Music, music, music...

Sunday afternoon we were at a piano concert in our local theatre. The performers were 6 members of one family with the youngest being about 10 years of age. As I listened to the music I was amazed at the skill and dexterity that even that youngest member displayed. However, that wasn’t all.

I was taken back almost 70 years to when my burning desire was to learn to play a piano, to be able to make the instrument sing. I took every chance that came my way to experience having that instrument played for me. Then for my eighth birthday, I was allowed to pick out piano, a Heintzman piano, second-hand, but I didn’t care! My dreams of sitting down at that instrument and playing anything I wanted were about to be realized!

While I became a player who was capable of getting excellent scores on the Royal Conservatory of Music exams and one who my teacher wanted to go on to further study, I didn’t feel the magic of the keyboard. I was too focused on getting the notes ‘right' without ever taking the time to see how they related one to another, to experience the emotion that was in the music. It took another teacher, one 20 years later to do that. At least in part!

We had just acquired an organ with a full pedal board for the house. I was recovering from an operation and decided to fill my time by taking Organ Lessons (focusing primarily on using the pedal board] from a nearby shop. Two breakthroughs happened. For the first time I realized that both the chords in a piece of music and the arpeggios, were simply different ways of playing the same notes! This was quite a surprise to me.

But when my teacher said to me, ‘Just listen to how the music sounds in your own head, and then play it that way.’ I knew exactly why I hadn’t found playing the instrument fulfilling to this point, and more importantly why I never would. I couldn’t hear the music, and so I was destined to always being a rote player.

As I listened to the concert that Sunday all this went through my head. But it made a connection for me. I could see my years and years in the church, that never led where I hoped they would go, were much like my piano experience as a child. It was only when I was exposed to the writings and thoughts of such people as Dominic Crossan, Marcus J Borg, Walter Wink, Phyllis Tickle and Walter Brueggermann [to name just a few] that I was awakened to what lay beyond the dogmatic teaching I had previously been exposed to. But there was a difference here. This time the thought and ideas expressed in those books and others resonated with the similar thoughts that already inhabited my mind.

And so a Sunday afternoon concert led me to this place in my spiritual journey, and gave me an appreciation for the lessons learned along the way. You can’t force yourself, or simply wish [no matter how hard] to achieve something. But when the time is right, when the ground has been prepared, then, and only then, will things fall into place.

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