I bet Heaven is a lot like Music
For most of my life, I’ve participated in music. I sing, I play, and – though you’ll never hear a lick of it – I tinker at composing.
The thing about music is that it’s creative and beautiful. The beauty can be a single simple melody, but I’ve never heard a single simple melody that cannot be made yet more beautiful by other musical parts.
And it’s here in the communion of musical voices, each moving and dancing harmoniously in their respective ranges, resonances, and tones, following the beating measure given by the director, that heaven is captured and gives us here in the present moment an opportunity to glimpse into the way things were created to be. Music very readily explains it all for us without needing word or reason except simply to be and follow freely within our part, with our own expression while remaining within the spirit of the score.
We each are a part in the great composition of humanity, the greater composition of creation, and the greatest composition of divine communion. In the beginning, we were a perfect two part harmony playing amongst the other work of our Composer. Though now we find in our lives that we are discordant, we have been provided the living melody, theme, and steady rhythm by the very hand and played example of our Director and Composer.
Sometimes life is pretty raucous, and I feel myself being drowned in the noise, losing my grip and becoming just another part of the static. But as with all music, once an ear is trained to hear the melody, the ear can pick the melody out amidst the fray. How sweet a mystery it is that the melody is so much easier then to hear whence falling among the noise, and I can not only then begin to imitate the melody but (and I think more importantly) also bring myself into it as a harmony.
I often find myself pining to be part of an symphonic/orchestrated ensemble again, but since then I found this longing, I’ve also found this analogy tugging at me, too. Perhaps this longing is more for the analogy than for the effort of actually picking up the old flute and picc again. Perhaps it is yet another graceful clarion call that, as a Christian, the melody and theme has been set, and I have a responsibility to it in my own part.
I bet Heaven is a lot like Music. But without the noise I am surrounded in today.
Please tell me you’ve read the Silmarilion’s introduction… If not, imagine Tolkien’s grasp of language and beautiful prose coupled with this idea, and a re-telling of the creation story.
yeah, I have actually. …but I wasn’t really thinking about it when I was thinking this up and writing it. The notion of communion is what really inspired this. That… and, well, oddly enough, listening to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. Perhaps a dormant seed that finally took root?
I think it’s interesting to think about the “noise” in relation to the music. Ives and Cage (and Tolkien for that matter) embraced the music of noise. It’s harder to appreciate but often more human than the perfection of a Bach fugue or the extravagent romantic excesses of a Wagnerian opera. I wonder if in heaven we’ve learned to hear the beauty of the noise.
If the parallel is that noise is sin, then I don’t think there is ever any beauty in noise itself. I’m not certain Tolkein for one embraced the notion of noise, but he did, at least in his creation story, say that noise could be made a part of the greater composition, made into good – and I agree with that notion. But noise/sin, in itself, is not appropriate, not proper, not good.
Is noise “more human” than classical pieces because of its discordant, fallen nature? Wouldn’t that make it, as we really are on this side of heaven: less human?
I remember a fantastic musical experience from a choir camp I attended. Our director—who was a collegiate guy and really awesome—picked some short little line from a Mozart choral piece. It couldn’t have been more than, oh, 20 measures long. He then picked one person out of the choir at random and said, “You, whenever you feel like singing, begin. Sing at your own pace. Do with the line whatever moves you. Keep repeating the line, too. Speed up, slow down, do whatever.”
The guy did so.
He then instructed us, while the guy was singing the line quite slowly, asked others of us to join in, but to join in at a different spot, at a different pace. He implored us to take our own spin on the line.
We did so.
Eventually, he began to slowly move his hands … and we all got the idea that we should, on the next time by, come to his tempo. Then, as a hive mind, we all realized that we should hold the end note until we came to all be singing the same lines at the same time. When we were all in unison, we then moved in concert with the director.
We only ever did this twice—once during a rehearsal [when we blew ourselves away and didn't think that our audience would get it], and once during the concert. It’s actually how we began; our crowd was a bit stunned, but they eventually got it.
When the applause had subsided, the director said, “Folks, that’s kinda how I imagine Heaven.”
I don’t image Heaven much at all—I don’t think that I can imagine the unimaginable!—but … that’s what I think it might be like.
good story!! you should have put it on one of your own blogs.
I just might.
Here’s a perspective from someone who can’t sing:
I have an awful singing voice. But it doesn’t matter. I love music and I know that in worship the LORD isn’t hearing me with human ears.
Here is what I do: I listen carefully to the worship team and pay VERY close attention to the lyrics of the song. As the words slide past I internalize them. What thought, praise, sentiment, or mood are they conveying. How does my soul react to that? How are those words true for me? Then I sing them out faithfully. It doesn’t matter who else hears them, I am only singing for Him. I keep my eyes shut I haven’t had my opens through a worship time in over a decade).
I imagine my voice weaving among the voices of those in the congregation, rising up to the LORD and I hope that he finds the offering pleasing.
The music performed by the worship team is wonderful, but it isn’t there for me except as a place to put my worship. It is all about Him.
I may not be able to hear the nuances that others hear in the music, but that matters not. It is simply a joy to tell my Lord that I love Him.