Our Sound is Our Wound: Contemplative Listening to a Noisy World

Reviewer: Carol O'Connor

In a world so insistently visual in its means of communication, it is good to have our attention brought to the soundscape around and within us. Lucy Winkett encourages us to apprehend the world in a new way. She divides her book into chapters, each concentrating on 'sound' in a different context. These are the sounds of Scripture, Lament, Freedom, Resurrection and Angels. When a person becomes truly attuned to sound, both hearing sound and making it, it can take her or him to a place of vulnerability. Sound can have "...substance in itself, in that part of its nature is that of a wound which reveals depth and trauma under the surface." This is a place where one is sensitive both to receiving and making sound. Winkett assumes that "taking our own contemporary experience seriously is part of the Christian vocation."

This profoundly rich book skilfully weaves interpretations of scripture into Winkett's reflections on the theme of sound and listening, and her own personal stories. Her stories not only reveal her breadth of experience but also fuel the work with an engaging immediacy and energy. Each story has the simplicity and depth of a parable. Children sing Dona Nobis Pacem, on the anniversary of the September 11 tragedy, on the floor of a London trading firm that lost many colleagues. Before they sing, a suited business man introduces the singers, then exclaims: Let business continue — let's keep making the money. Their singing "brought a timeless message of peace which jarred against the fast-paced aggression of the business of increasing profit." Movingly, Winkett recounts the story of accompanying a male friend to do an intensive course with a speech therapist. As an adult his voice never broke but remained prepubescent. He was self-conscious to the point of not answering the phone or wanting to meet new friends. Eventually, with the help of the therapist, he developed a resonant voice. However, his singing voice is still a high pitched counter-tenor, which has become a great gift that he has to offer and enjoy in the world. Each story shows Winkett's own breadth of experience, her depths of reflection, and prompts us to recognise that our world is full of these narratives. Meaning is found in the chanced unexpected moment, in day-to-day encounters, and in human relationships. Most importantly, an underlying message in this book is the need to be sensitive and aware to that which is happening around us, particularly in what we hear and in what we make heard.

After reading this book I had the same experience I have sometimes after listening to the shakuhachi or zen flute music. I felt much more alert to the sounds being made around me and the sounds I make. There are aspects to, and contradictions in the making of sound, that I also had not thought about before. Winkett emphasises that sound "is not morally neutral." It can liberate as well as oppress. Enforced silence can do the same. On a superficial level and in certain contexts this is obvious. However, there are many subtler instances of this in our world every day. "In a house where no one is working, constant advertising on the television or radio is a relentless reminder of exclusion. Sound has political meaning, and, in an unequal society, reinforces that inequality."

We know that sound can be used for political coercion or as an instrument of torture. However, that pop music, classical music or even the music on Sesame Street can be used as a tool for torture, is a shocking matter to contemplate. It is not so much the music itself which is torture, but how it is played, it "becomes torturous in its repetition, volume and relentlessness." During the sixtieth anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, musicians who knew that their music was being sabotaged in this way deliberately held a one minute time of silence during their concert. This was in dedication to the victims of this perversion of sound. Another example of sound being used coercively is the high-pitched sound emitted from a device called the Mosquito. This sound has been used as a method of maintaining public order. It is only heard by young people's ears, so most effectively it has been used in the UK in public spaces in order to dissuade youth from congregating outside shops.

Through these accounts, Winkett adroitly interlaces scenarios from scripture. In citing the story of Exodus, she focuses on Miriam, a figure whose voice is strong "in defence of a defenceless child, in leadership and celebration of freedom, and in challenge to human authority. She is silenced by disease, dishonour and death, and for a woman whose story irrigates the prophecy of her brother Moses by her interventions at the River Nile and the Red Sea, it is an irony that she dies in a dry land where there was no water." And it is ultimately to Jesus that Winkett directs the compass of her contemplations. It is in Jesus and "his expression of human need, of forgiveness of his torturers, of abandonment by God in the hours before his death" that "teaches us courage to claim the freedom that is ours. We learn that, when we find our own true voice and use it, we set ourselves and others free."

Throughout the book Winkett resists the temptation to make judgements herself, rather she is much more interested in opening the discussion. A recurring theme is the use of music in worship. She encourages us to listen to the soundscape heard in Churches. "The Church is bound to proclaim two truths revealed in Scripture: that God is both transcendent and immanent; beyond us and beside us. The sounds of this Scriptural revelation resonate nowhere better than in music."

Winkett's own appreciation of music is wide and eclectic. She affiliates herself with no particular taste in music in church worship. Her fine knowledge and love of religious music has enabled her to appreciate that dissonance and harmony, Pop and Blues, Jazz, Chant, Classical, Gospel all have their place. Liturgy, Winkett reminds us, means "the work of the people." Subsequently, music is at its fullest when together people make music. However, she also does not shy away from the complexity of the issue concerning types of music used in worship and various debates about this. Though acknowledging danger can lie when music in worship becomes too self-referential, her overall intention is to stimulate the reader's own responses.

The chapter I found most moving is The Sound of Resurrection. We meet a writer who has clearly experienced and remains close to the experience of grief and resurrection. It opens with an hilarious account of two workmen attempting to move a very large cross across St Paul's Cathedral, in London, after a Good Friday service. Instead of carrying the cross, they decided to push it with their backs. The large cross suddenly "simply flew the whole length of the long aisle, fleeing, it seemed, from the fixed, stuck, exposed place where Jesus died, and looking as if at any moment it would crash through the vast locked doors and escape into the city....This moment of release, this sudden movement and freedom, made sense for me of the ancient words of John of Damascus, Christ 'burst his tomb', and that resurrection is the 'spring of souls.'" Her reflections on the depiction of sounds of resurrection and how this aspect of resurrection can be experienced today is deeply insightful, as it is thought-provoking. When Jesus calls Lazarus back to life, John's Gospel uses a rare old Greek word (know-gad-zo). It is a sound used to describe the "tumultuous sound of a crowd, not the call of one person."

This is no firm but polite call: it is no gentle invitation that coaxes Lazarus back to life, this is a tumultuous shout to drag Lazarus back from the dead. Jesus screams. We have heard him weep for his friend, we have seen him shudder and snort with fury. Now we hear him scream. These are the sounds made by one who has the power to bring a person back from the dead.

We know that pain and anguish have sound. To learn here that coming to life, back to life, involves such a primal sound reminds me of the cries of childbirth. And these ideas are not far apart. Winkett finishes this chapter with a perceptive discussion on the stages of a person's grief. Her prose becomes almost lyrical and is subtly nuanced. She speaks of resurrection as a song that comes from "seismic rhythms of grief."

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