March 3rd, 2018
WE OPEN WITH DAISY SINGING HILDEGARD’S “AVE MARIA” AS ANYA (MOTHER MARY) GIVES DRAMATIC BIRTH TO JESUS.
DAISY RECITES STANDARD VOICE CULT OPENING SERMON.
PASSES TO IDGY…
True story: my first experience with Daisy Press was witnessing her sing the birth of Jesus through Anya’s vagina. I asked them to kindly recreate this performance to help illustrate a concept of divine trinity which I hope to articulate today, on this unofficial holy numerical holiday of 3/3, which I’m calling the HOLY TRINITY TRIPLE THREAT THREESOME IN 3D.
33… A master number in Numerology, having to do with a calling to teach and show – by example – the power of love, forgiveness, and healing. It is the largest positive integer that cannot be expressed as a sum of different triangular numbers. 33 is, according to the Newton scale, the temperature at which water boils. There are 33 vertebrae in a normal human spine when counted individually. In reference to gramophone records, 33 refers to a type of record by its revolution speed of 33⅓ revolutions per minute. These are called 33s, long playing records, or LPs. The number of deities in the Vedic Religion is 33. The divine name Elohim appears 33 times in the story of creation in the opening chapters of Genesis. According to Al-Ghazali, a medieval Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic of Persian origin, the dwellers of Heaven will exist eternally in a state of being age 33. Islamic prayer beads are generally arranged in sets of 33. Such beads may number thirty-three in total, or three distinct sets of thirty-three for a total of ninety-nine, corresponding to the names of God. 33 is not only a numerical representation of “the Star of David,” but also the numerical equivalent of AMEN: 1+13+5+14=33. There are 33 degrees in Scottish Rite Freemasonry, and the House of the Temple in Washington D.C. has 33 outer columns which are each 33 feet high.
And then there’s the Lord. Perhaps a sermon on Jesus would be more appropriate around Christmas, or next month, when we celebrate resurrection. But I am very stubbornly and devotedly attached to this number 33, halfway through my own thirty third year, celebrating quite seriously what the kids cheekily call “Jesus Year,” as 33AD was the speculated year our culture’s most famous yoga teacher, King God’s holy Prince, got baptized, trekked through the desert for 40 days refusing temptation, began his ministry, was crucified, reborn, and who has since been regarded by billions of people as the world’s savior for over 2,000 years.
So who the fuck is Jesus? I feel like most liberal secular sound-minded folks in my community see Jesus as an unfortunate cartoon; at best, he’s a digestible symbolic metaphor; at worst, he’s the representation of horrible oppression, discrimination, doctrine and dogma.
For our purposes today, I see Jesus as the Voice, the conduit to our divine selves.
My parents were brought up in churches, but they never took us kids, and I often felt jealous and deprived as a child that I wasn’t included in all the Sunday fun my friends moaned about—CCD, Communion, Mass, Hebrew School, and the like (probably a big reason why I’m so into our Voice Cult services and fetishsizing Jesus right now). It’s not like my parents were Godless—they were just lazy or busy or both, I think, to teach us any real spiritual formalities. As a kid, I certainly felt a special kinship with an all-knowing entity of sorts, sensing my own infinity in mirrors, as young as age 3, and trusting that even if I didn’t practice being perfectly good or pray or even believe in anything, that a supposedly mind-reading creator lord would totally know my intentions (since duh, it created me!); so really, I had nothing to fear at all!
Not to mention, I had this uncanny ability to make music, on multiple instruments, without any formal knowledge or training of musical notes, theory, practice, technique, harmony, etc., even to this day. It just flowed through me, inexplicably, from some mysterious unknown source, and so I think deep in my child heart, I was always willing to believe in the invisible forces, and luckily found my own way to worship them by making my own noise. I don’t technically know how to sing, but certainly, something continues to sing me, to sing us, and that’s what I love so much about what we do here in Voice Cult.
When age 11 rolled in, and my dad abandoned the family, it was a perfect time to adopt a decade or so of typical adolescent atheism. Convicted belief in no belief seemed to be the general mood of the learned world. And if God is so often described as a father, it makes sense we’re made atheists when there is no father to be found. James Joyce touches upon this beautifully in Ulysses, describing the father as “a necessary evil… unknown to man… a mystical estate…”, and that our churches are in essence founded “…upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood.” It seems as though when we worship an invisible, perhaps even fictional God, we’re basically worshipping an absent dad. This reminds me of a favorite line from T Bone Burnett, that rock and roll is, often enough, a prolonged scream of “Daaaaddy!”—a son’s cry for notice.
But this is why the TRINITY is so clutch, why we need sensual, birthing, feminine Madonna bodies to give dramatic, screaming, ecstatic birth to the signing, dancing holy child Prince in all of us.
The story of Madonna’s Immaculate Conception belongs to all of us… we all get some spiritual nudge to go up on the roof and look up at the sky. Gazing towards the heavens, we’re suddenly pregnant with a vision of the best version of ourselves, and when we’re able to birth that, doves cry, we save ourselves, heal ourselves, and thus, heal the world.
From a chakra body perspective, we map our way to this higher consciousness from our guts through the heart and throat–and it is the voice, our great savior, that pulls us from the earth (1st chakra), through the emotions and digestive fires (2nd and 3rd chakras), using holy spirit unconditional love, forgiveness and compassion (seated in the 4th and 5th chakras) to connect us to that higher awareness of being, intuition, and holy communion (the topmost 6th and 7th chakras).
This 7-step scale we climb can be sung in 3-part harmony, together with the inconceivable consciousness (the father), the reborn best version of yourself (the son), and the inherent nature of your being (the holy spirit).
So let our singing be our salvation. Amen. Daisy Press…