Formation Friday: Parables as Melodies

This is Scott Coulter, your Minister of Formation (and Community Engagement, but this column is all about formation…). This is the first of what will become a weekly blog, “Formation Friday”. In this space, I hope to explore various formation topics, from the deep to the superficial, the serious to the funny, the liturgical to the mystical. These pages are going to be all about what it means to follow, understand, and embody the path of Jesus of Nazareth, and what it means to be part of this “Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement”, as former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry once said. I hope this can become an enriching space for you. And so without further ado, let us dive into our first exploration, “Parables and Melodies”!

A parable is not a riddle. Though it can be tempting to treat a parable as a “solvable” riddle, I have always felt we lose so much magic when we take this approach. You see, a riddle has one (or sometimes a few) “correct” answers, and a whole lot of wrong ones. A riddle is an intellectual exercise, a matter of “outsmarting” the riddle and pinning down an answer. And once a riddle is solved, it is dead. There is no “going back again and again” to your favorite riddle. The entire process ends once the answer has been reached.

Not so with parables. They are living things. Parables are much more like seeds than riddles. And of course, Jesus (and many spiritual teachers) simply adored the metaphor of seeds. So many of the parables about the Kingdom of Heaven involve seeds. One in particular, the parable of the Mustard Seed, stands out. It is worth hearing the parable in full before we go further: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field; which indeed is smaller than all seeds but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31)

You see, a seed grows and changes and transforms. It is latent with possibility, brimming with a million different futures, any of which may come to fruition. And a seed grows organically, not through outside force, nor through its own willpower, but through the magic combination of soil and water and inner programming and potential. A seed, unlike a riddle, contains multitudes. Rather than eliminating possibilities, it expands them.

There is something else I am familiar with that works like this - melody. And that is what I want to share with you today: parables as melodies.

Let’s imagine a composer, sitting down with a simple melody (since parables are, on their surface, simple stories). She takes that simple melody and internalizes it. Before anything else can happen, that melody must become ingrained in her, memorized so that her imagination is free to begin working with it. This might be similar to our practice of Lectio Divina, in which we hear the words of scripture over and over, chewing on them and internalizing them.

Next, a composer will begin to accompany that melody. She might use counter-point, parallel melodies, or other accentuations. She might create rhythmic backgrounds for it. As she moves forward, those accompaniments will grow in complexity, expanding and breathing. The harmonies become richer and more diverse. But while there are countless directions a composer may go in this stage, there is an important caveat: the accompaniment must compliment, and be drawn from, the melody it supports. A composer isn’t free to just “make up whatever she wants”. I mean, she could. But it won’t sound good. No, in order for it sound like music, it must be in harmony with the melody - it must come from the character of that melody. Here, too, we can relate back to our prayerful reading, and the stage of meditation in Lectio Divina. We contemplate the parable in such a way that new insights can arise, new patterns can emerge, and creativity can lead us into new discoveries. But it’s not a free-for-all. We remain rooted, deeply, in the parable that is our north star. Our insights emerge from within the parable, our starting seed.

Soon, our composer may begin to expand on the melody. Theme and variations emerge, and that seed of a melody gives way to new melodies, follow-up melodies, and the journey of the musical piece expands even further. Jazz musicians will often talk about “thematic development” in our improvisations. It means we are conscious of playing melodic ideas that connect with each other, that tell a story. And so, we start with a melodic idea, and then we grow that idea into new melodies, new variations. Where we end up may not sound at all like the melody we started with. But again, if we are good at what we do, the whole improvisation will connect. It will make sense. It will tell a cohesive story. And as readers of parables, we can do the same. This is a deeper level of meditation, moving perhaps into contemplation, a stage in which we are listening for God’s voice. Here, we allow God’s voice to lead us wherever it will. If we are grounded in our practice, if we have truly internalized the parable, God may lead us into previously unimagined worlds, inspired by the parable but moving so much deeper and farther out than we could never have predicted the outcome.

Before you know it, our composer has created an entire piece, maybe an entire symphony. The seed has blossomed into the largest of trees. Just like a parable. And, just like a parable, even that finished symphony is just one possibility. And this is the final lesson we must learn from our composer. The symphony she hears today may not be the symphony she hears tomorrow. Every time we come back to our parable, we come back anew to our simple starting melody. And where it leads us, what we discover, the harmonies we hear, the variations we create, are always changing, always growing. There is no “end” to a melody. There is never a moment when we can say that “every possible harmony” has been tried, or “every possible rhythm” has been found. So it is with parables. That is what makes them so miraculous. Amen.