The below text was part of a speech offered at the National Church of the Brethren Conference in 2024.
I am so glad to be with you today. I am Kevin Shorner-Johnson, a dean of the school of arts and humanities at Elizabethtown College and the director of the Master of Music education in Peacebuilding. As someone who does not identify as Brethren, I want to speak from the position of an outsider, to reflect upon what I love and have embraced about the Brethren heritage and tradition. And how I have imagined that heritage walking the halls of Elizabethtown College and our schools in 2024.
As an outsider, I am a blending of Quaker and Episcopalian heritage, someone who married a Cooperative Baptist Pastor, and who currently attends a United Church of Christ Church.
My talk is about the development of the Master of Music Education in Peacebuilding program, the first of its kind of draw upon an Anabaptist heritage to explore what might lay at rich intersections of this heritage with studies in peacebuilding and professional studies. I have decided to extend this also toward a meditation on artistic peacebuilding as intimacy.
Our Master of Music Education program empowers music teachers to “reclaim space for connection and care” within classrooms. We include modules and courses in Brethren heritage, peacebuilding, ethnomusicology, social emotional learning, trauma-informed practice, and World Music Drumming. With Ethnomusicology, our students open themselves to more diverse ways of doing music and being musical, with a particular focus on African diasporas of music making and culturally-rooted peacebuilding.
With social emotional learning and trauma-informed practice, our students study psychological research, neuroscience, and pedagogy to ask how we might build capacities and conditions for love and repair in our world.
And with World Music Drumming, we weave circles of Afro-centric music making to explore and express the magic of circle process.
Mutuality-Agency-Imagination
Our philosophy of peacebuilding is a framework of mutuality, agency, and imagination. Mutuality –we can musick toward deeper forms of interdependence, listening and responding. Agency – that peace is built when we open space for mattering. And finally, Imagination – peacemakers observe what is and imagine what could be. We center the role of the artist in offering alternate possibilities.
Using these pillars, our teachers walk the day-to-day vocation of teaching as peace work. In our six years of existence, we graduated eight teachers and have an enrollment of 22 students. Our students come from 12 different states or territories: Pennsylvania, DC, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, New Jersey, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and British Columbia. Graduating students have completed capstone research projects in the music of Mister Rogers, Appalachian Bluegrass as peace process, trauma-informed education, and the role of ritual within classrooms.
Our students publicly express that the Master's program has offered a way of living into what it means to care, to live generously, and to teach from a heart of meaning.
Alongside this program, I built a "Music & Peacebuilding Podcast." This podcast opens rich, scholarly conversations about research, meaning, and linkages to peace work. I intersperse and close episodes with a language of blessings and questions that ask us to examine the self. I believe the sacred is always intertwined within questions of meaning, belonging, conflict, cohesion, and love.
Reflections on Intimacy
If you will indulge me, I would like to offer a mediation on a theology of intimacy, pondering on reflections about what I love within Anabaptist heritage, and how this admiration is infused with our program.
In a lovely chapter by Miller on a history of Mennonite peacebuilding, Miller suggests that a core question among Anabaptists in the 20th century was a question of how separate should the faithful be from the world. Should a pacifist choose a path of nonresistance or nonviolent resistance? How do we walk the call of peace? How close do we get to the forces of domination in seeking to model a different way?
In the opening of his book on Biblical Pacifism, Dale Brown engage similar questions in his story that crosses the lines of World War II. Brown described the 20th century as a pacifist pilgrimage of increasing voice against war and injustice, offering love and repair where it was needed.
In the framework of intimacy, I see stories of the past century and those of the early church as opening questions about how close should we get to the world. To get close challenges our convictions, asks for engagement, and carries the enlivening risk we might in turn become changed. To get close may obscure the security of certainty, may strengthen our convictions of love and presence, and may offer us the challenge of continuous discernment.
Within Anabaptist and Pietist traditions I see a rich heritage of humility and presence that asks us to move closer. My first introduction to the Brethren tradition was in learning about the meaningfulness of foot washing and the love feast. Here was an active sense of being with another that was as close and intimate as a faith tradition could carry a person, maybe awkwardly close for an Episcopalian like me.
And as I spent time in research projects with the Harrisburg Church of the Brethren and then later with Habecker Mennonite Church, I learned about a God who was close. So close, that Harrisburg members taught me that you literally 'walked with God.' This idea of "walking" was the metaphor through which members explained their experiences with God. God woke up with us and lived alongside us in the walks of our daily lives. God was intimate.
And I sensed intimacy at our worship last night, in the symbolic intimacy of the table, and the transforming power of hymn and song to bind us as one.
I also sensed closeness in the Anabaptist ethos of presence, patience, intentional community, and humility in peace work. Presence is a kind of holy intimacy, a breath of spirit in the betweenness of me being with you. Love unfolds gently under the gaze of presence.
Singing a Path Back to Belonging
I love how this heritage illuminates a slow, sustaining, and intimate kind of peace work. Our sense of Presence is one that remains with hurt, seeking sustaining relationships over the quick, performative fix. Staying with what hurts is radically countercultural. And in staying with what hurts, we may be just intimate enough to listen to stories that change us. We may illuminate a small light forward when all the rest averts their eyes from a fear of darkness.
Returning to the lived work of music teaching, I sense that music brings bodies near each other, offers moments of listening, responding and eye contact, and sings a path to back to belonging. When I see our modern distractions of cell phones and asynchronous anger, I know there is something radical and countercultural in choosing to be in synchronous song.
Modern scholarship has increasingly critiqued distanced approaches to peacebuilding that are often found within large-scale geo-political organizations. Distance does little to listen to local voices and often replicates the kinds of harm that it seeks to repair.
I believe we need closeness in our peace work. A closeness that is rooted in relationship. We need the humility, discernment, and intentional community, where our practice of presence builds the peace of right here.
My many Brethren interviewees have told me repeatedly that the heart of Brethren life is in "taking Jesus seriously." What if I read Jesus as a story of intimacy. In moving closer, Jesus entered stigmatized social spaces of tax collectors and a woman at the well. And in each place, he centered love to encounter pain, and used storytelling in an unhurried sense of being with the people right here. Stories draw us near and ask teller and listener to unravel meaning.
What if the story of Jesus as peacemaker is a story of intimacy?
In some of my foundational work on peacebuilding, I preached on the story of Ruth, naming that Ruth begins the story as an object of despair, a migrant, and a deplorable Moabite woman. Yet, with each step closer to Boaz, Boaz is convicted of his need to offer just a little bit more. With increasing intimacy, Boaz humanizes and relates to Ruth in a way that changes his moral equations. In that sermon, I wrote:
" And just like Ruth and Boaz, each move closer demands even more of us. Leaving out leftover grain becomes not enough, until we can do nothing less than give our whole selves."
Padraig O Tuama and Glenn Jordan reflected on this ongoing dialogue between law and intimate lovingkindness in Ruth. They reflect on a kind of dialogue between distanced, objective laws and the much more seemingly risky, more intimate space of closeness. They write, " The book of Ruth is also a radical theological act. It recognizes that the national stereotype of Moabites is overcome by a new story; indeed, it is an acknowledgement that new stories are always possible. And these new stories are not told on the level of nation states or whole people groups but through personal and human encounter. In this way the book demonstrates the enduring and transforming power of incarnation." (Tuama & Jordan, 2021 p. 34)
What is the peacework of encounter? And how might a Brethren heritage approach to peacebuilding and presence be profound and relevant today?
Reflections on Encounter
Now that I have recorded over 50 podcasts, I have the luxury of looking back a bit on what I have learned.
My very first podcast started with an examination of the life of Fred Rogers because to me, Mister Rogers was the embodiment of peace work in the day-to-day. In one of my favorite clips, Fred Rogers spent time with Jeff Erlanger, a boy in wheelchair who was to undergo spinal fusion surgery. In that clip, Mister Rogers gets on the ground, looks directly into Jeff’s eyes and asks him about his lived experience. When nothing but song was possible, Rogers broke into “its you I like,” a moment that is forever etched in my visions of music and relationship as peace work.
This is holy intimacy. Rogers moved closer, supported by a Presbyterian theological grounding that demonstrated that the walk of peace could happen on the front porch of a television set. This is not a grand peace of treaties and speeches, but the singular hold of a gaze that has a glimpsed dignity and inner light. I believe this models a theological grounding for the walk of teaching as peace work.
I see the intersections of dignity, humility, awe, and wonder with the pacifist work of intimacy. Brethren humility, so beautifully embodied in the practice of foot washing, is a resizing of the self such that we might open cracks that glimpse the spirit in moments becoming holy. If we are to move closer, our selves must be sized in ways that startle us with awe. I believe Rogers did just that, living his beliefs about dignity and mattering as an expression of his peace-rooted convictions.
Here is a blessing of dignity taken from the language of one of my interviewees.
may dignity be our garden,
to the unfolding of close rows of possibility,
of capacity for the seeds of the next generation of kindness.
May belonging be our guide of below to entangled roots and nurturance of shared abundance.
And when the vulnerability of separation becomes too much a reality,
may we be reminded,
we are all soil,
partnering nutrients of marvelous diversity,
interconnection, a rooted embrace,
belonging, and dignity.
We Are All Soil
We are all soil. I think that one of the greatest questions facing peace church traditions is a question of ecological relationship. With microplastics mingling within our blood streams, raging wildfires, and conflicts fueled by access to water, our humble walks of peace must include a pause, becoming more intimate with ecological relations.
One study of dictionaries, noted that in the 20th century the English language radically decreased its vocabulary about the natural world and replaced this vocabulary with language about built and virtual environments. I think of my granddad who lived on our family dairy farm. My dad told me he had an expansive vocabulary, naming trees, flowers, and insects that intertwined the forest of our farm. To name something with precision is to be intimate. And I believe that when we become more intimate, our demand to care and repair becomes all the more insistent. Returning to Ruth, "Leaving out leftover grain becomes not enough, until we can do nothing less than give our whole selves."
In one of my podcasts, I explored indigenous music making in the Tuvan region with Theodore Levin. Tuvan people listen to a place, like a creek, and then imitate those soundscapes as they sing back to it. Our studies of human attachments tell us that the first intimate bonds between mother and child are formed through imitation. The return of a smile or a laugh or the play with vowel sounds and gestures are pathways to attachment.
For Tuvans, imitation is a pathway to presence and attachment, where Tuvans see sacred spirits inhabiting the rocks, trees, creeks, and caves of right here. What would happen if we became more intimate with the soundscape of a babbling brook? How might that change the hubris of our domination of creation?
In his book on Intraconnection, Dan Siegel writes that today’s sense of violent individualism might be best understood through the metaphor of cancer. He writes that if we act and believe that we are separate from the rest of the world and our ecological systems, we have a tendency to commit violence in the name of our own self-interest.
He writes, “In medicine, when this happens to renegade cells in the body that grow without regard to the complex living somatic system, we call it cancer.” (Siegel, 2022 p. 5)
How does pacifism call us to repair our interdependent sense of care?
In our program, we look at how ecological soundscapes might be a part of every child’s music education, learning to listen to the call of a chickadee or the song of a whale. Channeling this research and Brethren humility, and a history of agrarian care, I wonder how we might support teachers in responding to the quiet call for peace that is in the bird song of right here?
Interconnectedness
And finally, this meditation leaves us with the continual reminder again, again, and again of radical interconnectedness. We act from a space of care when we feel and imagine how we exist within a web of life and spirit.
If we knew of the trueness of this web of life, I believe swords would become plowshares. To drop bombs and raise guns on a tiny celestial island we call Earth only damages the web-like strands tether us to wholeness.
It may be the role of the prophetic imagination to draw us to divine interdependence when voices of empire and domination call us to something less than a collective thriving. And it is the struggling work of forgiveness and reconciliation that mends the broken strands of fractured webs, forever mending and imagining that which God has called to be.
Brueggeman wrote, "The imagination must come before the implementation . . . Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.” (Brueggemann, 1978 p. 45)
What if our imaginations of interconnection are a pathway to intimacy?
In my work with the Ikeda Center, I have worked with Olivier Urbain and countless others to imagine how music might become more intertwined with peacebuilding. This coming October, I will travel to Tokyo along with scholars from the US, Columbia, Northern Ireland, the UK, Ghana, and Japan to build imaginations and implementations of music and peacebuilding. I approach this shared table, bringing with me the history, the heritage, and the resonance that the Brethren tradition offers.
Breathing an Anabaptist Heritage into New Places
How then does this theology of closeness, inspired by Anabaptist cultures, translate to the secular work of teaching in 2024. The work of teachers, is embodied in the day-to-day, the presence of here, this classroom, this hallway, and this relationship. When students struggle, teachers intuitively know that they need to move closer.
And music teachers know of the power of aligning our breath, our eye contact, and our presence with the rhythms and harmonies of the synchronous, expressive now. I believe teaching is peace work. I am inspired to breathe this heritage into new places, understanding that rich stories of pacifism inspire new ways of doing simple, yet profound acts in day-to-day walks.
Closure
I hope I leave you with a sense by which I feel the aliveness of Brethren traditions of peace, justice, witness, humility, servanthood, separatism, faithfulness, imagination, community, and nonviolence. The dedicated work of our 22 Masters students and eight alums tells me that this heritage and the move of the spirit is not done.
May we continue to move just a little closer, risk the potential for change, and open questions of meaning, peace, and nonviolence in response to what is right here.
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