Defining Spiritual Diversity

by Dean J. Seal, MATA, MDiv
I have been toiling in the vineyards of Interfaith Dialogue for a long time, and I find the terminology stifling.  It is a technical academic term which describes a process of comparing and contrasting with members of another faith tradition who believe in the same kind of effort.  This is useful work, but it isn't very accessible to the average Joe and Jane who want to know how to avoid saying the wrong thing to someone who they know is different from them.  Where do I start talking to a Buddhist when I don't know any Buddhists?  


I now prefer the term Spiritual Diversity, as a means by which we can describe how to talk to each other when we are unsure of another person's spiritual orientation.  It is less about talking than it is about listening.  


Spiritual Diversity is akin to other forms of diversity work.  It recognizes people are different from each other, and respects that.  It recognizes that some people are shy and untrained in knowing about other people's faith lives, and seeks to create a comfort zone where these things can be discussed.  It excludes proselytization - trying to convince someone to "convert" to your own spiritual beliefs - and is instead focused on Deep Listening, where one engages the other in learning and knowing, without challenging or arguing.  Then, when one has access to a basic understanding of the other person's "spiritual location," one can share what they know and practice to the degree that the other wishes to hear.  It's not an argument, it's not a battle.  It's more of a co-operative learning session.  


Why is this an important distinction?  Because in seeking an understanding of Spiritual Diversity, we seek to learn, to know, and to be changed by the person we are listening to.  We are not in an actual conversation unless we are open to be learning from, and being changed by, the one we are conversing with.  We don't have to give up our faith to understand that someone else has some good ideas that we can accept and recognize.  And both sides have to have this quality of openness in order for the process to succeed.  


I come from Norwegian Lutherans, who are painfully shy, and who are worried about saying the wrong thing.  The opportunity to learn about another faith tradition could be overcome by the feeling of being in error.  A gentle mutual appreciation for Spiritual Diversity starts with understanding that mistakes will be made, but the intention is valid and honorable.  Mutual respect and patience are marks of the spiritual practice called Hospitality.  


I teach classes on this in college, and I pursue it through the arts.  People are hungry for a chance to learn about other faiths, in my experience.  If people can recognize the promise of experiencing another faith through a performance, through dance (for example, the Hindu orientation of Ragamala Dance Company), or through storytelling and drama, through painting or sculpture, the shy ones are relieved of the duty of saying anything at all.  They can sneak through the portal of access to meaning.  Theater came out of church ceremonies in English culture, and from funeral oration in Greek culture.  Theater and church services are intertwined in that both present an event that conveys deep meaning.  The shy one can pick this up and move forward with some appreciation for the culture they have encountered, and they have taken the first step to overcoming a reluctance to engage.  


We are scared of a gay person until we meet a gay person.  We are scared of a Muslim until we meet a Muslim.  We are scared of a Jew, a black person, a white person, an Indian, a Native American, an evangelical, an atheist, a Lutheran or Catholic or anyone who is different from us, until we meet one and have a little contact.  Recognizing that it is okay for them to be who they are, and it is okay for us to be who we are, that neither one has to go over to the other side, but that both can learn about something outside of one's own experience - this is what makes for a meaningful exchange of views.  


In our world, it isn't just an interesting thing to do at a party.  It may be central to how you make your living, who you marry, how you teach your children, how you live your ethical life.  This is what it means to recognize Spiritual Diversity, and to use its methods for enriching our minds, our souls, and our lives.  

Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Written and Performed by Megan Wells. Prizewinning playwright/storyteller from Chicago.

She will Knock You Out.

2 nights only, Friday and Saturday, April 6th and 7th at 7 p.m. doors, 7:30 show.

That's Good Friday and Bad Saturday.

Black Forest Inn, Minneapolis

Tickets in advance at ticketworks.com $15. plus $2.50 service fee.

Seating is Limited. 

Produced by Spirit In The House!

The Year of Forgiveness starts here.

Features

From Human Voice to Human Ear: The Rose Ensemble, Ruth MacKenzie, and the Trio Mediaeval

 
Photo of The Rose Ensemble by Michael Haug

 
Photo of the Trio Mediaeval by Asa M. Mikkelsen (courtesy of the artists’ website)

 
Ruth MacKenzie, photo courtesy the United Theological Seminary website

January 7, 2008
 Essay by Dean J. Seal

Dean J. Seal delves into the vocal artistry and enduring attraction of early a capella music, with a focus on those composers and musicians whose calling is to preserve and reinvigorate the art form.

A Capella music is done only with the voice and has its origins in music for the chapel performed in a cathedral setting. The voice was the only instrument allowed, because it was the only one created by God and was, therefore, sacred. Scholarly, professional artists and organizations specializing in this area of early music are hitting their strides in recent years, especially in 2007. In the past year, The Rose Ensemble, an early music ensemble based in St. Paul, won a major International Choral Competition in Tolosa, Spain, making them kind of the flagship of the fleet. Twin Citizen Ruth MacKenzie added to her corpus of acclaimed work with a presentation of songs for Advent, Theotokos, at the seminary where she is wrapping up her studies in theology and the arts. And in November the Trio Mediaeval rolled into town from Norway, bringing their disciplined clarity to a repertoire that was hitting the Billboard charts and mesmerizing audiences from the Fitzgerald Theater to the Arctic Circle.

My experience of The Rose Ensemble ranges across several venues, many tasty recordings, and a variety of styles. A very ambitious programming philosophy by founder and artistic Director Jordan Sramek has led them across material from Eastern Europe, into Mexican baroque, and off to Hawaii. Sramek frequently chooses material that has never been heard in North America, or at least not in our time. And he brings those manuscripts alive. The Rose Ensemble musicians, purveyors of an exquisite sonic art, represent the synthesis of performance and scholarship that distinguishes those who specialize in working with early music. The Ensemble's popularity now extends well beyond the U.S.; as their victory in Spain demonstrates, their musicianship is as good as or better than anything else of its kind out there.

Ruth MacKenzie is a singer-artist who works as more of a soul proprietor. She recently put together a classic piece of performance that mixes ceremony with history and theology with harmony, offering solo and ensemble work that straddles both centuries and worlds. Theotokos is a collection of songs about the mother of God, presented as an advent concert/ceremony in the glorious jewel-box of the chapel at United Theological Seminary (UTS) in New Brighton, Minnesota. (Full disclosure: I am an alumnus of UTS). She assembled the music, wrangled the choral ensembles, and preached a sermon—all of a piece.

MacKenzie uses traditional Christmas music from Moravia, Bulgaria, Cuba, and Israel along with her own compositions. The songs were led by MacKenzie and supported by Mila (a vocal ensemble that specializes in ethnically-diverse vocal work) and the Unity Singers, from her Unitarian church, directed by Ruth Palmer. MacKenzie’s homily tied everything together explicitly—and her case was so persuasive she convinced even this reluctant Lutheran to give Mary her due. No small feat.

In a short interview, I ask her about how she thought things through and to compare her methodology to Sramek’s. “Jordan (Sramek)’s (way) is different. My perception is that The Rose Ensemble is about finding rarely heard material and bringing it to life. Mine is about looking at familiar texts in new ways.” She reinterprets the familiar Annunciation and Magnificat through these other ethnic vocal traditions, which leads the listener to reconsider the often-heard content anew. Putting the traditional melodies together with diverse performance techniques, she says, allows songs and artistic expressions not normally put in relationship to mingle and inform each other. “(The piece) ended up being perceived as a place of opening—opening (the audience) up to new ways of looking at the story.” Using an artistic reinterpretation of the familiar can also be an invitation for people who are not enamored with the traditional tellings of the story. “If people are on the fringes of religious life, this allows them a way back in.”

As a self-trained musicologist, I keep wondering what it is that ties these styles of harmony to each other—each is clearly distinct, but there are unifying themes evident as well. I ask Ruth, specifically, about the intervals she uses in her work which offer both harmony and dissonance. “Technically, we are using seconds, fourths, and fifths. I find the dissonance to be attractive.” The tonalities too seem more angular, unlike the soft subtle blend that distinguishes The Rose Ensemble’s sound, even when they are singing loudly. “This is a style of singing with a very focused sound that makes the ear perk up,” she says. “You hear it in American, Nordic, and Eastern European folk music, where the voice needs to carry the note some distance, across fields, for example. It’s not a rounded tone; there is a stinging quality to the voice. In the Nordic tradition of kulning, you can stand on one side of a lake and hear the sound projected across the water to the other side.”

MacKenzie discusses this distinctive tonality on her website in her description of the seminal moment when she heard a small Finnish singer sing in this manner, upon which she found herself pinned to the wall by the sound:

“She was kulning (a high pitched Swedish song for calling animals). The sound itself made me question, ‘Am I hearing the human voice or the animal within the human?’ The sound itself made me question, ‘Am I crying because I have discovered a sound which reveals the ancient in my own Scandinavian heritage or one that leads me to the tap root of human sound and music-making where we all meet regardless of our ethnic backgrounds?’ The sound itself grabbed me at my core and demanded that I try—try to be a channel for the song.”

MacKenzie’s music brings a purer, more primordial form of communication that teeters on the edge of yelling, and becomes music. And when I hear MacKenzie and company singing in this style, it “grabs me at my core” as well. I feel something spiritual and remarkable in this invigorating presentation that could not come out of a theology lecture, no matter who was giving it.

MacKenzie describes the power of this marriage between the spiritual message and performance this way: “Music opens the heart to new ways of understanding and healing. Even when we don't understand the words (because they are in another language) the spirit of music softens our hard edges, allowing the spoken word to find a way into the soul.” Music prepares people for the sermon, the homily, because music has prepared a place where we can hear what is being said, we can be penetrated at a deeper level, because we have been opened up by the music and the spirituality conveyed in that music. It is especially effective when singers are doing it, because there is no filter, no obstacle, of instruments. It is human voice to human ear, the sacred transmitted from one soul to another. MacKenzie concludes, “The work of music, which is a mystery, is sacrament. Saint Augustine defines sacrament as a visible sign of an invisible reality. When you think about voice that is indeed what is going on. It is a visible or tangible sign that the invisible divine is living within us. That is why voice is a wild, untamable thing.”

Trio Mediaeval barks up the same tree, bringing a new approach to old songs and putting them together with modern compositions that fall into the same sonic realm. They do not approach this music t from a spiritual viewpoint; they are strictly trying to sing something beautiful. In the same way that The Rose Ensemble is digging up obscure ancient material and putting it out there, the Trio utilizes folk music from the western part of Norway, mixing in work from other early sources as well as modern composers. Some of the songs come directly from the mountainsides and are sung in the same kind of vocal tradition that MacKenzie uses in her compositions. I heard the Trio Mediaeval at the Fitzgerald Theater, and you can hear them in their Saint Paul Sunday interview on the Minnesota Public Radio website as well.

The selections from the Saint Paul Sunday reflect both the Trio’s range and the range of the vocal style itself. There is an ultra-modern Kyrie, a sacred piece that weaves the ancient chords together with contemporary dissonances, a la Ruth MacKenzie. It becomes a seamless fabric of tonality and rhythm moving between the two polarities. The Kyrie is satisfying to hear because it comes across as one unified piece that has taken you to two places at once. Second is a Gloria from 700 years ago, approached subtly and carefully. The first two compositions were written in 1968 and about 1300, respectively. Nice range.

When I saw Trio Mediaeval at the Fitzgerald, each piece performed had its own place on the continuum between the “indoor voice,” smooth tonalities of the chapel and the “outdoor voice,” focused sounds of folk songs that grew from yelling across a mountain range. It seemed that no matter when the piece was written, the experience was one of immersion in the wealth of a time when there were hardly any instruments, but plenty of voices.

Many of these scores were lost to the ages, only turning up now in dusty corners of scholarly libraries, or as the stuffing for another book’s lining, or on the back of some tax accounting. Rescued by scholars like Trio Mediaeval or Jordan Sramek, these compositions are being reborn in a formal, respectful setting, where mistakes aren’t made and innovation isn’t going to be significant. The goal, for these ensembles, is first and foremost to present the song as it last existed.

The traditional etiquette behind performance of folk songs has always been that whoever is singing it gets to rearrange it—add verses, bring out new harmonies, and the like. It’s a living, breathing tradition where you have a wealth of material to work from. In a modern context, where the church is not the sole support of artists (and where sustaining them means more than a hard bunk in a dry room, a chunk of bread and cheese and a flagon of something to keep the pipes working), we have re-contextualized these ensembles’ performances from sacred to largely secular affairs. Trio Mediaeval rightly points out that their sacred music is taken out of the churches and the folk music pulled off the mountainsides, and then dressed up and polished for the concert hall.

At first, I was put off a bit by the sense of personal distance they create on stage. The music is presented with a clarity that seems warm and beautiful most of the time, but ethereal to the point of iciness at others. Their onstage personas are that of dedicated technicians who marshal the work of their vocal chords with military precision, marching on and off stage for their breaks in line and in step, with no audience banter.

An accurate, musically perfect performance is central to their efforts. What they lack in sense of fun or spontaneity, they make up for in technical proficiency. Their pleasure, and ours, comes from the work that goes into their harmonies, in the perfect blend of voices they achieve, in the fact that any one of them can be singing the high or the low part; that their ranges are amazing, their tones pure, their discipline is appropriate to the musical form. In hindsight, I am glad they didn’t schmooze us with stiff, unnatural Vegas-style banter. Let the music do the talking.

And what music. The tempo varies from measure to measure; the mood goes from reverent to poignant, from delirious to sober in a moment. A faster passage ends with a slowed, stretched-out coda; then quickens again, back to a steadier pace. The elasticity of the whole art form is not something generally heard from choral ensembles working with more contemporary compositions. There is a solemn and contemplative tone to the evolution of the sound in this early music. The muse is invited, honored, and followed-- instead of hired, drenched in coffee, and whipped to the finish line. The work from these musicians is made, and sung, in God’s time, not our time. Kairos, not kronos. It’s a type of music that presents timelessness in real time.

About the writer: Dean J. Seal is a producer, performer, and playwright who ran the Minnesota Fringe Festival for four years, during which it became the largest in the nation. He's also Artistic Director of Spirit In the House! which is a ten-day Spiritual Performance Festival held in May. Contact him by email (sealtotal@aol.com). He serves as mnartists.org's Spiritual Theater Correspondent.

Related Links and Events:

What: The Rose Ensemble Presents Candlelight Concert: The Secret Society of Notre Dame de Paris
Where: Various venues, check the website for specific performance locations
When: Performances February 22, 23, 29 and March 1Visit The Rose Ensemble website for detailed showtimes, venues, and ticketing information.

Visit the Trio Mediaeval website to listen to a few tracks and to browse through their recordings.

Listen to kulning as interpreted in Ruth MacKenzie’s compositions by lending an ear to some tracks from her recent recording Kalevala: Dream of the Salmon Maiden.

Related Links

• The Rose Ensemble on mnartists.org( http://www.mnartists.org/organizationHome.do?rid=136554 )
  Find out more about these musicians by visiting their mnartists.org artist pages.
• The Rose Ensemble website( http://www.roseensemble.org/ )
  Keep track of upcoming concerts by this acclaimed, homegrown vocal group by checking in with their website.
• Jordan Sramek on mnartists.org( http://www.mnartists.org/artistHome.do?action=info&rid=3965 )
  Find out more about The Rose Ensemble's founder and artistic director on his individual mnartists.org pages.
• The Trio Mediaeval website( http://www.triomediaeval.no/ )
  Find out more about this virtuosic trio and listen to a sampling of their songs online.
• Kalevala: Dream of the Salmon Maiden by Ruth MacKenzie( http://www.omnium.com/kalevala/ )
  Find out more about "kulning", Ruth MacKenzie, and listen to some examples of this distinctive sound in some new tracks from her recent record.

Author Bio

 Essay by Dean J. Seal
Image (top) is a photo of Ruth MacKenzie and the eponymous salmon from a recent performance, "Kalevala: The Dream of the Salmon Maiden." (Courtesy of the artist's website)

a project of The McKnight Foundationand Walker Art Center - contact us
© 2012 mnartists.org. All rights reserved. 

The Dakota Gods Explained

Here is the text or story that Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs will guide us through at Thursday's Mid-Day Session.  Please plan to attend.  12 noon to 2 p.m., at the St. Paul Area Council of Churches, 1671 Summit Avenue, St. Paul (doors open 11.30 for informal byo lunch and social time).

DAKOTA CREATION

GODS –

 Wakantanka -- the Chief God, the Great Spirit, the Creator, and the Executive.

The Superior Gods:

Inyan-the Rock--ancestor of all gods and all things; patron of the arts.
Maka-the Earth--mother of all living things.
Skan-the Sky--source of force and power; judge of gods and spirits.
Wi -the Sun--all-powerful Great God, ranked first; defender of bravery, fortitude, generosity and fidelity.

And more.

Reindeer Drumming Solstice Recommended

Greetings, fans of awakening souls. Here is an event I can recommend with all my senses. Drumming the Soul Awake is a series of drum ceremonies put together by Jaime Meyer. Jaime is a noted playwright, a graduate of United Theological Seminary, and an amazing storyteller. He brings the room of people together, he gets them all drumming, then he brings us all to silence as he spins out one or more of his tales of spiritual flight.

The Winter Solstice Blessing is about reindeer, about making the sun come back, about gathering in a ceremonial situation and blessing each other in the darkness of a winter night. I plan on bring there.

http://drummingthesoulawake.squarespace.com/winter-solstice-blessing/

Go to this link for a great informative website.

Ragamala: An Appreciation of Sacred Earth

Sacred Earth: Ragamala’s Spellbinding, Breathtaking Embodiment of the Eternal

by Rev. Dean J. Seal

Artistic Director, Spirit in the House

The Cowles Center was wise enough, and fortunate enough, to bring the Ragamala Dance Company in to inaugurate this long-awaited dance space in downtown Minneapolis. This is a significant dance city, with many small jewels of companies, but Ranee and Aparna Ramaswami are in another dimension. The work is drawn from Bharatanatya, a two thousand year old methodology that needs more explanation than I can give it here. Suffice this excerpt from the website:

“In Bharatanatyam ... Every song or poem is re-created by the dancer, becoming her personal statement. Unlike a completed painting, the dance grows and changes and is re-interpreted with every presentation. “ — Smt. Alarmel Valli

In other words (mine) you are presented with an infinity of infinities. This may take a while to unpack.

Sacred Earth: The Show:The music begins, and it plays throughout in an unbreaking wash of ever-changing soundscapes. There are innumerable rhythms, melodies, harmonies, different speeds, backbeats, driving beats, and counter beats. The dancers emerge, slowly, behind a screen, and they paint on the floor, in white rice flour, traditional forms like all-white sand paintings. They slowly, painstakingly make the designs, and then walk over them in bare-footed concentric circles across the stage, evaporating the snowy dust. The dance slowly hooks into a tighter relationship with the music, being a part of it and being apart from it, sometimes flowing closely, sometimes unrelated to the music. But the swirling motion in a room of light and sound begins to transport the audience into a zone that carries us through space and time, very corporeal, yet outside of time and place. Everything works; everything is intentional; nothing is left to chance, except exactly how much wonder the audience will be capable to absorb.

The dancers are all women. They are committed to beauty. They have beautiful clothes and make-up that takes about two hours to put on. They look like a vision of the infinite past, but they dance with a strength and power that is solidly present. Their bare feet slap on the floor with a corporeal presence that is immediate and satisfying. They dance with strength and a sense of detail that makes slack-jawed bumpkins of us who think we’ve seen very detailed, complicated dance. Think you’ve seen it all? Not until you have seen this.

Regardless of spirituality, see if you can suss out the motivation of these artists, tied to generations of dancers and devoted to connect places, audiences, and generations. But remember that each dancer is taking this collection of discipline and artistry and making it her own. Ranee and Aparna, mother and daughter, partners and collaborators, have described each other’s yin/yang relationship thusly: Ranee’s attitude of seriousness and devotion, with Aparna’s exhibition of joyousness, as the differentiation between them, the two sides of the same spiritual coin. Ranee’s spirituality is a strong, grounded sense of sharing, of a spiritual connection to the ages of women who have preceded her, but with the expectation that things are going to be really cool, really amazing, just keep watching. Her expectation of the unfolding of the work is anticipatory; her confidence born of the knowledge that this work has been working for a long time. Alternatively, Aparna’s bounce, the Aparna walk of pleasure, of radiating the satisfaction and delight of the present-tense, of sharing this beautiful thing that they have created, is again a sense of generosity that climbs beyond doing us a favor; she is taking us to a beautiful place, she is sharing her gratification in the joy of this work. Her devotion has moved her into a realm of enjoyment , and that her pleasure in sharing it only multiplies her own joy.

What makes the cascade of female beauty different from so much other stuff out there? They seem to be from a place where feminine strength is not confused with erotic power. They are beautiful, they are sometimes spelling out a romantic story, but they instead exert a disciplined feminine strength that seems infinite, ageless, timeless – as it is intellectual, athletic, and four dimensional. It exists in this place of upper consciousness that honors infinite tradition, melded to the dancers in the here and now, and executed with the discipline of years of sweat-filled training; made with the full intention of bringing joy, delight and a spiritual presence to the experience of their audience.

How much training? Let me give you a tiny snapshot. An non-flexible, overstuffed reporter has been allowed into the beginner’s class, because they are merciful people. On the wall outside the studio is a list of finger gestures, which are as choreographed to the same detailed degree as any western steps or leaps. There are 60 of them. That does not include choreography of the eyes, arms, head or legs. The first few lessons focus on legs and feet; “training of the arms does not begin until the second year.” So, a year on the legs, then maybe you get to work on the arms- and don’t even ask about the fingers yet.

Protestant Problems of Perception: This cascade if joyous celebration may be more than some people can absorb. I grew up in a Protestant community, the proverbial Norwegian Lutherans, who preached against the pleasures of the body, in fact preached against even acknowledging having a body, except in the pleasures of coffee and dessert. Otherwise, beauty was a temptation consuming the mind with the earthly pleasures instead of saintly virtues. There is scholarly analysis demonstrating how Catholics have a much better of appreciation of art and beauty than do Protestants. So it’s not even a Christian thing, it’s a Protestant thing. Art and beauty and pleasure are a waste, the training says.

Ragamala goes against all my training in dourness, the denial of joy, the theology of scarcity. In focused concentration, existing once and never again, the magnificence and uplifting generosity of the work opens the horizon to a spirituality of abundance, and rewards me for all my training in spiritual diversity and interfaith dialogue and for being alive, and it fires my imagination in realms of illumination that was unavailable to me before. Simply put, a lived revelation.

The Uplifting Matriarchy: So this is a feminine strength played out in a way that some western peoples are not accustomed to. I grew up in the dawn of Feminism, where women are being recognized as being human, not property or domestic animals or cheap labor or houseminders. The second wave of feminism optioned the reminder that some women want to be more than one or the other- office worker with a family, homemaker with a brain, career gal with offspring. The third wave was, to the outside observer, the reassertion that women’s power is through sexual power, of dominating men through the senses, and that women have the choice of being sex objects and sexual predators as a means of self-expression on a on a socially significant scale. Madonna Via Marilyn into Gaga = Same as the Old Boss.

And this whole discussion becomes a western-world of child’s play, or beside the point jibber-jabber, when brought into the arena of Ragamala. They are women, powerful and disciplined, beautiful and sensual, but not charged with erotic domination or conquest. This is a Matriarchy that men can love, that women can point to and be proud of. Women who are equal partners in the work of life, in the creation and passion and decision-making of art, in the sharing of joy, in the passing on of knowledge to the next generation, in the mindfulness of being in one place in one time and connected to all places in all times. This is a Matriarchy the Patriarchy can learn from. I for one am chopping at the crumbling supports of the Patriarchy if I can live in a Matriarchy like this one.

Transcendence on a Saturday Night: How can a show transport us so? What you experience is a cascade of exquisite movement, motion, the slapping of feet on the floor, the swooping into and out of view, in solo and in pairs and in trios, in bunches and in groups, in speed and in languid fluidity. A choreography of arms and legs, of dresses and hair, of gold and silk, of eyes and faces and fingertips, of timelessness and of time, of pleasure and of work. Finite? No. Specific. A demonstration of the infinity of joy, the evidence of a universe of love, played out for our pleasure, at this moment and in this place. How rich we are to share this gift. How sweet is the life that includes these artists; how joyful is the evening that encompasses this love. The work of Ragamala Dance is a singular act of generosity, a spiritual gift for any faith tradition, a blessing to experience and a blessing of existence. I wish this blessing upon you.

Sacred Earth is touring through February 2012. Aside from Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy, the astonishing dance company includes Amanda Dlouhy, Jessica Fiala, Tamara Nadel, Ashwini Ramaswamy and Bria Borcherding. See http://www.ragamala.net/ for details.

Join us for True Ghost Stories - October 28-29!