My younger sister, Samantha, brought me two relics of our teen years when she came to stay this week. I have been ruminating on them ever since.
Item one: an old-fashioned metronome, still in good working order in its tattered-but-intact box. For the musically uninitiated, a metronome is a device that sounds like a loud clock – “tick / tock, tick/tock” – and is used to maintain an even tempo while learning to play an instrument. It can be set for fast – “allegro” – pieces, or for slow – “adagio” – pieces. The instrumentalist plays while the metronome keeps time. It is really, really annoying.
Item two: a thick, dog-eared book of Beatles music for piano. Like most of my favorite piano music as a teenager, the Beatles were a bit “before my time”… But the early ‘80s was not a period renowned for music, and even adolescent amateurs recoil from trying to play the greatest hits of, say, Depeche Mode or A-ha. Ahem.
Initially, I had trouble understanding why Samantha kept the metronome all these years. It was reluctantly and infrequently used, the object of much resentment and derision. Teenage-me hated having anyone or anything tell me what to do, ever; a metronome literally set my teeth on edge.
The Beatles book, though… I totally get why she hung onto that. It represents hours and hours of shared memories.
The Beatles Book
I bought the book in England, on a summer-long visit with my British first-best-friend, Margaret (for whom my daughter Maggie is named). Margaret and I would take the book, along with “The Simon and Garfunkel Collection,” up the street to the Ashbys’ house. Mrs. Ashby obligingly let us use her piano as often as we liked, and even more obligingly told us that we were “bloody marvelous” no matter how we sounded. I’d bang out the melodies on keys stained yellow by cigarette smoke (both Mr. and Mrs. Ashby were dedicated smokers) while Margaret sang soprano versions of “Scarborough Fair” and “Eleanor Rigby” and (my favorite) “Let it be” over my shoulder.
The books came back with me from England, and Samantha stepped in where Margaret had left off – belting out Beatles or Simon and Garfunkel (we called them “Sime-Funk”) or show tunes, somehow keeping pace with my passionately inconsistent, metronome-less meter as I pounded out the tunes on the piano in our childhood home.
This quirky instrument had a presence all its own. At some point in the early ‘70s, my father had had a fit of artistic inspiration and painted the whole thing a matte orangey-beige streaked with brown, creating an effect akin to the classic polyester leisure suit of that era.
By my teens, the streaky paint top-coat had chipped in several places, and the original shiny black laquer peeped through, smirking. The keyboard, only slightly less nicotine-tinted than the Ashbys’, was missing several whole ivories and had two keys (middle C and the D adjacent) whose tips had bite-shaped pieces missing (casualties of the inquisitive jaws of the youngest sister in our family). The sounds that piano made were utterly unique; I do not recall a single instance of it being tuned.
What it means
Remembering the impromptu sessions Samantha and I staged at that piano, I laugh and cry in the same breath, in awe of our solidarity and moxie. We banged away at a broken piano and bellowed at the top of our young voices in the midst of a home perennially plagued by financial crises, mental health emergencies, and persistent addictions. We were so stubborn! We were so defiantly exuberant! Our parents’ tragedies were omnipresent, but so were the harmonies and hilarities declared by us – and we were just plain louder.
It would be a stretch to declare that “music saved us.” But it’s no stretch at all to see in music a powerful element of God’s prevenient grace toward us. And because of that insight – God’s grace, working to give us hope and energy for the future when the present was so bleak and broken – I understand why Samantha kept the metronome.
Order matters
We tacitly rejected the metronome in our years of piano-proclamations, but the fact of its existence testified to the existence of order. It still does. And we need order. We need order that is inarguable and unalterable, order that persists no matter whether it is ignored or esteemed, order that holds us together even when circumstances work to blast us to smithereens. As a child in in a house where safety and security were in scant supply and disorder was constant, I craved the structure of time signatures and measures in which beats added up; I was greedy for the symmetry and logic that made major and minor keys reliably themselves; I treasured the order – beginning, middle, end – that music provided. In that order which music provided, Samantha and I truly escaped disorder and experienced (in our cacophonous noise!) peace.
I think that’s part of the reason God insists on His people praising Him through music. Our earthly home is chaotic, and will be chaotic, until He comes back. Things in our world are broken – missing bits and pieces, slightly ridiculous in appearance, discordant. But the order and beauty that music super-imposes on this world, this earthly home, declares the sovereign Truth of God over the reality of the Right Now. So God calls His people to make music – to praise Him through music – as an ongoing reminder of His order and the peace we have within it, no matter what.
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord: “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously…”
Exodus 15:1
O come, let us sing to the Lord;
Psalm 95:1 – 2
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
…Be filled with the Spirit, 19 as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, 20 giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Ephesians 5:18b – 20
16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.
Colossians 3:16
In this season when the broken-ness of our earthly home is being so radically displayed all across the globe, I pray that we will choose to gather around pianos (or guitars, or xylophones) and sing the Truth of God in stubborn, defiant exuberance.
Our worldly tragedies are omnipresent, but when we make music for God we are just plain louder.
And in the pristine order of worship music, we can escape disorder and experience (in our cacophonous noise!) peace.
