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The Engaged Citizen

​Musicking for a more
​Compassionate World
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1.   What is a more compassionate world?
  • The Stanford Medical School Project
  • Jane Goodall's Prayer
  • The Charter for Compassion
  • Martin Luther King Jr.'s idea of Beloved Community
2.  What kind of person can I become if I am to realize my potential and help build a better world?
  • Process Theology as option among many
  • The process Idea of a Fat Soul
3.  What role might spiritual literacy have in helping me become this kind of person?
  • The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence
  • The Spiritual Alphabet
  • What is the difference between "spirituality" and religion?
4.  How might "music" and "musicking" be a spiritual practice aimed at helping create a better world?
  • Maya Angelou: We are all human, I'd Like to hear your voice in my ear.
  • Music as Contributing to Emotional Intelligence
  • Christopher Small's notion of Musicking
5.  Why focus on "music" rather than religion? 
  • Because, for many people in the world today, music functions as a universal religion.
What is Musicking?

Christopher Small defines musicking as participating in a musical performance in any way.  It

1. Creating the “meaning” of music in the act of participating in its performance.
2. Building relationships with others who are also participating.
3. Uncovering possibilities for how to live in the world, imaginatively if not also in actuality.
4. Uncovering worldviews: that is, ways of imagining the world as it has been, is, and can be.  
5. Improvising with others amid the participation, making things up as you go.
6. Co-creating with others amid the participation, exercising cooperative agency.
7. Claiming your own capacities for subjective agency.
8. Experiencing touches of transcendence -- moments of feeling fully awake, aware, and alive - in the act of listening to and performing the music.

In short, musicking is an activity, a verb, a process, and it has at least seven dimensions in the moment that it occurs.  It creates the meaning of the music; it builds relationships; it inspires the imagination; it uncovers worldviews; it requires improvisation, it experiments in co-creativity; and it helps a person compose his or her life. ​
​How can we come together?  Shared service projects, shared meals, shared storytelling?  All to the good!  Workshops on diversity, panel discussions, the creation of diversity-inclusive pedagogies?  All to the good!   Internships, scholarships, special courses.  Yes, all to the good.

Toward what end?  At the liberal arts college where I teach, Hendrix College, our statement on diversity and inclusion puts it well.  We want our lives to be enriched by "the race, ethnicity, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, socioeconomic status, ability, culture, political philosophies, geographical backgrounds, and intellectual perspectives" of one another.  

With what capacities?  Here again, Hendrix states it well.  We want to "cultivate capacities for generous listening, especially to those who might otherwise not be heard, to introduce the arts of dialogue across differences, to afford opportunities for mutual transformation through multicultural cooperation, all with the aim of creating an atmosphere that is welcoming, hospitable, and true to the best of liberal arts education."  
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The question is: Can just a little of this be fun?  Can it include joy, enthusiasm, play, and zest for life?  Is there a place for shared-music making, among diverse peoples as helping create a context for a culture of diversity and inclusion.  Why not multi-cultural karaoke every Thursday?  Or an interfaith pop concert once a semester?  Or multi-cultural video-making?  

The folks at Playing for Change: Connecting the World through Music pull all of this together.  They offer an example of the power of music to help people connect.  Click here to see their musicians around the world.  Enjoy a few of the videos below to get the general idea.  Then organize some events in your own locale: college, church,, synagogue, mosque, coffee house, living room.  No time to waste!  It's too much fun.

​-- Jay McDaniel


​1.  What is a more Compassionate World?
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​Jane Goodall's Prayer

​We pray to the great Spiritual Power in which we live and move and have our being. We pray that we may at all times keep our minds open to new ideas and shun dogma; that we may grow in our understanding of the nature of all living beings and our connectedness with the natural world; that we may become ever more filled with generosity of spirit and true compassion and love for all life; that we may strive to heal the hurts that we have inflicted on nature and control our greed for material things, knowing that our actions are harming our natural world and the future of our children; that we may value each and every human being for who he is, for who she is, reaching to the spirit that is within, knowing the power of each individual to change the world. 

We pray for social justice, for the alleviation of the crippling poverty that condemns millions of people around the world to lives of misery - hungry, sick, and utterly without hope. We pray for the children who are starving, who are condemned to homelessness, slave labor, and prostitution,and especially for those forced to fight, to kill and torture even members of their own family. 

We pray for the victims of violence and war, for those wounded in body and for those wounded in mind. We pray for the multitudes of refugees, forced from their homes to alien places through war or through the utter destruction of their environment.

We pray for suffering animals everywhere, for an end to the pain caused by scientific experimentation, intensive farming, fur farming, shooting, trapping,training for entertainment, abusive pet owners, and all other forms of exploitation such as overloading and overworking pack animals, bull fighting, badger baiting, dog and cock fighting and so many more.

We pray for an end to cruelty, whether to humans or other animals,for an end to bullying, and torture in all its forms. We pray that we may learn the peace that comes with forgiving and the strength we gain in loving; that we may learn to take nothing for granted in this life; that we may learn to see and understand with our hearts;that we may learn to rejoice in our being.

We pray for these things with humility; We pray because of the hope that is within us, and because of a faith in the ultimate triumph of the human spirit; We pray because of our love for Creation, and because of our trust in God. We pray, above all, for peace throughout the world.

Jane Goodall

What Kind of Person Can Help Build a Better World?
Process Theology and the Idea of a Wide Soul
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A Wide Soul

"By S-I-Z-E I mean the stature of [your] soul, the range and depth of [your] love, [your] capacity for relationships.  I  mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure.  I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness.  I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions.  I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature."

- Bernard Loomer

What is a soul, Anyway?

"I am a philosopher, let me tell you a great secret of life—a soul is not a thing, it is not something which stands untouched by the events of your life.  Your soul is the river of your life; it is the cumulative flow of your experience.  But what do we experience?  The world. Each other.  So your soul is the cumulative flow of all of your relationships with everything and everyone around you.  In a different image, we weave ourselves out of the threads of our relationships with everyone around us." 

- Robert Mesle, A Soul is Not a Thing: A Process Relational Wedding ​


3.  ​What Role Might Spiritual Literacy
have in helping People Become Wide Souls?

4.  What Role might Music and Musicking
Play in Helping Build a More Compassionate World?

A Role for Joy 

The role of music is clear enough.  Music is what feelings sound like, and music in its many varieties introduces people to the world of feelings, including the positive feelings identified in the spiritual alphabet.  However, this point leaves out the social dimension.  How might music -- or, more specifically, participatory music-making -- contribute to the emergence of a more compassionate world?

Take Jane Goodall as an example of the engaged citizen.  She lives by a dream.  She wants to be respected, to have a family, to enjoy friendships.  But she also seeks to help build communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, equitable, multicultural, humane to animals, friendly to the earth, and spiritually satisfying with no one left behind.  For her such communities are the building blocks of "ecological civilizations." 

She knows that these kinds of communities cannot emerge all-at-once or once-and-for-all.  She knows that they are ideals to be approximated, not utopias to be fully realized with the waving of a wand.  Still, she lives by this hope that marshals her energy to help it become a reality.

The emergence of  these kinds of communities requires many practices: wise public policies, simple lifestyles, socially responsible business practices, and economics for the common good, for example.  These practices are hard work.   But the emergence also requires an element of fun, of joy.  If people do not have fun in building these communities, the communities will not emerge.  And if the communities are themselves joyless, they have no chance of being sustained.  Rabbi Bradley Artson makes this point in his celebration of the secular new year: "Joy for its own sake, laughter and conviviality without pretext, meeting time's advance with unapologetic delight, raucous noise, good friends — these are nothing less than the eruption of the hidden light cracking the conventional crust of our mature good sense, our dehumanizing obsession with control, our idolatrous reliance on possession as salvation." One of the primary practices for such fun and joy is participatory music making, or musicking.  

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Examples of Musicking
Musicking Defined

Christopher Small coined the phrase musicking and defines it as participating in a musical performance in any way.  As understood in process philosophy, musicking include the following eight characteristics.
​
1. Creating the “meaning” of music in the act of participating in its performance.
2. Building relationships with others who are also participating.
3. Uncovering possibilities for how to live in the world, imaginatively if not also in actuality.
4. Uncovering worldviews: that is, ways of imagining the world as it has been, is, and can be.  
5. Improvising with others amid the participation, making things up as you go.
6. Co-creating with others amid the participation, exercising cooperative agency.
7. Claiming your own capacities for subjective agency.
8. Experiencing touches of transcendence -- moments of feeling fully awake, aware, and alive - in the act of listening to and performing the music.

In short, musicking is an activity, a verb, a process, and it has at least  eight dimensions in the moment that it occurs.  It creates the meaning of the music; it builds relationships; it inspires the imagination; it uncovers worldviews; it requires improvisation, it experiments in co-creativity;it helps a person compose his or her life; and, amid it all, people experience touches of something more, a beauty that is more than them.

Karaoke and Musicking

Dancing as a Form of Musicking
Matt Harding and Melissa Nixon

NPR: What do you hope people come away with after watching your video?
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Matt Harding: "A wildly exaggerated view of the natural joyfulness and goodwill of our species. I make humanist propaganda. I try to trick people into thinking the world is wonderful so they will act accordingly."

Process Theology and Musicking

Empathy: One of the most important ideas in process theology is empathy.  At every moment of our lives we are feeling the feelings of our own past experiences, both consciously and unconsciously, and those feelings partly shape our experience in the present.  Those past feelings are inside us.

In addition, says Whitehead, it is possible for us to feel the feelings of others, and so that their feelings become part of us, too.  The many feelings of the past actual world, some belonging to us and some to others, become part of us in the present moment. The many become one and are increased by one.

We all know that this is like.  Someone walks into the room and we can feel their anger, or their sadness, or their joy.  There is a sharing of emotions.  Philosophers call this kind of sharing inter-subjectivity.  Usually it is localized.  We feel the feelings of other people in the room but not in the next room.  And we are not so sure of strangers.  Walls get in the way. 

But videos can make it possible to feel the feelings of others, too.  Especially if there is dancing and music.  Other people appear on the screen and somehow there is a sharing.  We sense that the world is, or could be, what process theologians call a community of communities.   

Religion: We see this hope in the video above, created by Matt Harding and Melissa Nixon.  In watching him dance badly (so he describes it) we catch a small glimpse of the basilea theou of which Jesus spoke: that state of affairs in which the will of the Spirit is one on earth as it is in heaven. 

We see what motivates the Buddhist when she prays that all beings be happy, the short ones and tall ones, the wide ones and thin ones, the two-legged ones and four-legged ones, the crawling ones and the flying ones. 

The hope for a community of communities runs very deep within the human heart.   The community we seek need not be perfectly syncopated.  Polyrhythms are fine.  And it's fine to dance badly.  Some bad dancing can make the community all the more beautiful.  All that's needed is dancing and singing, and some craziness, too.

The hope is contageous.  Whitehead believes that God catches the feelings of others, too.  Every feeling anyone has becomes part of God's ongoing life, remembered forever even as the person may pass away.  And in that memory there's a kind of deep dance that's occurring all the time, more than we can ever imagine.  When we dance -- perhaps especially when we dance badly in a spirit of love --something beautiful and funny is added to the divine dance.  Wholly funny.  Holy funny. 
Open Horizons