Children, Mozart and the Holy Spirit

April 12, 2010

John 14:16-17: And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him.

I have come to realize there are a few things you cannot receive unless you have learned to quiet your heart and listen: the gift of children, music and the Holy Spirit.

Children are with us. They are often loud, obnoxious, annoying. They speak a different language than grown adults: they do not care about money, time or efficiency. In the midst of a pedantic bedtime routine, they can ask the most profound questions: why is it so difficult to hear them?

Watching my children, from very tiny infants, and learning to listen to them, has taught me a whole new way of listening and communicating that has very little correlation with what we consider communication and language in the adult world. My baby, now 9 months, turns her head. I follow her gaze and see she is looking at the cat; I watch her eyes, and share in her experience of wonder and joy at this animal she has no name or category for, and finds new awe in every time she beholds it. So there is witnessing with them the new wonders of the world. Then there is also learning to listen behind their words to the pain they do not know how to express. Then there is learning to notice with them all the small things of the world: stopping for twenty minutes on a walk to watch a caterpillar climb up a tree, guessing which side of the fork in the trunk he will take—watching, awaiting that slow, slow crawl to see what he decides (do caterpillars decide?) Do carrots mind when we pick them? Does it hurt when we harvest lettuce? These are questions I answered gardening with my six-year old this weekend. Responding to a comic in the Sunday paper I said, “no one can live below the ground.” “Except the elves” retorted Hudson quickly. Who knows? If there is a fairy world of tiny quiet things, nearly invisible, it surely would be the children that would notice them, not us. We have grown so cumbersome and obtuse in our thinking; we steamroll and interrupt and run ahead. My children have taught me how to listen.

Which has been a surprising gift in regards to music. I have played harp and piano since I was very young. I know—have known—how to listen to a piece of music I am working on, its nuances and flavors. But to listen to a new piece; an unfamiliar piece… to make a new piece familiar—I had very little interest. What would I gain? How do I approach such a thing? And to what end?

But watching an infant work up—for three weeks-- the fine motor skills to roll over—prepares a person to sit and listen to the cadence changes in Mozart. Here is why: in both cases you set yourself down, that heavy bulky load of self-concern and narcissism. You must clear your mind (again, we are being prepared to receive the Holy Spirit) and watch and listen (how many times were we told this by Jesus in the gospels?) It seems so simple; it is directly in front of our noses: the baby rolling over; the bluebirds building a nest in the fern on the front porch; the slight variations in Bach’s musical offering. These things are spoken in a language that has become foreign to our tongue, because we have learned to only watch and listen to what serves us most boldly, efficiently and immediately. How do we expect the Holy Spirit to reveal himself to us—in our inbox? Message us on facebook?

But then I found this other language: this language that lifts up the small things and does not denigrate the little, hardly noticeable things of our world. I became interested in what the birds are saying in the mornings. I began to notice, with greater interest, the cycle of the leaves on the oak tree out back, and the birch out front. I became, over the months I worked on the Mozart, increasingly content with my job as keeper of the small things in our house: the quotidian tasks of laundry, cooking, cleaning. I saw with clear eyes how much work there is to be done with our children, and found fresh energy to bring to the task of discipline, relationship, physical, emotional and spiritual growth. And I discovered a secret—or what had been a secret to me—that it is the small, ever-present but nearly unnoticeable things of the world that do, in the end, shame the wise. It is the weak things of the world, the things that are tucked away in church nurseries and paved over for highways and heard only by white-haired concert goers that will, in the end, shame the wise. It is a secret I take so much joy in, because it is a secret by which I have found life: the Holy Spirit does not come in the earthquake, the fire or the wind. He comes, as we have always known, in a still small voice.

This is a secret I used to know as a child; I guess this should not surprise me, I imagine all children, if they are left to be children, know it one way or another. I was left to be a child for quite awhile: with very little media exposure and lots of time in the woods, I had an imagination and understood the importance of old trees. The old trees were wise and quiet. As I walked the mile-long one-lane road to our house, I would listen for their secrets. Gazing up at them, I imagined I could see their faces, hazy but present—and understood that they held their arms up in praise of their Creator, as an example for us to follow. As a child I understood instinctively the passage in Psalms, “if we do not praise God, the trees will raise up their arms in praise to Him”. All trees reminded me of our duty to praise God, and their quietness reminded me to listen. Until I left home for college, I continued to rise early in the morning and run the thin road that stretched east and west, watching the sun barely begin to make a dent in the darkness that was 5 AM. I would remember God’s promise to remove my sin as far as the east is from the west, and I could feel, in that barely sunrise, how far the east really is from the west. I am not sure I had ever even heard the term meditate; if I had, I would have been uncomfortable with the concept. But meditate was what I did every morning.

Now I am without the luxurious expanse of nature around me. Yes, we have the trees that form a canopy over our house. But we have freeway noise and neighbors and too much concrete. We have houses around us, and planned grass and shrubs. No more deer and porcupine and towering oaks. No more Mt. Rainier and Puyallup valley and expanse of clear blue and fog below, the river in the distance. But the listening is the same, even if the avenues are different: and the Holy Spirit promises that God is here. But…there is the caveat: The Holy Spirit is here, but the world cannot receive, because it neither sees nor knows. Do we see? Do we hear?