The Sacred Is Where We Choose to Find It
by Jeffrey Aaron
New Brunswick Meeting
New Brunswick Friends Meeting has always been small, and music has rarely played a significant part in our meetings. Intriguingly, however, words from Brahms’ Requiem inspired a meaningful message, reinterpreted from a Quaker perspective.
The first semester of my freshman year at Rutgers, fall 1963, I joined the Rutgers Choir. I was soon in rehearsals for Brahms’ Schiksalslied (“Song of Destiny”) and Ein Deutsches Requiem (“A German Requiem”), two major pieces of choral and orchestral music. We were to perform in November at Carnegie Hall in New York, in New Brunswick, and in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia Orchestra with professional vocal soloists. Two days after our first performance at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, something suddenly seemed amiss in the world. Everywhere people had their ears to radios and were talking in quiet tones: a social phenomenon that occurs during a crisis. I soon learned that President John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated. The world was transformed; everything was now different.
That evening, a call came, asking if I could board a charter bus the next morning to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia with the other choir members. We were to make a professional recording of both works, to be played at the televised funerary proceedings during the following days, which all the world would be watching. The choir, orchestra and soloists arrived. We recorded the powerful pieces, emotions painfully enhanced by the circumstances. I was intensely focused on my vocal part to the end, as is standard for any serious musician. But when I looked up at the end, I saw people weeping. The emotion and historicity of the situation landed heavily on my consciousness, and only then the tears came to my eyes, not only for the murdered man, not only for an assassinated President, but for all of us and our broken world, where people do such terrible things to each other, for that is what truly brought on the tears: for you and for me and for people everywhere. The following performances at Rutgers and Carnegie Hall were dedicated to Kennedy and were performed with no applause at Carnegie Hall, at the request of the conductor, or at Rutgers, at the request of Rutgers President Mason Gross, who opened the evening with a reading of the words from the Bible with which the Requiem begins: “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” The solemnity of the final chords of that powerful work, to silence from the hundreds of audience members at Rutgers and to almost 3000 in New York was stunning and overwhelming for everyone experiencing this shared experience. The reviews in the New York Times and other papers reflected the intensity of one-ness that we felt as musicians and audience members. The experience for a young man just out of high school was beyond words. The world watched the proceedings during the following days and heard us perform.
Years later, in New Brunswick meeting for worship, words from the Requiem, “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen, Herr Zebaoth” suddenly came to my mind. It occurred to me that the usual translation, “How lovely is your dwelling place, o Lord,” was wrong! It was plural in German: “How lovely are your dwelling places.” In contemplation of that difference, I realized that traditional Friends do not hold any person, place or thing to be any more or less sacred than any other. We gather in simple meetinghouses without icons, not churches. We have no exalted members or leaders; we are all ministers to each other and to the world at large. I soon stood to share a message about the unity of shared experiences, of the sacredness of unity of all people, brought to me that morning from a universal experience in the language of music from decades past. And I reflect as I write how it applies very much in today’s world.