Homage to John Repulski

JOHN REPULSKI has been a supportive colleague and an inspired contributor to the worship and ministry of Christ Church Cranbrook, and those with whom he will serve in his new position will be greatly blessed by his presence among them.

What I will miss the most about John is his capacity for musical surprise. This gift of his not just entertained me, it has also humbled me. It has taught me to worship (something I had thought I already knew how to do); reminded me why I am a Christian (which I didn’t think I had forgotten); and helped me prepare to die (which, paradoxically, causes me to feel intensely alive.)

How does he do this? Are there books he reads? Experts he consults? I rather think John is his own book, and his own expert, and that it is a gift from God.

Who else would think of using klezmer  music in the course of an Easter liturgy? This quintessentially Yiddish  music comes from the very exuberant, and utterly destroyed, Jewish culture of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust nightmare. When its exotic riffs burst out from among the rowdy lyrics I find myself leaping over the confines of conventional belief, dancing in a Sabbath chorus-line, dancing in defiance of demonic fascism and of death itself. And all that while sitting in my pew! When klezmer sounds forth at Christ Church Cranbrook, it is God who dances among the choir-pews.

Who else would think of having the male voices in a choir drone a solemn chord in the background while the women render psalm-verses in Gregorian chant? And then alternate the droning and the chant between the male and female voices, thus creating a Yin and Yang antiphony, an exquisite commentary on the harmony and agony of the world? John’s choral interpretations are part Benedictine monastery, part Lord of the Rings, calling us, Frodo-like, to suspend disbelief and see the world enchanted once again.

It could be that such things are done routinely elsewhere, but I think John has one ear tuned to ancient religious practices, and the other to the sound-track of tomorrow’s latest trend. For me, this results in a confluence of all that I most trust about the past, and all that I most enjoy about the present. Surrounded by John’s music, I become “open to the future”, a posture that the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann regarded as the closest our disenchanted age can come to what the apostolic church experienced on that first Easter.

Finally, who else would think to combine the sophisticated mechanics of a world-class pipe organ with the primal simplicity of bagpipes? There is no piece of religious music more familiar, or more often trivialized, than Amazing Grace. It has a special place in the mythology of my own family, and we sang it, plaintively, at both my parents’ burials at the Moravian Church cemetery in Canadensis, PA, while my mothers’ dogs lifted their grieving voices along with ours as we sang the hymn. Many years later, as John accompanied the bagpipes on the organ   the verses increased exponentially in volume, moving from a single bagpipe to a thunderous climax involving many pipers and every organ stop employed.

Was that John’s idea? I don’t know, but it was him playing the organ, and it brought me back to that Moravian cemetery  in the mountains, except that it was me who had died, and my children and dogs who sang.

I am sad about John’s leaving, and I am sad about the issues with his back that have kept him from playing the organ recently. I am sad about the deaths of my parents and my own inevitable end. But, as I contemplate these realities, I feel strangely and intensely alive. How strange is that?

It is strange in the way Easter is strange, the way the most familiar things can sometimes come as a surprise, the way silence merges with chant and becomes an unending hymn.