First, I apologize for my geezer slip that required a password for my last post. To the best of my ability (such as it is) that will never happen again. However like many interruptions, that one caught my attention and sparked my realization that we all – children, adults, and geezers – often find ourselves coping with disabilities, accidents, or other interruptions to “normal” life.
As I reflected on that realization, up popped a memory of a story sent to me ten years ago by a client who had been disabled for decades and was at that time confined to bed; so I had visited weekly at home. To my wonder and delight I had saved the email in my storage file labeled “wisdom”. So read on – the story of an ultimate geezer. No further comment needed.
“Article from the Houston Chronicle…
“On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. If you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an unforgettable sight. He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward.Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.
“By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly while he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until he is ready to play.
But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap – it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do. People who were there that night thought to themselves: “We figured that he would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and limp his way off stage – to either find another violin or else find another string for this one.”
“But he didn’t. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had never heard before. Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that. You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before.
“When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done.
“He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone, ‘You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.’
“What a powerful line that is. It has stayed in my mind ever since I heard it. And who knows? Perhaps that is the [way] of life — not just for artists, but for all of us.
“So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have, and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have left.” — Jack Riemer
Our little church choir was rehearsing Easter music – Behold the Lamb of God from Handel’s Messiah. I love it. We basses shine at the dramatic opening with a full octave leap in the first two notes. After sufficient drama has been squeezed from the opening line, Handel moves on to the next phrase: “Who taketh away the sins of the world”. As I strain for the high notes in that line, this geezer’s rebel voice pipes up in my head:
“After 2000 years, look at the mess of sins cropping up in this world – Syria, homelessness, the Newtown shooting, and on and on. And what is a lamb of God anyway?”
And then this geezer’s inner scholar looks up from his book,
“Use all that learning you absorbed in divinity school. You know perfectly well what that means. Pay attention to your singing, or you’ll go flat.”
OK. When he first saw Jesus, John the Baptist blurted out to the crowd around him, “ (John 1:19)
Here is (Behold) the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”
This phrase has become the Agnus Dei, Latin for “Lamb of God”, and is said or sung today in Catholic churches at every mass, and at this season also in Protestant churches. Since most of us have no clue what it means, this phrase helps shove the church to the sidelines of our brains, so it won’t interfere with our survival in this high-speed economic downturn.
For the Hebrews, at the beginning of the first millennium when John and Jesus lived, if you killed a member of another family or tribe, that family or tribe had the right to kill you or one of your family or tribe. “An eye for an eye”. The only way to atone for sin was to shed blood.
One purpose of the Temple at Jerusalem was to show God’s mercy by accepting the blood of an animal in place of human blood to take away your sin. If you sacrificed a lamb from your flock in God’s temple, your sin would be taken away – especially if you invited the aggrieved family to share the roast lamb feast.
Perhaps you have felt deeply wounded by a tragic death. You will naturally yearn to lash out at someone. But you also may find a surprusing compassion in your heart for the one who caused the death.
Following the shooting, the people of Newtown, CT, have expressed a strange “love” for all people. The Blacks of South Africa have formed an amazing government along with the Whites who had subjugated them for centuries. Jesus stood his ground before Pilate, but told his friend, Peter, to put away his sword. Jesus accepted his own death rather than shed blood.
Jesus’s example has inspired believers and non believers alike to embrace what Walter Wink called Jesus’s third way – neither revenge nor surrender.– in order to produce reconciliation. So, my inner rebel, Jesus does embody that lamb of God, repaying the fear-based cruelty of Pilate with non-violent resistance to his power. That really does take away the sin. Of course it cost Jesus his life. If I really follow that third way, it might cost my life too. (print: The Lamb of God, Marc Chagall)
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Posted in death, Geezerhood Comments to the Church & disenchanted Christians, Peace, wisdom