Music

WHEREAS PAINTERS WORK WITH SPACE—the croquet players on the lawn, behind them the dark foliage of the hedge, above them the sky—musicians work with time, as one note follows another note the way tock follows tick.

Music both asks us and also enables us to listen to certain qualities of time—to the grandeur of time, says Bach, to the poignance of time, says Mozart, to the swing and shimmer of time, says Debussy, or however else you choose to put into words the richness and complexity of what each of them is wordlessly "saying."

We learn from music how to listen to the music of our own time—one moment of our lives following another moment the way the violin passage follows the flute, the way the sound of foot-steps on the gravel follows the rustle of leaves in the wind, which follows the barking of a dog almost too far away to hear.

Music helps us to "keep time" in the sense of keeping us in touch with time, not just time as an ever-flowing stream that bears all of us away at last, but time also as a stream that every once in a while slows down and becomes transparent enough for us to see down to the streambed the way, at a wedding, say, or watching the sun rise, past, present, and future are so caught up in a single moment that we catch a glimpse of the mystery that, at its deepest place, time is timeless.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Movies

VICTOR LASZLO leading the patrons of Rick's Cafe in the "Marseillaise" to drown out the Nazis' "Wacht am Rhine" under the direction of Major Strasser—possibly that moment in Casablanca had as much impact on the World War II generation as the news of Pearl Harbor or the eloquence of Winston Churchill.

Or the African Americans in the Alabama courthouse gallery rising to their feet as Atticus Finch passes by below. Or Dolly Levi sashaying down the grand staircase of the Harmonia Gardens to find Louis Armstrong at the bottom radiant as the sun at noon. Or John Travolta lithe as a panther in his white suit and pompadour dancing in Brooklyn. Or Jimmy Stewart being bailed out by his friends in the last moments of It's a Wonderful Life.

In a world where there are no longer books we have almost all of us read, the movies we have almost all of us seen are perhaps the richest cultural bond we have. They go on haunting us for years the way our dreams go on haunting us. In a way they are our dreams. The best of them remind us of human truths that would not seem as true without them. They help to remind us that we are all of us humans together.

-Originally published in Beyond Words

Mother

JESUS WAS BY NO MEANS SENTIMENTAL on the subject of mothers. He said that people who loved their mothers more than they loved him were not worthy of him (Matthew 10:37), indicating that duty comes first. And when they told him his mother was outside waiting while he spoke to some group or other, he said that his mother was anybody who did God's will (Matthew 12:50), indicating that his fellow believers came a close second.

To his own mother he could be very abrupt. When she came to him at the wedding in Cana to tell him the wine had given out, he said, "O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come" (John 2:4), meaning perhaps that she was to let him alone, that at that early point in his ministry he wasn't ready to be known as a miracle worker. He was speaking his heart to her if not exactly reprimanding her, and it was just "woman" he called her, not "mother.

"Some of the last words he ever spoke were in her behalf, however. She was standing at the foot of his cross when he told her in effect that from then on his disciple John would look after her. "Behold your son," he said, indicating him to her (John 19:26). Again it was just "woman" he called her, but her welfare and safekeeping were among the last thoughts he ever had.

Our mothers, like our fathers, are to be honored, the Good Book says. But if Jesus is to be our guide, honoring them doesn't mean either idealizing or idolizing them. It means seeing them both for who they are and for who they are not. It means speaking the truth to them. It means the best way of repaying them for their love is to love God and our neighbor as faithfully and selflessly as at their best our parents have tried to love us. It means seeing they are taken care of to the end of their days.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Moses

WHENEVER HOLLYWOOD cranks out a movie about Moses, they always give the part to somebody like Charlton Heston in fake whiskers. The truth of it is he probably looked a lot more like Tevye the milkman.

Forty years of tramping around the wilderness with the Israelites was enough to take it out of anybody. When they weren't raising hell about running out of food, they were raising it about running out of water. They were always hankering after the fleshpots of Egypt and making bitter remarks about how they should have stayed home and let well enough alone. As soon as his back was turned, they started whooping it up around the Golden Calf, and when somebody stood up and said he ought to be thrown out, the motion was seconded by thousands. Any spare time he had left after taking care of things like that he spent trying to persuade God not to wipe them out altogether, as they deserved.

And then, of course, there was the hardest blow of all. When he finally had it all but made and got them as far as the top of Mt. Pisgah, where the whole Promised Land stretched out before them as far as the eye could see, God spoke up and said this was the place all right, but for reasons that were never made entirely clear, Moses was not to enter it with them. So he died there in his one hundred and twentieth year, and after a month of hanging around and wishing they'd treated him better, the Israelites went on in without him.

Like Abraham before him and Noah before that, not to mention like a lot of others since, the figure of Moses breathing his last up there in the hills with his sore feet and aching back serves as a good example of the fact that when God puts the finger on people, their troubles have just begun.

And yet there's not a doubt in the world that in the last analysis Moses, like the rest of those tough old birds, wouldn't have had it any different. Hunkered down in the cleft of a rock once, with God's hand over him for added protection, he had been allowed to see the Glory itself passing by and, although all God let him see was the back part, it was something to hold on to for the rest of his life. And then there was one other thing that was even better than that.

Way back when he was just getting started and when out of the burning bush God had collared him for the first time, he had asked God what God's name was, and God had told him, so that from then on he could get in touch with God anytime he wanted. Nobody had ever known God's name before Moses did, and nobody would ever have known it afterward except for his having passed it on; and with that thought in his heart up there on Pisgah, and with that name on his lips, and with the sunset in his whiskers, he became in the end a kind of burning bush himself.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Morality

IT IS NO SECRET that ideas about what is right and what is wrong vary from time to time and place to place. King Solomon would not be apt to see eye to eye with a Presbyterian missionary on the subject of monogamy. For that reason, a popular argument runs, morality is all relative to the tastes of the time and not to be taken any more seriously by the enlightened than tastes in food, dress, architecture, or anything else. At a certain level, this is indisputably so. But there is another level.

In order to be healthy, there are certain rules you can break only at your peril. Eat sensibly, get enough sleep and exercise, avoid bottles marked poison, don't jump out of boats unless you can swim, and so on.

In order to be happy, there are also certain rules you can break only at your peril. Be at peace with your neighbor, get rid of hatred and envy, tell the truth, avoid temptations to evil you're not strong enough to resist, don't murder, steal, and so on.

Both sets of rules are as valid for a third-century person as for a twentieth-century Norwegian, for a Muslim as for a Methodist bishop, for the emperor Nero as for Marilyn Monroe.

Both sets of rules—the moral as well as the hygienic—describe not the way people feel life ought to be, but the way they have found life is.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words