Coming Home Again
August 12th, 2007 The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
“Return again to the home of your soul.”* That is what I was attempting to do during my three months of sabbatical: return home to my soul, for I had strayed so far from it.
The writer Theo Pelletier once defined home as “a place to become yourself…somewhere you can close a door and open your heart.” Music at one time had been such a place for me, and so returning to the piano was one way in which I wanted to try to re-connect to the “home to my soul.”
I am told that as soon as my family had a piano in our house, I began trying to play it. After returning from church each Sunday, I would attempt to play by ear the hymns I’d heard that morning.
My parents had found a piano teacher for my older brother and sister, but she was hesitant to begin lessons for me, as I was only about 4-and-a-half years old, and she didn’t feel my attention span would be developed enough. So this wonderful teacher – Carrell Pray – began coming to our house twice a week to give me 15-minute lessons.
I don’t remember much about those early years of lessons. But I do remember that my two older siblings and I shared a great love for the piano. It was not uncommon for each of us, as we neared the house after some outing, to yell, “I have dibs on the piano!” More than once, our mother had to mediate between us over whose turn it was.
When I was in the 8th or 9th grade, I began accompanying the Girl’s Glee Club at school. It was only by chance that this occurred. The student who had been playing for us was out sick for several days, so the teacher asked if anyone in the class could sight-read. I timidly raised my hand, and he called me up to the piano. The piece of music he set before me was, “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth,” from Handel’s Messiah. I must have done alright, because from then on I was the accompanist. (I don’t know how that poor girl who I replaced in the Glee Club felt about my usurping her job; I have always hoped she was relieved!) I continued this role of accompanist in high school as well, and I’ve always since then much preferred accompanying a choral group than singing in it.
It was music that was responsible for my ex-husband and me getting together. We were seniors in the same high school, and I’d just joined the a cappella choir as its accompanist. He was president of the choir, and one of its best soloists. (He had a beautiful baritone voice.) We began spending lots of time doing music together. One thing led to another, and in 1965 we were married. We’d each just finished our third year of college by then – he a pre-law student at USC, and I a music major at Immaculate Heart College. Not surprisingly for those times, he continued on with his education, while I stopped mine and turned my attention to supporting him and raising our daughter, and later our son.
Which meant that I also stopped taking piano lessons. What would be the point? I no longer expected to become the professional accompanist I’d studied to be; and who had time to even practice when working full-time as a secretary and tending to a family?
But music was never completely abandoned by my husband and me. We went to many concerts, and always had recordings of music playing in our home.
My parents gave us the old baby grand on which my siblings and I had first learned to play. But they kept the second grand piano they’d bought for me when I was in high school, as it was a much nicer piece of furniture. I wouldn’t inherit that instrument until long after my husband and I had divorced, and I’d settled in San Diego County in my first parish ministry. (My son and his beloved – also a pianist – now have it, and the saga of both pianos is a whole other story!)
Throughout my marriage I would from time to time try learning some new piece that my husband would hear on the radio and go out and buy for me. And when I was a member at Throop UU Church in Pasadena, I would occasionally get together with the minister there, Harmon Gehr, who was an accomplished violinist, and we’d play through violin and piano Sonatas together. I still have the piano parts of some of that music.
But by-and-large, my love of piano playing over the years was pushed into the background of my life – something that I “used to do,” but nothing I should take very seriously any longer.
And then one day 10 or 15 years ago, at a retreat of Unitarian Universalist ministers, someone began talking about Home as being not just a physical place where we live, but something deeper that opens us up to the Divine, and links us to our Soul. In that moment, a memory came to me of the day when a concert grand piano was delivered to the San Dieguito Fellowship.
The piano had been donated by a member of the Fellowship, in order to allow us to have concerts for the community – much as we do here at Emerson. The piano arrived, and the donor and her husband and I watched in awe as it was put in place in our newly-built Fellowship Hall. After the movers left, she motioned for me to sit down and play.
I remember sitting in front of the keys for a moment, trying to gather my thoughts; I hadn’t really played anything all the way through for quite some time – at least, not with anyone listening. Finally I launched into a Brahm’s “Intermezzo” that I’d played many years before. It filled the room, and sounded, even with my many mistakes, incredible on that piano. I could not believe how the memory of that music had remained in my fingers.
But what moved me almost to tears when recalling that image at the ministers’ retreat, was the realization of how far I had let myself stray from what was clearly the “home of my soul.”
And what I still find remarkable today is that even after that experience, and even after sharing that story in a sermon to you several years ago, I still had let my music take a seat far to the back of everything else in my life. If my life were a long van or bus, with many rows of seats in it, my love of music would have been relegated to the “back of the bus.”
And so, when I ventured on a sabbatical this past April with the purpose of “recovering lost connections,” I determined that I would find a piano teacher who would bring the discipline of practice back to me, and provide me guidance along the way. I wanted to bring the piano back to a more central place in my life.
So I asked Galina for a referral, and she gave me the name of a Neil Brastoff in West Hills. I phoned Mr. Brastoff and told him I’d been referred to him by the music director at Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church. And you’ll never guess what he said! “Anne, I was the pianist there many years ago!” Turns out that he was here when Brooks Walker was your minister, so I’m sure he knows some of you! I responded to him, “Well, my goodness; I’m the minister there now!”
I filled Neil (who’s at our service today) in on my musical background, and what I was wanting from him. He hesitated at first, as he teaches primarily beginning students. But we agreed that I would have an initial meeting with him, and determine at that time whether to proceed together. And I’m very pleased that he was willing to take me on as a student, because it’s been a pure delight, and the most exciting part of my sabbatical.
In addition to the Chopin that you heard earlier, I’ve been working on parts of Tchaikovsky’s Seasons – which is actually twelve separate pieces – one for each month of the year; an “Arabesque” by Schumann; three Brahms “Intermezzos; ” the first of Bach’s six “Partitas;” and a Beethoven “Sonata.” They have kept me busy, and off the streets!
But what working on these pieces has really done is provide a spiritual center for me by returning me to that place that has been my home since I was a young child. Sitting at my piano, learning music brand new to me, and wrestling with the difficult parts over and over until they finally work their way into my fingers, has helped me focus and pay attention in a way that nothing else really does. It has taken me out of head, and into my heart.
And what I haven’t told my teacher is that because he guides me in all of this, he has become my “spiritual director” of sorts. (But I probably won’t tell him that!)
This new spiritual practice is not without some poignancy. I’ve thought how pleased my father would be to know I’ve returned to the piano.
And just a few days before my mother’s death last week, I had spoken with the Activities Director at the nursing home where my mother lived, offering a small recital of music for them sometime in the Fall. I know Mom would have loved that, and I would have loved doing it for her. But I’ll just have to hope that somehow she and my dad can hear me practicing from wherever they are now.
During the first month of my sabbatical, I attended the ministers’ meeting preceding our District Assembly – in part because I needed to attend a meeting about our youth camps at deBenneville Pines, but also because I wanted to hear my friend Jan Christian’s presentation about her sabbatical. She had traveled to Vietnam for a couple of weeks, in search of the location where her older brother had been killed during our war there. And she talked to us about the motto of the United States Marines, “simper fidelis” – or “ever faithful.”
While that phrase means something very particular to a Marine, I began hearing it as something that we are all called to live as part of our spiritual journeys: remain “ever faithful” to who we are, and what it is that feeds our souls.
“Simper fidelis” is a challenge, because for most of us, the demands of our lives distract us at every turn, and we become further and further unfaithful or disengaged from that “home of our Soul.”
But one of the purposes of a religious community is to offer a place where we can become more centered, and be reminded of what our true “home” is. Our church can encourage and help us to remain faithful to our deepest longings, and to take joy in knowing that the greatest treasures of life are as close to us as our heart. But it does take commitment.
I am reminded of the old joke about the man who stops someone on a street in Manhattan and asks, “Can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?” The answer: “Practice!”
I am not trying to get to Carnegie Hall. But as with any spiritual discipline, I need to continue my lessons and my daily practice if I am to remain faithful to myself. I do not want to relegate my music to the back seat ever again.
And so I will spend at least an hour every morning at the piano, uninterrupted by meetings or anything else. I will not check e-mail first, or make phone calls, or even answer the phone. It will be my time for prayer, my time to open up to the Holy.
What is home for your soul? What is it that helps you be re-born and renewed? And what kind of daily practice would help you remain “ever faithful” to that home?
Let us honor, in whatever way we can, that which brings us home to ourselves; and as we do, let us utter a joyful prayer of thanksgiving.
Amen.
* Taken from hymn sung before sermon, #1011 from Singing the Journey.
© 2007 Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
