Rhythm and Tenor

April 26.

This morning I woke up around 4 a.m. 

At this hour of the morning, birds do not sing.

There’s a stillness that comes of the night. There is more stillness in it than the day; and in this can be profit. One can always learn from a deeper stillness; it calls the soul in a way that the affairs of the day do not. In abbeys, it used to be a common practice to awake in the middle of the night, say 2 am or 3 am,  and engage in common prayer. 

There’s something to be said for a sacred act engaged in while the rest of the world is silent. 

Each day ought to have a few moments where there is time set aside to just take one's life in quite simply, without the accessories of thought and concern. In this way one can learn without complications how to sit and sense the pulse of one’s life, the rhythm and tenor of it, before the pressures of time and embellishments of personality arrive. 

There’s someone here who is of the essence. My personage in its most purified and refined form. 

That form has a contact with the highest source of life. In Christianity, we call it the soul; the Buddhists call it Buddha nature. It’s always here within us, like the sweet and nourishing kernel of a nut. However one wants to characterize it, it has an unmistakable flavor that isn’t touched by the world, but lives in it and receives it.

The word tenor originally comes from the Latin tenere. It was used to denote import or meaning, as, for example, in a law. So sensing the tenor of our life is to sense its meaning. As I have oft explained, that meaning already begins before I have any meanings in me. My own meanings are invented meanings. The true meaning of life is, in the biblical phrase, begotten, not made. That is to say, it’s the product of a birth which is generated by a sacred action, and not a product of my ability to reason and fashion things.

The word rhythm is from the Latin rhythmus, which is related to a root that originally meant, in a general sense, to flow. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it, in musical terms, as the analysis of a piece according to the duration and arrangement of the notes.

What I want to point at here is the difference between rhythm and tenor. Rhythm is most distinctly of time. The flow of events is time. Tenor is metaphysical; it lies outside time. The meaning in our life may be expressed in time, but in the end it’s just as unspoken and mysterious as the effect of music. Music is a language we understand with parts of ourselves that don’t use words. Like meaning, it’s born of time; and it brings a wordless meaning into us that can bring joy or sadness, without words. It connects with this part of ourselves called the soul, and reminds us that it has capacities beyond our thought.

When I begin in the morning and I sense the pulse of this life, I’m interested in quietly coming to the duration and tone of life as it arises between time and eternity. The rhythm of my life is of time and in time; but the tenor is of eternity, of that which lies outside time. 

Both those forces meet together in Being: the worlds of time, and the meanings of eternity.

These two ideas, from an intellectual and metaphysical point of view, are huge. Incomprehensible. In fact, although we could engage in long intellectual discussions about them, there’s no need. The point that I'm making is that we can sense and understand the conjunction of these two sets of metaphysical forces quite simply within our Being. There is a part of us which is a genius that does this quite easily. I just need to listen for it. 

There’s an echo of it even now.

Now, there ought to be a rule somewhere – especially for me —not to give more than two examples of etymology in a single essay. It would be especially good to have this rule because then occasionally I could break it. 

The word genius comes from the Latin and means “the attendant spirit present from one's birth.” In this sense it's exactly the right word, because the genius in us is our essence, that part of the soul that touches God (See Meister Eckhart, sermon 52.) It’s already there before time. 

It’s there before I think of it. (In fact I ought to stop thinking about it!)

And in this great silence from which the world emerges, the resonance and consonance of its vibration sounds an eternal tone, one that comes from outside time. That single note of Being is where life begins – all of it. We’re as much carriers and sensors of it as the birds that sing. 

If we listen carefully, perhaps we begin to understand that birdsong is as close to the soul as God; and although it comes from the world, it speaks to the other side of it in this unknown language.

I'm tempted to say more, but I'll leave it there for this morning.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.