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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Beyond words

Sing in the pews

The fact that the Dean and the Archbishop of Sydney are brothers makes the situation for lovers of good music at Sydney’s Anglican Cathedral especially unfortunate. For the parishioners there is no escaping the hard-line and destructive opinions of these two, whose double-whammy reminds one of the accumulation of power by the Kaczynski twins in Poland. There is a difference, though: the Kaczynskis never made any pretence about being politicians who wanted to be elected to high office; whereas the Jensen brothers speak derogatively about how formalised religion, with buildings, hierarchies and ritual, runs counter to the spirit of the early Church, and then allow themselves to be appointed to just the kind of posts they think shouldn’t exist.

One wonders how they came to be appointed in the first place. Here is what the Dean, the Very Reverend Phillip Jensen (a title he doesn’t hesitate to use), has to say about large religious buildings of the kind he now runs: ‘There is no discussion in the Bible about buildings. So we must not make too much of them, they are not central to God’s purpose, not important, not the church of God, not a replacement for the Temple.’ And about Church music he opines: ‘Using the language and categories of worship in church is untenable...It is no accident that feelings of epiphany (transcendence) occur when certain human activities are undertaken, especially music’, and that they can induce these feelings ‘regardless of the content or the religious context. We need to help people to see that nice feelings are nice. But they don’t represent contact with God.’

Is it then merely to be nice that the men who wrote the Bible, and especially the Psalms, never cease to refer to how often and how passionately one should sing one’s praises to the Lord, from sheer joy? A more moderate observer than Dr Jensen might have pointed out that these Biblical exhortations are to the whole body of the congregation present — not to specialist robed choirs singing a cappela polyphony — and that therefore specialist performance is questionable, but there’s no point even in putting forward this standard argument against elitism in Sydney Cathedral, where no kind of singing can represent contact with God.

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