If you were a musical instrument, what instrument would you be?
LAST WEEK I went with a friend to a concert at the Hexagon, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing pieces by Rossini, Dvorak and Rachmaninoff. I am not a musician or a music scholar, but I do enjoy all types of music, and there’s something very compelling about watching a live orchestra – violin bows all rising and falling in unison, and the speed at which fingers travel around fingerboards and turn pages! The guest cellist, Andrew Byun, was mesmerising. And all conducted by Nil Venditti, who led with joyful panache.
Before it began there was a cacophony of noise while the musicians tried to get their instruments in tune. Then the first violin played a single note, and the whole orchestra tuned to it. Then there was silence. And then suddenly they were off, launching into the beautiful harmonies that sometimes moved the audience to tears. No duff notes as far as I could hear. The whole thing was extraordinarily beautiful.
In his book Praying by heart – the Lord’s Prayer for everyone Stephen Cottrell writes that, ‘The will of God, the good purposes of a good and loving God, for this earth and everything in it, is like a single, beautiful, clarifying note played throughout the universe.’ He says everything else can be, and should be, tuned to it. When we pray ‘Your will be done’ it’s not a prayer of defeat, a shrugging of the shoulders, or a resignation to the inevitability of the evil so evident in our out-of-tune world. It’s more a prayer of longing, of pleading, even of defiance. ‘YOUR good and perfect will be done,’ – rather than the selfish will of tyrants and despots.
Perhaps we feel a little helpless in the face of the barrage of bad news we see on our TV screens. But we are not. We can all pray, ‘Your will be done’. And we can all make an effort to tune – or perhaps to let God tune – our own hearts to the one single, beautiful, clarifying note of the will of God, the God who calls us to love one another with the same kind of love Jesus showed when he walked this earth. Selfless, sacrificial, merciful, gracious, joyful, courageous, holy love.
May your life, and mine, play a beautiful tune.
Penny Cuthbert – Associate Vicar, St John’s Caversham
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