Gathering

From Gathering, Summer/Autumn Issue, 2008

In the Our Lady of Grace Benedictine monastery, we were invited to introduce ourselves. One of the participants worked her way to the front, weaving through all of our chairs and desks when her name was called. As she did so, she began to play the 18" tar she held in her hands.

From the first strong Doum that she played, I was enthralled. Somewhere within me I was moved in a way that I had never been moved before. The story that tumbled out of her drum entranced me: I had to learn to drum like that!

Six years later, 13 of us gather in the Chapel in the General Council Offices; 13 people drawn from the neighbouring churches and from different Units. And we are beginning to meet one or two other frame drummers in Ontario. The drummer I heard at Our Lady of Grace six years ago led a workshop on drumming last October here at Church House. We have begun a 14" and 16" tar group from that workshop. We thirst for yet more.

The drumming we do originates with Layne Redmond *, world renowned drummer and author of the book When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm (Three Rivers Press, 1997), now available through UCRD.

Layne’s style of drumming goes back to the times of King David, of Miriam and Moses, and before. Whenever an important religious event was to take place among the people of God, such as moving the Ark up to Jerusalem, women drummers went first. And so it was throughout ancient Greece and Rome, and in some Eastern traditions.

It is thought that the sieve women used to sort chaff from grain evolved into the first frame drum: as women fed the people’s bodies, so too could they feed the people’s souls. When the Christian church became institutionalized by the church fathers, this drumming by women, and thus their connection with the Holy, was sublimated into the hands of angels and cherubs where, in Western Christian art, it rests to this day.

Before playing the tar, we learn the four basic strokes on what looks like a tambourine, but is actually a 10" frame drum with jingles: Doum the sound of Sacred Water, Tak the sound of Celestial Fire, Kah the sound of Mother Earth, and Cha the sound of Life-giving Air. Learning to put these strokes in various patterns along with the rhythmic tic, tic of the jingles brings us into ancient holy rhythms of majesty, power, and awe.

The tar entrances and draws in. A single note well-sounded in the sanctuary becomes a prayer of confession. The Cha and jingles of the smaller drum can accompany many of the hymns in Voices United and More Voices.

These patterns played in your chapel or sanctuary will draw visitors into that space. And when troubled, every drummer finds solace, peace, and the return of inner strength through the cadence of his or her DDt DDKtt (Doum Doum tic Doum Doum Kah tic tic—the beginning of the rhythm known as “Happiness”).

So it is that today world music and worship resources have come to one woman, one congregation, one Church House, one editor’s column. As Layne inscribed in my copy of her book, “In the pulse of the drum, we are all One.” May it be so for you.

Betty Lynn Schwab, The Worship and Music Desk