Through my son Denis, the
percussionist,
I have recently been
introduced to the work
of the Scottish percussionist Evelyn
Glennie.
She is a remarkable musician
in a number of ways:
sustaining a career as a solo classical
percussionist,
receiving over fifteen
honorary doctorates,
winning a Grammy,
and being one of the featured
performers
at the opening ceremonies of
this past summer’s Olympics.
She also happens to be deaf.
Because she would much rather
be known as a musician
than as a “deaf musician,”
she generally does not talk
much about her deafness.
But when pressed she will say
that while she is deaf,
in the sense that her ears do
not work properly,
this does not mean that she
cannot hear.
Hearing is simply being able
to interpret vibrations,
to experience them as
meaningful.
And while most of us do this
most of the time
with our ears,
we can also do it with other
parts of the body,
as when we feel the rumble of
a passing truck
in our torsos
or see the reverberation of a
guitar string or a drum head
with our eyes.
If one does not have use of his
or her ears,
then one must find other ways
to connect
to the vibrations that we call music,
which is what Evelyn Glennie
has learned how to do.
Hearing, Glennie says, is in
some ways
just a specialized form of the sense of touch,
and what she has learned to do
is to interpret pitch and tone
with the whole of her body,
building up in her brain what
she calls a “sound picture”
by opening up her whole self
and letting the music inhabit her
so that she can in turn let
music flow out of her
through the medium of her
instrument.
Evelyn Glennie shows us the
power of human beings
to adapt to seeming
limitations and to overcome obstacles
in pursuit of the things they
love.
But she also shows us that
hearing
is about far more than what we
do with our ears.
In some ways, “hearing” is
about our whole self
opening up to the reality
around it.
This can help shed light on
today’s Gospel reading.
This story involves much more
than simply the healing
of one whose ears do not work
properly.
The man’s deafness here is a
symbol of spiritual deafness –
of the way in which we close
ourselves off
to the vibrations produced by what
God is doing in the world.
In the context of Mark’s
Gospel,
the deafness of the man whom
Jesus heals
is a symbol of the inability
of the people of Jesus’s day,
of even his own disciples,
to recognize the presence of
God’s messiah in their midst.
Their expectations of what
God’s anointed would be like –
a powerful warrior and ruler
like King David –
made them incapable of hearing
God’s voice
in Jesus, God’s Word.
In our second reading, from
the letter of James,
we encounter another sort of
spiritual deafness:
an inability to recognize
in
the poor person with shabby clothes
one whom God has chosen to be
rich in faith
and heir of the kingdom that
God promised
to those who love him.
The people in Mark’s Gospel,
the Christians to whom James
writes,
and even we ourselves,
depend perhaps too much
on our
normal way of perceiving things
and so are deaf
to the
presence and activity of God around us.
The example of Evelyn Glennie
learning to hear music with
more than her ears
indicates to us that in order
for us to overcome
our own spiritual deafness to
the Word of God in all its forms
we need to open ourselves up
to new ways of knowing,
new ways of sensing the
presence of God.
When Jesus heals the deaf man,
he touches his mouth and ears
and says, “Ephphatha – be opened!”
Today he says to us as well,
“Be opened!”
We need to be opened by
Christ,
so that we can hear with our
whole self,
hear the voice of God that
sounds all around us:
in the sometimes comforting
and sometimes discomfiting words of Scripture,
in the cries of those who beg
for food,
in the voices of those who cry
out for justice,
in the words even of those who
might disagree with us.
If Jesus touches our ears and
opens our senses
our deafness can be overcome;
the music of God’s Word can inhabit
us and transform us.
And as with the man in today’s
Gospel,
the touch of Jesus opens not
only our ears,
but also our mouths,
so that the music of God’s
Word that fills us
can also flow forth from us
to bring hope and comfort and
challenge and good news
to all whom we encounter.
Ephphata
– be opened!
