Sunday, January 14, 2007

Pianos and Proof...

I doubt I'll ever run across incontrovertible proof for the existence of God. Not on this side, anyway. But legion are those things which bear witness.

(Nerd alert.) I remember my high school band director giving his first of the year pep talk every August. He sat at the piano, after having worked himself up in a militant frenzy about the power and virtue of discipline, and began to clunk away at individual notes, one at a time. "You hear that?!," he would yell. "That is proof that anything, when banged up against something else, will make some noise." Slowly he would make the individual notes get closer, then eventually flow into each other into beautiful harmonies, driving a melody that seemed to mean something. "But that," he would whisper, "that is proof of the existence of God!"

Proof? I'm not sure. What is proof anyway but data presented by someone who wants you to come over to their side. I'm also quite sure the legalities of practicing apologetics, (and shady apologetics at that,) in a public school classroom were quite suspect.

Yet that speech has always stayed with me. My guess is that it lingers throughout most of our minds. And while I question whether or not it is proof of God's existence, I don't doubt it's one of the million signposts left along the path for us to find our way. I think this a lot when the music starts playing at the end of Scrubs or during an especially emotional scene of Grey's Anatomy. The fight songs played at the sporting events of our favorite teams seem to pick us up by our collars and carry us to another place. A higher place. This place, yes, but without the heavy stones that burden our beings.

The music tells our stories and, I can't stop believing, is an echo of the place after this place.

So let's keep plunking away at those notes until they drift together and carry us to places of beauty...

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