Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

Jay McDaniel and Han Sun (孙晗)

We want to tell you about Anthony Snape.  We know you probably haven't heard his name before, but now you have!  He is from Australia and has travelled all around the world sharing his music, and now lives in the United States.   At JJB we like his music because he combines melody, rhythm, and a remarkable voice with the joy of questioning and a trust in love.  Questioning and love are among our favorite virtues.

Shortly we will turn to questioning, but we'll begin below with love.  You'll see it and hear it in the video art he's done and also with a song called Little Piece of Love.  When we watched the video we realized that he is interested in the same things we are in the worldwide JJB network: the possibility of an informal, transnational community of people, living in different parts of the world, who know each other through music, images, and who sense that love, not power, is what makes life worth living.   We know people who feel like this in the United States and in China, where we live.  We think Anthony can help.

By the way, that's Anthony on the left in the photo.  He has opened for one of the most gifted guitarists in the world, Tommy Emmanuel, who is on the right.  Anthony is a featured artist on Emmanuel's recent PBS concert series reaching millions of new music fans.  We saw the two of them in concert recently, along with a gifted songwriter from the US, Pam Rose.  Anthony has a special kind of charisma on stage, and if you ever get to see him live, you will understand what we mean.  You can get his tour dates on his website, http://anthonysnape.com.  You can also arrange some dates for your college or club -- whether you are in America or China, Canada or Korea -- by information provided on the site.  Now for the video.

And now for the song, including its translation into Chinese.  We encourage Chinese readers will sing along.  We know that Anthony would love to hear from you.

We interviewed Anthony after the show.  We were curious about what motivates Anthony to write songs in the first place, why he decided to give his life to music, and where he gets his inspiration.  We wondered if, by chance, there might be links with some of the things that are important to us, too, as college teachers.  When we asked him about motivations, he answered with a phrase that rung true to our minds and hearts: "To question the world!"If you are a college teacher, you know that, just before class, many of your students will have been listening to their Ipods.  As they walk into the class, they may be talking with one another about the music they've been listening to, sometimes quoting lyrics.  Typically they don't quote all the lyrics, just snatches: short phrases.  And they may say to each other: "That's how I feel.  I really love this song." 

Let's say, like Jay McDaniel, you teach philosophy or world religions.  As you hear the students quote the lyrics, it occurs to you that the songs offer a kind of "philosophy of life" for the them.  The lyrics are springboards for thought, catalysts for reflection, invitations to question.  Indeed you think that, today, popular music -- not academic theology or philosophy -- is a primary context for personal reflection for many people.

As invitations to questioning, the lyrics of popular music cannot and do not do not replace sustained reflection, all on their own.  We cannot expect the lyrics of Anthony Snape to provide exact equivalents to a dialogue from Plato, or an analect from Confucius, or a saying from the New Testament, or an idea from the Dhammapada.  Still, the lyrics can be invitations to question, or, in the words of Whitehead, "lures for feeling."  For example, listen to Anthony sing the song below.  You'll hear a very Buddhist question: What's the purpose of life, anyway?

Like we said, to our mind the song has a Buddhist tone to it.  At least it is asking a very Buddhist question: What is the cause of so much suffering in the world?  Can people ever live lives free of such suffering?  Is there a path -- a way -- to life more freely, and with wisdom and compassion?  In the song Anthony senses, as do all of us in the JJB community, that the way to happiness requires freedom from inordinate attachments to finite things -- money, for example -- when the finite things keep us appreciating each moment of time.  There is a kind of mindless hurriedness to contemporary society, a continuous freneticism, against which Sunday is protesting.  It is ironic that Sunday is officially, for some, a day of sabbath: of entering into that quiet place where freneticism ceases.  And yet, as we hear the song, Sunday is something to endure until Monday comes along.  Perhaps the idea is that, in so much of the world in which Christianity is a religion, the real religion is consumerism -- whatever day of the week.

But of course by some measures Sunday is very Christian song, too.  Or at least it's a song Jesus would understand.  Like the Buddha, Jesus pointed to a way of living that is free from grasping after money and free for what the New Testament calls "abundant life."  Abundant life does not lie in a frenetic pursuit of wealth or status, but in sharing a smile others, and sharing in their suffering, too.  It lies in finding the kind of community Anthony points to in his video, where people from different walks of life feel and are connected in a common community of mutual respect, mutual delight, mutual appreciation....otherwise called "love."

We know from our conversation with Anthony that he would be the first to admit that he does not always succeed in finding this freedom: the freedom to love.  Who among us does?  But like so many others in the world, he senses that the culture of consumerism, of surrending your life to the "weekly crusade" of money-making and acquisition, doesn't leave us happy.  When we fall into this weekly crusade, we find ourselves thinking that happiness is just around the corner, in some kind of tomorrow that never arrives, forgetting that if happiness is to be found at all, it's in the "todays" of our lives, when lived in service to others and openness to the miracle of the everyday.

Another questioning tradition is found in the philosopher Socrates, and we hear some of this in Anthony's music, too.  Socrates wandered the streets of Athens raising questions with people who believed that they had adequate understanding of ideas like "truth" and "goodness" and "beauty."  Socrates did not think that he had the answers to these questions, but he didn't believe they did, either.  He would ask them to define the terms and then, through a process of questioning, show that their own understandings were full of contradictions.  He was known as a very wise man, but his wisdom did not lie in having all the answers.  Instead it lay in knowing that he did not have all the answers.  He debunked -- and sometimes made fools of -- people who thought they did.

Anthony's music is devoted to this Socratic kind of questioning.  One obstacle to Socratic questioning, though, is meaningless chatter.  In our media age it is easy for many of us to become absorbed in a kind of chatter that avoids questioning for the sake of not thinking at all.   And for some strange reason, we do not question our lack of questioning.  In SAY SO, Anthony questions this whole atmosphere of mindless chatter.  The song was inspired by a moment in the twittersphere, and, as the blog on it puts it, "it has that pop rock sound that reverberates through the body before your ears gets a chance to digest."  It occured to Anthony, as it occurs to us, that so much "talk" on twittersphere is meaningless chatter, designed to anaesthetize us from wrestling with bigger questions.  Here Anthony is trying to de-anaesthetize us, not only through his lyrics, but also through the sheer beat and the sound of his voice.

Another tradition of questioning  is found in the Jewish prophets: Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Jesus.  A biblical scholar named Walter Bruegemann has written a book called The Prophetic Imagination in which he explains that these prophets questioned the world around them.  They were not questioning beliefs; they were questioning society itself.  On the one hand they questioned the injustices of the world around them.  They questioned whether the authorities of their time were legitimate, insofar as they (the authorities) received so many privileges while allowing so many people to remain poor, powerless, and marginalized.  They said "no" to the social worlds in which they found themselves and "yes" to a hoped-for world where there is more justice, more love, more equality, more equality.  Thus we have the prophetic no and the prophetic yes. To our mind, Anthony's video art and his song A Little Piece of Love points toward the prophetic yes.  And it raises the fascinating question of how, and whether, communications technologies -- Instagram and the sharing of photos -- might be a means toward approaching this yes.  The song contains a question: Can you feel the light shine on you? 

We close with a question ourselves.  What is this light?  Where does it come from?  Is it inside us?  Is is outside us?  Is it what the New Testament calls the light that enlightens all people: a light that was revealed, but not exhausted, in Jesus?  Is it the light that shines through a person who extends a helping hand to strangers?  Is it the light that enabled Socrates to be such an irritant in his society, always asking questions, never stopping?  Is it the light that enabled the Buddha to find a way beyond suffering?  Is is the light that sometimes shines through suffering itself, in the very angst that we do often hear in the blues, in songs like Sunday?  Can the light shine through music, too?  Through melody, through rhythm, through the movement of the fingers on a guitar?  Anthony told us that he finds inspiration in the ordinary and extraordinary circumstances of life: as occur, for example, when you hear two notes on a guitar, played in sequence.  He finds inspiration -- we might call it a kind of enlightenment -- in sound, in faces, in beauty, in life.  Does this light need a name?  Or does it remain nameless, but everpresent in so many different unique contexts, one of which is enjoying, the music and art of Anthony Snape.  Even on Sundays.