A New Yet Distant Music

I am sitting in this aisle seat, settling down for an early morning flight east. As I pick up the headset and finger the dial around to the classical band a voice announces the program items. There is a mention of Beethoven and Mozart, their names and music so familiar yet so distant in time they have become their music, no longer persons to us. 

Then suddenly I hear the name of an old friend whom my wife and I met when we first arrived in Ottawa in those long ago fifties. We were all young. Many times we shared their family table and they ours in those Ottawa years. Sadly, we lost contact after we left for the west coast. Now after a fair number of years I hear the name of our old friend, and I am aware of how much beautiful music he gave to Canadian Church life. The piece I am listening to now is Divertimento for Organ and Two Oboes, it’s composer our long-ago friend, Robert Fleming. 

As I listen, the announcer reminds me that my friend recently died. I become aware of the brush of the artist we call Memory bringing back a face and voice. As the piece begins I receive his gift from him across the gulf of life and death, a gulf in one sense so immeasurable and yet sometimes so achingly narrow .

The fact that I was receiving a gift from a friend now in that state we call death made me think of the mysterious line between those of us who live and those of us who  - what shall we say - have crossed that mysterious line?

The music to which I am listening is as much of Robert now as it was when it came to him from beyond him on to his keyboard, then to his manuscript, then to countless performances by others until one reaches into my life. 

Therein lies the most mysterious aspect of all this. What is it that links us all across the gulf and is the source of this music? Robert of course is a channel for that source, as am I in this act of listening, but can it be that we are all channels of that same Source we gropingly and haltingly call God, and that this is the mystery by which alone a glorious melody can take a vast gathering of individuals and make them one”.

T.S Eliot once wrote “ Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind,flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything”.