Violins Violence Silenc

“VIOLINS VIOLENCE SILENCE,” is a neon light sculpture by Bruce Nauman that has been wrapped around the outside of the Baltimore Museum of Art since the 1982-83 exhibition of his neon works. It was a gift of the Nauman Galleries to the BMA, and therefore to Baltimore, the community and the world. The words light up forwards and backwards in multi-color rhythm that is both confrontational and meditative all at once. Violins interrupted by violence results in silence? Violence often results in violins, as in funeral music, as well as in silence? Or, as art critic Gregory Volk once suggested, it may represent both the silence of victims of violence and the silence of those who choose/chose not to bear witness or to oppose the violence.

It seems to be one work of art that continues to have relevance to a week like the one just concluded: the violence of 58 killed and nearly 500 wounded in Las Vegas by one man and a cache of weapons; the violence of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of two uniquely powerful hurricanes; the violence of political rhetoric that seeks to deafen and numb the population into unbearable silence. I find the confrontational violin concertos of Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg hauntingly playing in the background as I struggle not to fall into symptoms of PTSD such events like Las Vegas threaten to precipitate ever since gun violence ended the lives of my two closest colleagues in ministry one afternoon in the offices at St. Peter’s, Ellicott City: Brenda Brewington and Mary-Marguerite Kohn. And then I recall Nauman’s neon sculpture endlessly, relentlessly, lighting up back and forth: violins violence silence silence violence violins. And I thank God that I have music to listen to and music to play as I struggle to make sense of it all.

How long have the Ten Commandments, or the Ten Words as they are also known, been around? Articulated in Exodus chapter 20 and reprised by Moses in Deuteronomy chapter 5, these words are meant as a gift to outline a Way of Being One’s True Self in the World. They not only outline a way of acting but more importantly a way of Being – they confer identity – they give shape to what it means to be “created in the image of God.”

I am forever indebted to Abraham Joshua Heschel who once observed that in the Deuteronomy version the command for Sabbath comprises nearly one-third of the text of the Ten Words, and that only one commandment is stated twice – the Tenth: thou shalt not covet, and in case you did not hear me the first time says YHWH, thou shalt not covet. And yet, we live within an economic system that is defined by covetousness -  the need for more and more of everything. Advertising: an entire industry devoted to making us more and more covetous.

So, Heschel suggests that the Sabbath, a day off, is not at all a religious command or ritual. It is an alternative to the 24/7 relentlessness of a covetous economic system that often drives people to violence. Sabbath is a periodic withdrawal from the dominant economic system; the unfettered need to produce, acquire and consume more and more stuff – be it money, products, or property. Our very identity is wrapped up in this “stuff” – my car, my home, my clothes are carefully curated to say something about who I am. I often joke about the creation of the Self Storage industry – lockers, most as big as a garage, in which to store our excess “self.” But it is no joke. For covetousness eventually leads to violence somehow. Sabbath is meant to break the cycle of covetousness long enough to remember who we are and whose we are.

Note the actions of the tenants of the vineyard in Matthew chapter 21, The Parable of the Vineyard. They live and work in a vineyard that is not their own. Yet, when the owner sends servants and even his own son to collect his produce, the tenants become violent and kill one after another so as to take possession of the vineyard for themselves. Covetousness begats violence, which results in silence and the violins of funeral music. Once again this is a parable that means to hold up a mirror before us and help us to see a way beyond violent solutions.

Saint Paul, in writing to the Philippians in chapter 3 comments again on the need for a change of mind – a radical reassessment of past, present and future. Everything I have accomplished and acquired in my otherwise exemplary past is rubbish he says. Actually, this is a genteel alchemy of translation, for the Greek text of his letter calls it dung. In a this tightly argued part of this letter he seems to say that the Good News, the Gospel, is not an answer to all the problems in our lives. Rather, the Good News of God in Christ means to disturb all my settled answers, we might say “my ideology, or my theology,” and sends me searching for new answers and new solutions!

I have not reached the goal, he says, but I press on, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead – that which is the “unseen” of our creed – because God in Christ has made me his own. I have been overtaken by Christ. All that I think I already know is dung. What is important lies ahead.

What the Ten Words know is that unless we break the cycles of production, acquisition and consumption, unless we break the cycles of debates that hide behind “this is what I know and I am not changing my mind,” we cannot lean forward into a future in which violence itself is silenced. So important is Sabbath Time, suggested my friend and mentor Gordon Cosby, so relentless is the pace of life today, that I may need Sabbath Time once a day instead of just once a week. To literally, physically withdraw from the 24/7 busyness of covetousness for a period of time each day to simply Be with God and rediscover my True Self once again.

A self that is molded and shaped by the statutes, the law, the commandments that give “light to the eyes, wisdom to the innocent and right judgments” as Psalm 19 invites us to sing! “More to be desired are they than gold, more than much fine gold, sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb…above all keep your servant from presumptuous sins; let them not get dominion over me; then I shall be whole and sound and innocent of a great offense.

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer!”

Shabbat shalom. The need for heart-full meditation. There can be no shalom, no peace, without Shabbat. There can be no shalom without seriously allowing our entrenched ideas and ideologies to be let go and reimagined. There can be no shalom as long as the means to mass violence are so readily available as a presumed “solution” to a current problem. I look at Las Vegas and weep. God looks at Las Vegas and weeps. Yet, our leaders in Washington, DC, effectively remain silent. A silence that only begats more violence and the need for more funeral violins.

Violins Violence Silence. When will we be able to turn off those relentless neon lights once and for all because they will no longer have meaning?