DESCRIPTION:
Interview with Dr. Don Saliers, William R. Cannon Distinguished Professor of Theology and Worship, Emeritus, Candler School of Theology, Emory University.
The Reverend Doctor Melissa Sexton is a post-doctoral fellow in the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine and an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. Dr. Sexton is completing a practicum with the Interfaith Health Program as part of her fellowship; as part of that work, she is interviewing those with particular insights into the religious and spiritual dimensions of the COVID-19 outbreak and our responses to it.
The interview begins with Dr. Saliers talking about the importance of lament in our “strange time.” We prefer blame, denial, and repression of things we know are real; knowing how to lament well in our anger, grief, and pain is important. The Psalms are a deep resource for experiencing lament for both Jews and Christians; they offer us “an honest, aching song.”
The outbreak demands a change in how we live and relate to one another; Don encourages us to re-discover spiritual practices that we had largely abandoned in our modern era—for example, practices of silence and practices of meditative reading (the lectio divina). He also calls us to pay attention to what’s in front of us, the practice of visio divina. Both of these practices are relational—they are prompted by a friend, in community: “there is nothing more precious and powerful than seeing the world, tasting the world, hearing the world through another.”
Melissa and Don discuss the challenges of communal singing during this pandemic. Don talks about the ways that choirs can continue to value the gift of what music offers even though they are unable to practice or perform. He argues that so many aspects of human experience and communication are musical and involve pitch, rhythm, and affect. This is true in spoken communication as well. Melissa concludes the interview by asking to “play something” on the piano. He obliges with one of Bach’s inventions.