I Have Measured Out My Life in Coffee Spoons...

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to play a concert which featured Joshua Roman as soloist. It was a singular experience for me; I have never been closer to someone that good at my own instrument (after his first rehearsal with us he actually came back out and played in the section a little -- he was sitting right next to me!). I cannot say enough good things about his playing: fluid yet lush, effortless yet passionate.

After the first rehearsal, I came home a little discouraged. Let me explain. I am sure that Joshua spends many hours a day practicing; you cannot reach such heights without years of dedication. But even if I were to lock myself in a room and do nothing but practice, I would never ever be as good at the cello as him. Again that pesky word effortless; I could sweat and strain and maybe make some of the same shifts, but he slid through jumps with an ease which I could never match. That is one of the marks of greatness, that he makes difficult things look easy.

I think there are two basic responses to being confronted with greatness like this. They are separated only by a thin line, but they are miles apart. First, the sin driven response. I came home discouraged that night because I knew not only that I would never play the cello like that, but that I would never produce art on that level. My vanity in my cello playing has diminished over time, worn down by lack of practice and a realistic measurement of my abilities. But there are other storehouses for my fragile self-image. In particular my writing: I like to think of myself as a good writer, someone who loves language and ideas and can generally harness them and drive them in the direction I want them to go. But chances are good that I will never make my living as a writer (as I sometimes dream of doing). I suffer, I confess, from a need for self-justification. It isn't that I want to be rich and famous as an author, but I do crave the self-satisfaction of knowing that I have created something lasting and worthwhile. The music which Roman creates is intrinsically, instinctively wonderful: I long for a taste of that experience.

As usual my wife has a good bit more sense than I do. We talked about my insecurities, worked through my petty self-image. I realized some very important things. I will never be a Dostoyevsky, will probably not ever even be a Buechner, but that is emphatically ok. In the end it does not matter if I do not reach dizzying heights with my prose; it is enough that I do what I can with the time and talents given to me. God does not need my scarce talents as a writer to bring about his Kingdom. Rather he has given me the skills He has in the amounts He has in order that I might glorify Him. Maybe that is one reason I feel compelled to write on this blog, as a part of good stewardship over my talents. Better that I make use of what I do have.

But what of the other response? If my initial reaction was intermixed with sin (which it certainly was), there was perhaps an element of the longing I felt that was pure and good. I think that the longing I felt had to do with being an amateur -- not in the pedestrian sense of the word, someone who is not good enough to be a professional (though that certainly applies to me), but in the root sense, someone who performs an action out of love for it. In that sense I am assuredly an amateur cellist: I play because music lifts my soul, exhilarates me like few other things. I can point to a handful of moments in my life as a cellist that I would call truly transcendent, and those alone are more than enough compensation for the years of hard work and frustration. I think Dostoyevsky was on to something when he said "Beauty will save the world." Not in an ultimate sense of course (unless you mean the beauty of Christ), but beauty does point (no, stronger -- guide) our souls to the source of beauty. That is a part of the longing I felt when I heard Joshua Roman play: I had the desire to break through the mundane and experience transforming beauty, but not the ability. In The Symposium Diotima tells Socrates that the desire of love is to give birth to beauty; in this case I felt a little like Hannah before the Lord blessed her with Samuel.

I feel like this in life quite often. There is a thirst that reaches down into each one of us, a basic desire which seems to elude satisfaction. Yet Christ promises a deep, abiding slaking of that thirst. How do I reconcile that promise with my life? Truth is, I spend most of my time avoiding the spring which would satisfy. Grace is mystifying, complex, quite simply beyond me. I cannot comprehend, but I long for it. Thank goodness that art does not imitate life: "it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy."