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Playing the Rests

It's been a while, but I've been outrageously busy in the real world of Methodism without attending too much to the virtual one (which is ironic given the subject of my post), but as usual the necessity of coming up with something for Thought for the Day on Radio Ulster has prompted me to post again... Here's this morning's offering which you can still catch here 26 minutes in and 87 minutes in... With a hat-tip from Alan Meban in a piece about checking emails on the way in to work in between. They will probably get round to posting it here as a clip later on.

I am sure that anyone who has to travel during rush hour has noticed the increased travel time required over the past few days with schools starting to go back after their holidays… It will be even busier on Monday, and that’s without those in some parts of Belfast having to pay attention to the start of the new Glider service… The summer break is over for most us, and within schools and churches and many other sectors, the autumn term is about to begin in earnest… So maybe we need to make the most of this last weekend before the mayhem really takes off…
Holidays are important, but we need to learn to pace ourselves and pause from time to time in the midst of the hectic lifestyles that too many of us are living… Even those who are retired repeatedly tell me “I don’t know how I ever found time to work!”
Within the Jewish and Christian tradition there is the idea of Sabbath… one day in seven where we are encouraged to rest… Genesis suggests that this idea was there from the beginning, built into our DNA as it were and not simply one of the 10 commandments… Yet how often does our faith lead to even greater busyness… I’m a Methodist Minister and Methodism has a reputation for hymn singing, preaching and social action… Methodist spirituality doesn’t lend itself easily to quiet contemplation and rest… We’re a noisy, busy bunch on the whole… And personally my life has gotten even busier recently, if that were possible, with a change of jobs…
But over the summer, whilst on my holidays I was listening to someone else preaching and he, as a trained organist was talking about the importance of “Playing the rests…” Now I am incapable of playing any musical instrument, but I have checked with a couple of other organists and they all tell me that so long as you keep your finger on the key of an organ it will continue to play the note… unlike the piano, which requires the use of the sustain pedal to prolong a note to any extent… but an upshot of this is that refraining from playing is as important as doing so, because the rests enhance the perception of the notes to either side of it…
As in music so in life, the rests enhance the music… So whilst I have no intention of learning to play a musical instrument of any sort any time soon, I do intend to make a concerted effort to learn to play the rests…

Selah

I regularly use the word "Selah" as a sign off on appropriate pieces... It is a Hebrew word found regularly in the Psalms, and is usually untranslated as there is uncertainty about its meaning. But I am told that its context suggests that it is a musical term, instructing the singers or musicians to pause... I was going to include a reference to it in this morning's piece but there is a limit to what you can get into two and a half minutes without gabbling... It really wouldn't have been appropriate to edit out all pauses to include a reference to pauses...

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