his wife with two tickets for which there was only one seat. I wondered if we were about to see a repeat in miniature of the Super Bowl fiasco, but no, a workman appeared with a new seat and proceeded to bolt it to the floor and the crisis was averted! Next, the audience was treated to the fulfillment of a seventieth birthday request, made by the guest star himself, namely that he, Placido Domingo, be allowed to conduct the orchestra that evening in its rendition of the Overture to Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II. To watch this renaissance man perform in a display of his multiple talents was an extra pleasure. Third, the debut of Sonya Yoncheva was a triumphant success and the Spanish dance by Nuria Pomares in her red satin dress was performed in such a way as to bring both passion and romance to the audience in the sold out Hall. It was a program deeply appreciated, a reality that was signaled by a number of standing ovations, three curtain calls and an encore that featured each of the three artists, ending with Placido and Sonya in a duet singing a medley of songs from Bernstein’s West Side Story.
The final adventure on this special night occurred as we walked back to our hotel on what was a very windy night in New York City. On that journey my hat was lifted from my head by the wind for an unaccompanied jaunt down Broadway and we had the pleasure of observing taxis, automobiles and even a city fire truck pass over it as it rolled merrily on its way! We were possessed by a sense of helplessness, since we preferred to remain alive rather than attempting a rescue effort by venturing into the rapid flow of Broadway traffic. Finally the wind brought the hat to a resting place about a block away against a barrier separating a pedestrian walk from the street. Then, running like two teenagers along the side of Broadway during a lull in the traffic caused by a red light, my wife Christine and I finally rescued the hat, a good bit worse for wear, and held it, battered and wounded as it was, as we walked along the south side of Central Park until we arrived at our hotel home for the night.
I do not do well with hats. I lost my first hat several years ago while on a river cruise on the Brisbane River in Queensland, Australia, the same river that recently brought a devastating flood to that great city and region. I lost my second hat from a double-decker bus in London while we were showing this city to two of our grandchildren. I lost my third hat on the mountains of the Lake District in England in a rainstorm as Chris and I, along with our daughter, who was at that time a United States Marine, were walking the 192 miles from the Irish Sea to the North Sea. Now another fedora was lost in the heart of Manhattan.
These events made the night of the Valentine concert memorable, but while they added to the excitement of the evening, what transformed that night and made it indelible was that the occasion, the orchestra and the artists together pushed me deeply into two new insights that I would now like to share with my readers.
The first insight was elicited by watching the orchestra itself at work. The New York Philharmonic is made up of about 100 musicians, each of whom is marvelously gifted, perhaps even at the very top of his or her professional career. These are individuals who have taken what was first an inclination that became a talent and honed it with not just hours but with years of disciplined study and practice that enabled them to reach their present levels of competency. The strings, the brass, the drums as well as the specialty instruments, were each performed with consummate skill. The talents and abilities of these individuals were not lost in the whole of the orchestra so much as they were transformed by having the limits of individualism transcended in order to make the orchestral performance we heard possible. As I watched this miracle of gifted individuals creating something that none of them could have achieved alone, I saw in a new way a parable of humanity itself with its often unadmitted or even acknowledged radical interdependence. I recalled St. Paul’s words as he talked about the church as a sign of a new humanity under the symbol of “the body of Christ.” The foot cannot say to the arm, Paul wrote, “I have no need of you.” Neither can the eye say to the ear, nor can the presentable parts of our bodies say to the less presentable parts, “I have no need of you.” Oneness is born in our integration into the whole of life, which requires that all of our constituent parts work together in harmony, for only thus can any of us become all that we are meant to be. No matter how gifted or talented a single individual might be no individual can finally be human alone. No single violin can make an orchestra.
I watch this nation struggle politically today between what is thought to be individual good on one side and corporate well-being on the other. The tension present in American politics at this moment is not between Democrats and Republicans so much as it is between those who see the well-being of the individual as primary and those who see the well-being of the whole society as primary. Finding the proper balance between the two competing “goods” is the key to effective government. Both of our political parties have their “wings” that the other regards as extreme. The Republicans have their “libertarian-Tea Party” types on the right, who appear to resent any attempt by the government to give dignity and well-being to its weakest citizens; while the Democrats have their extremists on the left, who seem to believe that the government should do everything for all of its citizens. The former, if left unchecked, would result in a fascist government based on the principle that might makes right, that every person, no matter how poorly equipped, must make it on his or her own with no help from anyone. Echoes of privilege are in this approach that border on master race theories. The latter, if left unchecked, would result in a kind of sick dependency where both initiative and individuality would be badly compromised. The genius observed in a great orchestra like the New York Philharmonic resides in the fact that we can see in it another view of both our humanity and our politics.
The individual artist who combines talent with years of practice is rewarded when that artist blends his or her gifts with those of others to make a great orchestra possible. One musician alone could never create the grandeur of sound that the great composers of the ages both envisioned and even heard in their mind’s ear as they created their masterworks. A great orchestra comes into being when individual gifts are brought together to do things that no individual can do alone and in the process a new understanding of humanity is experienced. The violin will not say to the clarinet, we have no need of you. The drum will not say to the trombone we have no need of you. A nation must be built on the individual gifts of its people, but these gifts must ultimately be used for the well-being of the whole. Maybe the only way to achieve that goal is through the tension of politics, but the secret of political success is never to allow either the “libertarian-Tea Part types” or the “Government-can-do-it-all types” to win a complete victory. An orchestra presents us with a vision of what the combination of individual gifts invested in the life of the whole people might be.
The second insight I gained from this Valentine night at the Avery Fisher Hall is that love is still the power that drives us human beings to couple and that this thing called love remains a mighty force in human development. A Valentine’s Day concert is a lover’s delight. This New York symphony hall was filled with couples of all ages, sizes, shapes and ethnicities. Many were holding hands or walking arm in arm. Earlier on that special day Valentines had been exchanged between lovers, spouses and partners; the flower industry, located primarily in South America, had been invigorated, and the candy makers had shown a bump in profits. Even the restaurant into which my wife and I along with many other diners crowded prior to the concert offered a “dessert special” of heart-shaped vanilla and chocolate mousses. The basic family unit in our society is assaulted today by divorce and domestic violence, by infidelity and selfishness, but it is still holding.
The gay and lesbian community expresses its yearning to possess the values inherent in this basic unit of society by demanding that they too be included in the institution of marriage. In a good marriage individual partners can grow into being more loving, more deeply and fully human and more capable of living for others than in any other relationship I know. A Valentine’s Day concert gives us as a society the ability to display that love, to relish it, to rejoice in it, to hold it in honor. For those of us who have come to value our partners more than we value ourselves, it is a doorway into abundant life, into transcending our limits, into the deepest dimensions of what it means to be human and I would argue it is also the doorway into what the words “eternal life” actually mean.
So to my readers, I wish for you many more Happy Valentine’s Days.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Robert D. Rose, from Springfield, Oregon, writes:
Question:
I am retired, 79 years old, and am an active member of my local United Methodist Church in Springfield, Oregon. I regret that I could not attend your seminars held in Eugene, Oregon, because I have read most of your books and thoroughly enjoy hearing your lectures.
Recently I read the book, Godly Play, by Jerome W. Berryman. He has an interesting approach to Christian Education for children, but what struck me was his discussion about the basic questions of existence. Those questions each person must face alone. He lists these four: death, the threat of freedom, unavoidable aloneness and the need for meaning. I think I can make a case for Christianity providing answers to these questions, but I would like to learn about your answers (although I realize that full answers would take a book to cover the topic fully).
 
Answer:
Dear Robert,
Thank you for your letter. I am impressed with Godly Play and when I was still an active bishop, I watched it being used very effectively in a number of churches.
All religions address the basic anxieties of life particularly mortality, purpose and meaning. There is great unanimity among all human religious traditions in the human questions they each seek to address. The differences among these great world religions are in how these questions are answered. All human answers come out of our acculturation and they reflect the wide varieties of human cultural experience. I could not in the space of a response to a letter do justice to how I as a Christian, or Christianity itself, might respond, but those are the themes that permeate my books. In my most recent publication, Eternal Life: A New Vision, I seek to take on most of these issues directly.
John Shelby Spong





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