Old things are new

I like old stuff. Really old stuff. It’s kind of what I do, old stuff. I like old stuff all around–my grandmother’s quilt, my great-grandmother’s teacup. When it comes to piety, to Christianity, I like the old stuff there, too.

Those of you who have been reading my stuff for a long time will not be surprised by this. Probably those of you who haven’t been reading long will also not be surprised by this.

I’d put Gregorian chant at the top of the inexhaustive list of old Christian things I like.

As a teenager, I wanted to like Gregorian chant. My sister bought me a CD–I’m sure it was the Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. I preferred the jazzed up chanting of Anuna, which is vaguely Gregorian but they’ve taken a lot of liberties. No, I’d say that as much as I wanted to like chant–purely because it was old–aesthetically, I didn’t like it.

But it was strange. I found it ugly and halting. It seemed stuffy and well, just plain weird. I’m fond of weird, generally, but this was not good weird.

Apparently, I don’t love old for the sake of old. Who knew?

As an adult, though, I learned to chant. We joined an Anglo-Catholic parish and I was thrown headlong into the world of chanting. They chanted every Sunday. I chanted every Sunday.

A funny thing happened. I started to love chant.

The reasons are somewhat complicated but they have to do with creativity, which is the subject of this post.

Creativity is about process. Art isn’t about the product simply, the thing created. It’s about the process of making–in other words creating–something beautiful or provocative.

Chant creates worlds. This works inside and outside.

Done simply and without pretense, chant contributes the creation of sacred space.

It is old and it works with other old things to accomplish its purposes–the acoustic environment created by traditional Christian architecture, incense, the sheer beauty of a space richly ornamented with Christian symbols.

As far as acoustics and the simplicity of delivery, you can’t do better than this:

This is the external, the outside. Chant creates an external world–a sacred space–and those who chant participate in the process of making that happen.

More significantly, chant creates worlds inside. The reason I came to love chant was that I climbed inside it and I came to understand how it works.

Daniel, the man who taught me about chant, told me early on that chant is not song. If you’re expecting a tune, you’re going to be disappointed.

That’s why I so disliked chant when I first heard it. It didn’t fit neatly in my existing categories.

When I started chanting, I got new categories. And new categories create new worlds inside–sounds I never new, vocal gestures and intervals I’d never experienced .

New worlds, inside and out.

This is the epitome of creativity, to my way of thinking. Creation figures a new world–either by reconfiguring what’s inside or outside or both. In this case, it was the process of learning, embracing, and loving something very, very old that made all things new.

This isn’t about historicism, to be clear. It’s about speaking in the modern world using an ancient tongue.

This dialectic between the old and the new is at the heart of Christian truth. The newness of God’s revelation in Christ hearkens back to the moment of creation. God created through the Word; God redeems through the Word made flesh. In Adam, we sinned; in the New Adam, we are reborn.

We would be mistaken to chase creativity as the quest for something new, always something new and different. In seeking restlessly after the new, we overlook the wisdom and power of the old, not as something that holds us back, but as the very thing that has the power to create new worlds, in us and around us.

I’ll shift out of the first person plural and back to talking about myself. I need the old. I need the stability of the old just as much as I need the creativity to getting inside and learning to speak (and sing) in the language of the old.

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