Into Harmony with the Divine
Rev. Edmund Robinson
UU Church of Wakefield
January 4, 2004
	Here it is a brand new year stretching before us like a blank slate.  As usual we are making resolutions resolving to make a budget and stick to it, keep on a diet, get a handle on our drinking.  On the national and international scene, we all have our hopes and fears for the outcome of he battles we are engaged in.  But I suggest that in addition to our resolutions and hopes and fears, New Year is a good time to take stock of what we have.  A lot of our energy is spent on wishing for something else, for some new ideas or new inspirations, for travel in far-off lands and fighting evil wizards and getting the ring of power.  We spend so much energy in wishing to be something or someone else, we overlook what is in our own back yard.   	Take this covenant or affirmation which we in Wakefield say every Sunday, which starts out “Love is the Doctrine of this Church.”   It really contains some marvelous words.  We could do worse to start out the New Year than to take a good look at these words we say.  I am particularly drawn to this phrase which sums up the whole religious endeavor for us, “to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the divine.”  It echoes for me my favorite words from today’s hymn, Come thou Fount of Every Blessing/Tune our Hearts to Seek Thy Grace.
	I haven’t pinned down precisely where this affirmation came from originally, maybe one of you know, but I do know that it is Universalist and was collected in an anthology put out by a minister named L. Griswold Williams in 1933, and made it into the 1937 Hymns of the Spirit.  I suspect Williams did not write the affirmation but took it from one already in use.  
	Clearly this phrase “grow into harmony with the divine” is pure Universalism.  Quillen Shinn, the great Universalist preacher extra ordinaire, preached glowingly about the harmony emanating from God and how  evil was an illusion.  He had confidence that science would ultimately reveal the single principle which ruled the universe, the force of good. 
	But the notion of a Divine Harmony goes back long before Shinn, and even before John Murray.  It goes back to Pythagoras and his Music of the Spheres.  Pythagoras lived around 500 B.C.E., and though he was Greek, he did most of his work in Southern Italy.  He established a school there and taught disciples an esoteric body of knowledge which they were sworn not to reveal.  Since Pythagoras himself didn’t write anything down, we don’t have any way of knowing directly what he taught, but much of his thought survives in Plato.
	We think of Pythagoras mostly as a mathematician, as he was that, but he was also a musician, a theologian and an astronomer, and to the Greeks, these were all about the same thing.  And when we contemplate the notion of divine harmony, we realize what strong cross-currents there are between math and theology and music, and these are being revived today.  My colleague Sarah Voss has published extensively on mathematical theology, and had a wonderful little essay on the subject in the World a few months back.
	Now there is a problem with discussing this for a general audience, because many of us are mathophobes.  When someone starts spouting numbers or putting equations or even ratios on the board, many of us want to run, not walk, to the nearest exit.  Yet even hose of us who can’t really do the math can appreciate the connection between science, math and music.
	Maybe the connection is clearer in the following story: a man was hit by a bus; he was badly injured and it looked like he might not make it.  The policeman asked him if he could get a priest.  The injured man said, no, I’m a Unitarian Universalist.  The policeman replied, well, then, shall I get a math teacher?
	Well back to Pythagoras.  His most important discovery, was probably not the theorem on right triangles that bears his name, but the proportions producing musical harmonies.  It is said that he was passing a blacksmith shop and noticed that the hammer blows he could hear coming out were at different pitches.  He heard plink plunk plank.  He came in and noticed that the men wielding the hammers were different sizes and strengths, and so he had them exchange hammers.  It turned out that the same hammer would produce the same sound no matter whether it was wielded by the big guy in the corner or the little skinny one up front.  The same piece of metal would sound at a different pitch when struck by hammers of different weights, no matter who was wielding them.
	He then went on to apply the same principle to lengths of vibrating string.  Now I’m about to dive into a little music theory here so let me say for those who might be rusty on it than when I say interval, I mean the distance in pitch between one note and another on the scale.  The most important interval is the octave which is eight notes distant, and other important intervals are the fifth, or five notes, fourth and third.  What Pythagoras found was that if  the whole string produces, say, a “G,” then shortening the length by half will produce a “G” one octave above.  If you shorten it in the ratio of 3:2, you produce a “D,” that is, a tone which is a fifth above the note produced by the whole string.  A ratio of 4:3 produces an “C,” which is a fourth above the basic note.  And a ratio of 5:4 produces a “B,: which is a third above.  The perfect octave, fifth, fourth and third have always been the basic consonances in Western music. Pythagoras had discovered the mathematical basis for harmony.
[demonstration]
	And in discovering the mathematical basis for harmony, he also invented Western science, in a sense.  As Pythagorean David Plant notes, “By associating measurements of length with musical tones he made the first known reduction of a quality (sound) into a quantity (length and ratio).”  Still today we think  the main thrust of science to be the understanding of nature through mathematics.  But for Pythagoras, the musical octave was also the connection between the worlds of matter and spirit.
	Spirit and matter: their interface is music and their language is number.  Pythagoras took these ideas into cosmology.  Pythagorean cosmology survives in two dialogues of Plato, Book X of the Republic and in Timaeus.  He conceived of the earth as a globe, which was ahead of his time, but also thought of the heavens as  a series of spheres turning on a common axis.  Each of the principle heavenly bodies was attached to its own sphere: the sun, the moon, the five visible planets, and the stars, and each sphere moved at its own rate of speed. The distances between the spheres were particular ratios, and these ratios corresponded to particular musical harmonies.  
	The Timaeus in particular presents an extensive exposition of this theory, a kind of Pythagorean creation myth, which I don’t claim to follow entirely.  But I am fascinated by paragraphs like this one, which for sheer murkiness would put most postmoderns to rout:
When the Creator had made the soul he made the body within her; and the soul interfused everywhere from the centre to the circumference of heaven, herself turning in herself, began a divine life of rational and everlasting motion.  The body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible, and partakes of reason and harmony, and is the best of creations, being the work of the best.  And being composed of the same, the other, and the essence, these three, and also divided and bound in harmonical proportion, and revolving within herself__the soul when touching anything which has essence, whether divided or undivided, is stirred to utter the sameness or diversity of that and some other thing, and to tell how and when and where individuals are affected or related, whether in the world of change or of essence.  When reason is in the neighbourhood of sense, and the circle of the other or diverse is moving truly, then arise true opinions and beliefs; when reason is in the sphere of thought, and the circle of the same runs smoothly, then intelligence is perfected.”
This kind of stuff makes Emerson look easy!
	Well, Pythagoras’ teachings reputedly laid great emphasis on trying to get his students to hear the music of the sphere.  He claimed to be able to hear it himself.  He was reputed to be quite an extraordinary musician, and used music in healing illnesses of the body and soul. 
	After Pythagoras, according to David Plant “Plato, Pliny, Cicero and Ptolemy are amongst the philosophers of the ancient world who contemplated the music of the spheres. The doctrine was transmitted to medieval Europe where it found its most glorious expression in the architecture of great abbeys and cathedrals consciously designed to conform to the proportions of musical and geometric harmony. The English hermeticist Robert Fludd (1574-1637) visualised grand celestial scales spanning three octaves and linking levels of existence from the sub-planetary elemental worlds to exultant choirs of angelic intelligences beyond the stars. The beautiful engravings which illustrate Fludd's encyclopaedic works are amongst the most comprehensive descriptions of pre-Copernican cosmology ever devised.5"
	And that word, Pre-Copernican, contains the rub for us, since that Sixteenth Century Astronomer and his followers Galileo and Kepler, ultimately demolished the idea that the heavens consists of a series of spheres.  We know beyond doubt that the earth revolves around the sun.  Why is the Music of the Spheres anything more than a charming historical curiosity.
	Well, for one thing, Kepler took it seriously.  Acording to David Plant, by careful observation he worked out that the orbits of the planets around the sun were not circles but ellipses, a conclusion which he resisted for a long time because it seemed to fly in the face of Platonic ideals of perfection.  Yet once he had embraced this idea, he went on to observe that the planets had different speeds, going faster at the point nearest the sun, called the perihelion, and slowest at the point furthest.  Then he started calculating the ratios of the slowest to the fastest, and he found that these ratios corresponded to the ratios of musical harmonies!
	For example, he found that 	Saturn moves at a rate of 106" of arc per day at aphelion and l35" at perihelion. Cancelled down, the ratio 106:135 differs by only two seconds from 4:5 — equivalent to the interval of a major third. Kepler found that the angular velocities of all the planets closely correspond to musical intervals. When he compared the extremes for combined pairs of planets the results were even more marvellous, yielding the intervals of a complete scale. Thus, the ratio between Jupiter's maximum and Mars' minimum speed corresponds, to a minor third; the interval between Earth and Venus to a minor sixth. Rather than the fixed-tone planetary scales of earlier schemes, Kepler's measurements revealed ever-changing polyphonic chords and harmonies as the planets move between perihelion and aphelion. Furthermore, he had shifted the focus of celestial harmony from the Earth to the Sun.  He said "Henceforth it is no longer a harmony made for the benefit of our planet, but the song which the cosmos sings to its lord and centre, the Solar Logos".
	The solar logos.  Do you think this is what the Universalists meant by harmony with the divine?
	Well the planets may be proportioned in musical intervals, but with space pretty much a vacuum, it is hard to see how much singing gets heard.  Yet science does not debunk the whole notion of harmony and proportion but to the contrary exhibits it at every stage.  The Fibonacci number series is the basis for the golden proportion (or for readers of the Da Vinci Code, the number phi) which is found not only in the best and most satisfying human art and architecture, but in snail spirals and arrangements of flower petals and the distribution of leaves on trees.
	Emerson was simply wrong when he said no number tallies nature up; for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, there are numbers all around, and they enable us to see deeper into the nature of things.
	And while we may not literally listen for the music of the spheres, we are doing amazing things with resonances.  We have developed a technology to use resonances to see tumors within a living body and save lives.
	We see resonance at work in our ministries, where our words go out into the congregation or the community and come back to us in the form of transformations and synergies.  Resonance is happening on the Internet as political voices and movements obtain supporters and money and make real change happen.
	My own favorite aspect of the notion of divine harmony is not the planetary association but that resonating in harmony seems like a good way to be in relation to the divine.  The Hebrew Bible depicts God as a stern father or ruler, and you’re either for him or against him, loyal or out of favor, virtuous or sinful.  But if we depersonalize the divine, if we conceive the divine as a wave or a tone, we can sidestep a lot of the emotional baggage associated with the Biblical God.
	You don’t obey or disobey a tone, you either resonate with it or you don’t.  You may resonate with it at the octave or the fifth or the fourth, so not everyone will resonate with the same tone in the same way.  The conception allows a marvelous diversity: you may be in harmony with the divine and I may be in harmony with the divine, but that does not mean that we are necessarily in harmony with each other.  Let’s say the divine note is G, for God;  you may be resonating in B, a third above and I may be resonating in C, and we will sound dissonant to each other.
[demonstration on concertina]
	Another aspect of this: to harmonize with the divine, the divine need not be all powerful and unchanging.  Indeed, maybe what God calls us to do most is to listen, listen closely.  As the divine music moves along, what we do to harmonize at this moment, may create dissonances in the next moment.  
	A yes, dissonances.  Sometimes it is hard to hear the divine tone.  Sometimes all we can hear are cacaphonies.  Sometimes the only notes we can sound are sour ones.  We don’t always harmonize even with the ones we most want to. 
	And we may want all souls to grow into harmony with the divine, but I put it to you that perhaps the agents of that growth are the dissonances.  If everything was in perfect harmony all the time, it would be a boring world and a stagnant one.  As classical composers discovered in the Twentieth Century, a little dissonance can liven things up.
[vocal demonstration]
 	Come thou fount of every blessing, tune our hearts to seek thy grace.  This has been an airy ethereal sermon; those of you who came expecting down-to earth words of comfort may be disappointed.  But I think it’s good to remind ourselves from time to time, and especially at the New Year, of our highest aspirations, what the view looks like from the top of the mountain, even if we spend most of our time in the valleys.  We need to know what a tuned heart can feel like, even if we are out of tune a lot more than we are in, which is a banjo-player’s fate.  Some days we may be augmented, some days diminished, some days we may even be suspended.  In this New Year, my prayer is that, each in our own way, we may find our keynote and all of our souls may continue growing into harmony with the divine.
Amen.