Last week my daughter Sarah and I went to the concert at the Recital Hall at UNK, as part of the Concert on the Platte series. Yang Liu, an extraordinary and world-renowned violinist, was the featured artist, and I’d taken Sarah to his open lesson that afternoon. I was very tired, and it would have been much easier to stay home, but I promised Sarah that we’d go.
Wow.
He played with a colleague of his, who accompanied him on piano, and they were both magnificent. My emotions ran the gamut throughout the performance. Some music was sadly stirring, other pieces were lively and upbeat. Liu played with such intensity that he was dripping with sweat, he was moving his whole body, and he even had to get a new bow at one point, because he’d played some of the horsehairs loose on his bow. It was beautiful. Sometimes I felt lulled into a sense of peace, other moments I felt pinned to my seat, drawn into the overwhelming intensity of the music. I looked around the recital hall and there was a wide variety of people. A woman in front of us had a yin-yang tattoo on her neck and was wearing a tank stop, sitting with her young daughter who was knitting. Her bald (purposely) husband kept time with the music by bobbing his head and tapping the seat in front of him. The daughter spontaneously hugged her mother’s bare arms during especially intense musical moments, and leaned her head on her shoulder. There were college students in sweat pants and T-shirts, a row of older women dressed in their Sunday best, and yet another row of serious-looking, professionally dressed, perhaps music majors. There were young couples with funky hairstyles and girls with stiletto heels. We were all there to hear this accomplished violinist who had been performing very difficult classical pieces in recital halls such as this since he was 10 years old.
It was a nice break from the rest of the world. For two hours, Sarah and I got away from radio and TV coverage of how the Virginia Tech students are coping, or how the gunmen’s family has to have police protection as they grieve this horror. We got away from all the things that challenge our hope and joy. And we participated in Beauty. We shared this wonderful moment of beauty with a room full of total strangers. We were all different, some of us from different ethnic backgrounds, different taste in clothes, and different positions in life. But we were drawn together by our love of beauty, of music, of the unique capacity of music to heal and bless our souls.
We need beauty so desperately. As I write this, it is very dark and dreary outside, with the severe thunderstorms raging and flooding outside. We’ve had some significant losses in my own community already in 2007, and there are many among us struggle with various crises in their individual lives. Rarely a Sunday goes by in church when we are not praying over more than one prayer blanket to give away.
Let’s not forget the power of beautiful things to bless our souls and the souls of others, to nourish and renew. Let’s pursue beauty and share it. When we were little, we would draw a picture for someone we loved and present it to them as a gift. We’re not too old to think of something beautiful to give or to do for someone to light up their world, to add music to their silences, and color to their black and white days. Take time for beauty. Indulge in beauty. Soak it up, eat it up with your eyes, your senses. It is not easy to be bearers of beauty—it makes us vulnerable, and sometimes just plain weird! But don’t be fooled, we all need it, we all hunger for it. Jesus was weary and sad as he faced his impending death when a nameless woman came to him and poured expensive perfume over his head, soothing, blessing him, and filling the room with a precious aroma. When his friends were shocked at her questionable behavior, he said, “Leave her alone, she has done a beautiful thing for me, and what she has done will be told wherever the gospel is proclaimed…. (Mark 9) Jesus himself is an image of beauty—his presence, his words, his depth of love, his power to love and heal—in a world that had grown hard and cynical.
Let’s be beautiful. Let’s add color to our corner of the world, and shine light in the dark corners! Imagine the light we can radiate when we get together in the spirit of the Resurrected One!
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