Cello Lessons

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It’s been winter for almost two years now. Always winter, but never Christmas, as they say in Narnia.

Right before everything froze over I was given a gift, as if in preparation for the long, dark nights to come. It came in the form of a light-weight, curved green case containing a cake of rosin, a French bow, and a beautiful cello. I didn’t realize at the time that I was really being given a survival kit.

It feels fitting to be learning  an unfamiliar instrument in an unfamiliar season. I already play flute and piano, so I can read music, interpret rhythms, listen intently for tuning and intonation. But I’ve never played a stringed instrument before, so I am learning completely new techniques. Bow hold, fingering, wrist position, shape of the left hand, sweep of the right arm, orientation around the fingerboard. So often I can hear that my sound is wrong, but I have no idea how to correct it.

Enter Naomi.

Every few weeks I load up my cello and take the drive to Naomi’s house. I walk through the back door into a room with high ceilings and wooden floors, that is large enough to contain a grand piano. The house is silent and my mind slows. These lessons, these hallowed moments of singular focus and concentrated exchange between teacher and student make me feel as though I am stepping out of the ordinary, into a sacred space.

Naomi is an incredibly gifted teacher. At the end of each lesson I always realize that I have just witnessed someone doing precisely what they were created for. She is gentle, and yet absolutely insistent that I establish good habits from the start.

“Wrist up; soften your right shoulder; bend your thumb; lean the weight of your arm into the strings; flow your bow!”

As a player she is, and always will be, way out of my league. But she believes in me, and is willing to invest the time in teaching me to play. If I’m attempting something new, or having trouble with it, she plays right along with me, steps down to my level, mingling her sound with mine until I can’t tell which is her and which is me.

I always come away from lessons feeling light-spirited, encouraged that I am at least a  little bit closer to being able to make this instrument sing the melodies I can hear in my soul. I never mind the many corrections I am given, in fact I actively seek them out, checking if my technique is right, talking about any problems I have encountered so I can adjust where necessary. Naomi always knows exactly where we’re going and exactly what I need to do to progress to the next step. I trust her implicitly.

It strikes me that my relationship with the Holy Spirit might be a bit like this. I think about how He corrects and encourages in order to shape me into who I really do want to be. When I’m struggling, or trying to master something new, He comes right down to my level to play alongside me, mingling His grace and patience so closely with my own halting and scratchy attempts that I can no longer tell which notes are His and which are mine. I am swept up into playing melodies of love and forgiveness and rhythms of grace that I had assumed were well beyond my capabilities. And I wonder if perhaps I should submit more easily to His correction, see it as a kindness, seek it out, even. After all, it’s just possible that He might know exactly where we’re going, and exactly how to get to the next step too.

Still

When I read this, I know I’ve found a book I’m going to love:

I am one of those overeducated library types who might be expected to look down her nose at self-help books – but the whole bookstore is a self-help section to me. When something needs to be fixed, when I need something to change, my first and abiding instinct is to read. I think I can read my way to a solution. Or at least an evasion.

Still, p. 23

This is exactly what I do. This is exactly what I have done in finding Still, although it is a searching for some kind of navigation, or way forward, or even just understanding, on this occasion, rather than an avoidance tactic.

The title’s tag line –  notes on a mid-faith crisis - is what attracts me. I wonder if Ms Winner and I can compare notes. Maybe she has found some wisdom she can pass on to me.

The whole book is like a conversation with a friend really. Someone who isn’t exactly in the same shoes as you, but whose life is similar enough that they get how you feel. I love the honesty and humility and the patchwork of inspiration she draws from other writers. In reading, I am reminded of how powerful it can be to invite someone else into your own story.

Winner does this beautifully on many occasions, and I leave you with the quote which resonated with me the most:

I am sitting on a bench in a museum. The museum is a five-minute walk from my office, and I come here often, to be spelled in the middle of the day by thirty minutes of silence… In my lap, the Bible is open to the fifth chapter of Luke, one of Jesus’ healings… the story ends with Luke’s telling us that Jesus often withdrew to lonely places to pray. A little like  escaping to the quiet of a museum, I think. What can it mean for a place to be lonely?

A place, lonely like Jesus? Lonely like me?

Maybe I can make my loneliness into an invitation – to Jesus – that he might withdraw into me and pray.

Still, p. 141

Changing the story

Richard Pithouse, reflecting on the recent riots in England…

…The young people contained in decaying council estates are bombarded by relentless corporate propaganda conflating access to consumer goods with meaning, beauty and dignity. Cameron likes to say that there are communities in England that are broken. But it is a society that tells young people that they have to consume to live with dignity but denies them work or the money to consume that is broken.

In the age of enclosure, rioters tore down fences. In the age of mechanisation, rioters smashed machines. Its hardly surprising that in the age of consumerism some people should leave their grim and fearful council estates, with their stairwells littered with needles and rank with the stench of urine, to, for a night or two, occupy, smash and loot the temples of consumerism…

They have seized public space, desecrated the temples of consumerism, a religion from which they are structurally barred from full inclusion, and affirmed their existence in a society that holds them in contempt and insists that they keep to their place.

There has, to be sure, been vile and tragic behaviour amidst the upheaval. And while vile acts must always be resolutely opposed we should recall that in a riot, an event that is spectacularly outside of the norm, every perverse act is hyper visible and will be exploited to stand in for and to condemn the whole. In the everyday passing of time the structural vileness of society… is masked as normal and remains largely invisible.

from The Return of the English Riot

by Richard Pithouse

The over arching meta-narrative of consumerism – a meta-narrative we are not suspicious of, despite what postmodernism would have us believe – is not serving us well. Coupled with a ‘do whatever is right for you’ approach to morality, it isn’t working at all. Whether you are spinning corporate propaganda to convince a fifteen-year-old that new trainers are a matter of life and death, or whether you are a fifteen-year-old who believes you must satisfy your own desire for new trainers no matter the cost – what feels right to you may cause untold grief and heartache for someone else. Unfortunately, a society that privatises morality has no framework to address these issues.

What is needed is not an increase in wealth, or structural social changes so that the poor can participate in the religion of consumerism. What is needed is a change of religion.

People need to know they are valuable, not on the basis of what they own, or what they do, but on the basis of their humanity. Meaning, dignity and beauty are their birthright, not something they have to purchase on the way.

People need to know that it is possible to move from devastation and despair, through to peace and hope.

People need to know that mercy and forgiveness and grace could swallow up the whole world’s evil, if only we let them.

People need to know they are so loved, that God didn’t even spare His only Son, but sent Him to the cross and raised Him from the dead so they could be in a relationship with Him.

People need to know your story church.Tell it,  live it out. Never has it been more necessary.

Idea for a social experiment

Lets take a group of people and constantly bombard them with the idea that they ‘need’ certain possessions in order to be ‘happy’ and fulfilled’ say, for the first sixteen years of their lives, while simultaneously keeping them in poverty so that they can never have access to what we have trained them to believe they ‘need.’ Then lets cut any kind of funding which helps keep these people from pushing forward, achieving any kind of education, having any hope for the future or even from just being entertained for a few nights a week.

Lets make sure no one cares enough to challenge their greedy, self-centred attitudes; to teach them about respect and discipline; or to tell them that they are worth something. In fact, lets silence all other messages, except the ones telling them what possessions they ‘need’ in order to be ‘happy.’

Then lets sit back and see what happens…

The Cellist of Sarajevo

Today the last military leader wanted for war crimes during the Bosnian War of 1991-1995 was arrested.

On May 27, 1992, during the siege of Sarajevo, 22 people queued for bread, anxious to feed their families from one of the only working bakeries  left in the city. A shell hit the bakery and all 22 people were killed.

Observing the horror from a few feet away was Vedran Smailovic, principle cellist of the Sarajevo Opera. Grief-stricken at the way his city and its people were being torn apart, Smailovic responded in the most profound, and maybe only, way he knew how. He dressed in his formal concert attire, took his cello, sat outside what was the bakery and began to play Albioni’s Adagio in G minor, in mourning for his people.

He played there for 22 days, one day to remember each of the dead.

Over the next two years, Smailovic played his cello on the streets of Sarajevo, often playing for free at funerals, despite the fact that these were targets for Serbian snipers.

“What is the good of playing music in the middle of a war zone?” you ask.

Sometimes music is the only way left to respond, because some things are so terrifying and horrific that there are no words for them. Music is the only thing that can seep in between the brokenness and somehow give it an expression. There is no better place to articulate grief, loss and lament than in the middle of a war. There is no place where reminders of beauty, hope and grace are more desperately needed.

Moved by his story, English composer, David Wilde, wrote a piece for unaccompanied cello in Vedran’s honour, entitled “The Cellist of Sarajevo.” Yo Yo Ma played it at the International Cello Festival in 1994.

Paul Sullivan describes the performance this way:

When he had finished, Ma remained bent over his cello, his bow resting on the strings. No one in the hall moved or made a sound for a long time. It was as though we had just witnessed that horrifying massacre ourselves.

Finally, Ma looked out across the audience, and stretched out  his hand, beckoning someone to come to the stage. An indescribable electric shock swept over us as we realised who it was: Vedran Smailovic: the cellist of Sarajevo.

Smailovic rose from his seat and walked down the aisle as Ma left the stage to meet him. They flung their arms around each other in an exuberant embrace.  Everyone in the hall errupted in a chaotic, emotional frenzy – clapping, shouting and cheering.

At the centre of it all stood these two men, hugging and crying unashamedly…

We were all stripped down to our starkest, deepest humanity at encountering this man who shook his cello in the face of bombs, death and ruin, defying them all.

Everyday Greatness.