Springs of Living Water

This morning’s Gospel at the Eucharist was about the Woman of Samaria, and He who is the Living Water. “The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of living water springing up into everlasting life” (St. John 4:14). The form this takes in me is the Music that I play. For all musicians and artists and writers, this is how it is. There are many other life-giving forms it can take as well, such as parenting, acts of mercy and kindness, teaching, caring for the elderly, sick, or mentally deranged, careful administration, making things of value and beauty, but I cannot here speak of these directly.

Bach is a monumental example of this in the realm of Music; he worked all his life long, right up to his final day. Hundreds of cantatas, Passions, Brandenburg Concerti, music for solo violin, solo violoncello, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Clavierübung with its Goldberg Variations, the B Minor Mass, the organ preludes and fugues, the Musical Offering and Art of Fugue, the hundreds of chorale preludes and harmonizations... there is no better way to describe this than to term it a “well of living water springing up into everlasting life.”

There is only one Bach. What about the rest of us? Well, there are springs and wells large and small. He is one of the largest and best, but there is ample room -- and need -- for the rest of us. Not least, his music and that of the other masters cannot now exist unless we play it, as I tried to do this morning with the B minor prelude and fugue (and yesterday, at a funeral, with several Bach chorale preludes and the St. Anne fugue and some of the Brahms chorales). As a performer, we strive to be like a spring, allowing the water that is not of our making to flow through us into the world. Some times it goes better than others, and as Paul Westermeyer wrote somewhere, when it goes well, it is always a Gift, not of our doing.

On our little hill country farm back in West Virginia, there is a spring. It is one of the most significant features of the place, in my opinion. Its water is hard with iron and sulfur (though perhaps healthy because of that; people once thought it so). It is just a little spring, but it has never run dry -- not in the one hundred years or so that my people were on that land, nor for all the years before, clear back to the Shawnee and others who used to camp there before the white men came.

And there was a little mountain spring that I loved. It was on the side of U.S. 19 near the state line between Tennessee and North Carolina -- sweet and good and beautiful, giving of itself freely to all. The builders of the old highway in the 1940’s recognized its value and made a pull-off area, and cleaned it up so that people could stop and fill their water jugs there and perhaps their radiators, for it was near the top of a long steep switchback climb to the ridgetop and the state line. The modern engineers who made the road into a four-lane in the 1990’s could not be bothered with such a quaint notion as a roadside pull-off for a spring; to them it was a nuisance to be piped away into a drainage ditch.

And there is Red Clay. In the uttermost southeast corner of Tennessee can be found so noble a spring that it became one of the chief Holy Places of the Cherokees, and remains so today. Nowadays, there is a little state park that protects the Blue Hole Spring and the council grounds around it, the last seat of government of the Cherokee Nation before they walked the Trail of Tears. The day my wife and I were there, several Indian families were there as well. From the license plates on their rusted out pickup trucks and beat-up old cars, they had come there all the way from Oklahoma to stand there in silence and Remember, and to let their children drink of that water and run and play in the little park. It is to such a spring that Bach might be compared. We too come to his music to Remember, to encounter the Holy, and to let our children drink of it.

A spring does not get to choose what sort of spring it is, nor the place where it is. But it is there in that place as a blessing upon all who pass by, and as a source of life. So it is with all of us, or so it could be, were we to drink from the Living Water ourselves and allow it to flow through us to others.

In other passages, Our Lord describes the concept in other ways: the branch which abides in the Vine and bears fruit, and is pruned by the Father to bear more abundantly; the good soil that brings forth thirty-fold, sixty-fold, and an hundred-fold (and the many ways that we can fail to bring forth any fruit), the steward who is told “Occupy till I return” and with the one pound he is given makes five, or ten. These likenesses remind us that the Music does not simply flow from us without discipline. We practice, and learn new skills, and listen, and study scores, and wrestle with the notes. One thinks of Beethoven in this, but one thinks also of Bach in the period when he was writing a new cantata every week -- writing it, teaching it to the choirboys, rehearsing it, performing it on Sunday. Or Haydn on his knees in prayer, not knowing where to take the idea with which he was struggling.

For a musician, this is the “pruning” that brings forth more fruit. Or the cleaning up of the spring so that it can be of more benefit to travellers. But the fruit, the living water, the increase of the harvest -- none of this is ours in any ultimate way. We strive only to become transparent, to “abide,” to let go.

Soli Deo gloria.