Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Unitarian Society of New Haven

Franz Schubert’s Mass in G was written in less than a week in 1815, when he was eighteen years old.[i]

In 1825, Schubert wrote a letter to his parents about a different composition: “My audience,” he wrote, “expressed great delight at the solemnity of my hymn…” “It seems to have infected the minds of listeners with a spirit of piety and devotion.”[ii]

Based on other letters, scholars believe that Schubert was agnostic, despite his religious compositions. He had a difficult relationship with the established Church and, in fact, never included the traditional words of the Credo – “And [I believe] in one, holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” — in any of his masses.[iii] We will not hear the Credo of the Mass in G today;
I’ll speak more about that shortly.

Still, Schubert had a powerful spiritual sense, one we can hear in his music and understand through the reaction of his audiences and our reaction today.

His letter to his parents continues: “I believe I have attained this result by never forcing on myself religious ecstasy, and never setting myself to compose such hymns or prayers except when I am involuntarily overcome by the feeling and spirit of devotion; in that case, devotion,” he says, “is usually of the right and genuine kind.^[iv]

And what kind is that? The right and genuine kind of devotion? That kind of devotion to the ineffable that is not forced or coerced. That kind of devotion that flows from the heart. While most of us have not been in the position of writing Masses for the Catholic Church for pay, many of us have been to religious services to please family members. We have perhaps even said prayers or creeds or made devotional gestures at times in our lives because it was easier than explaining what it meant to be a questioning believer – or not a believer at all.

 

Devotion is one of the words at which Unitarian Universalists often cringe.
We shouldn’t.

Because we are some of the most devoted people I know. The question is, to what or whom are we devoted? And what would it look like to set our sights higher or wider or deeper?

I believe that without devotion, without reverence, without a sense of awe and wonder, without the humility that comes from an understanding of forces larger than ourselves – be they divine or earthly – we are missing a fundamental aspect of the human experience. And I think we kid ourselves if we think that we can exist without it.

Can you recall a time when you became “involuntarily overcome by the feeling and spirit of devotion?” Was it when you first saw a shooting star? Or first looked into the eyes of your child?
Was it on the deathbed of your beloved? Or when you found yourself at prayer some time you least expected it? Was it when the earth began to wake again, and miraculously, shoots of green began to reappear? When did you last feel like shouting Hallelujah? When did you last feel like sinking to your knees?

You may believe in a higher power. You may not. You may call that higher power God.
You may use other names to describe that which is indescribable.
The beauty of our faith is the fact of our coexistence in this space, in our ability to hold space for the myriad ways we engage the world and the cosmos and that which is beyond our understanding.

The choir and string quartet have lovingly and devotedly prepared the music we are so blessed to hear this morning. It is a mass – minus the Credo in a nod to our creedlessness. (Plus, it’s extra long.)

In Franz Schubert’s time, folks were just beginning to look beyond the walls of the small-c church and the influence of the capital-C Church for an experience of “the feeling and spirit of devotion.” The mass was what Shubert knew. It was the best way he could express, as Jeff said, the range of emotions he knew so well in his young life: “fear and sorrow; joy and celebration.”

It is, for us, a gift in music, an expression of devotion, right and genuine, an experience of the human longing for that which is beyond ourselves, beyond our understanding, beyond words, even.

Beloveds, let us lose ourselves once again in the music, “our hearts kindled to warm love,”
“our souls transported to a better world.”[v] “More abundant life”[vi] is ours in this moment.

And for that, let us be oh, so grateful.

 

Praises be.

Amen

 

[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_No._2_(Schubert)

[ii] Letter to His Parents, 1825. http://www.franzpeterschubert.com/letter_to_his_parents.html

[iii] Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828) A Short Life, Rich in Music http://www.sfchoral.org/site/franz-peter-schubert-1797-1828-a-short-life-rich-in-music/

[iv] http://www.franzpeterschubert.com/letter_to_his_parents.html

[v] Franz von Schober “An die Musik” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_die_Musik

[vi] Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Songs for the People https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58442/songs-for-the-people