I have become busy this summer planning a whole new music curriculum for school on top of my general mom duties. It was a swift, no-turning-back decision and I tend to get overwhelmed by the scope of the project.
Firstly, my music theory chops are severely underdeveloped. I just like to sing and strum a guitar, and it doesn’t seem like that could get me a whole job. Yet here I am, contemplating the merits of color-coded solfege and Orff and the difference between glockenspiels and xylophones.
I was thinking aloud about the potential in overlapping subjects—fractions and meter! Rhythm and pattern! The science of loud and quiet and noise vibrations. The history of composition and instruments. Literacy and rote memory work. Shakespeare, performance, comic operettas, John Phillips Sousa, Jimmy Driftwood, local versus world. My brain is a sticky fly trap for ideas.
Meanwhile my garden is bursting with aroma and symmetry—a combination of multiplication (one seed+sun+water+time=bountiful flowers and fruit) and awe (the beauty!). The diversity in root systems, corms, tubers, sprouting eyes. Vines that trellis, male and female flowers and buzzy little pollinators that promote fertilization. When I planted sunflower seeds, they grew into the exact replica of the photo on the seed packet.
The two things I’ve homed in on this summer, teaching music and growing stuff, are completely, absolutely dependent on the standard-issued, God-provided, earth material.
Music is not produced without sound waves, and plants never spring from nothing.
The rules, though not explicitly stated, are stiff. The accuracy and reliability is mind-boggling. What you plant is what you grow. What you sing is what others hear. A new creation cannot be conjured up—you can’t mix a graham cracker with a cup of lemonade and expect it to turn into a graham cracker plant. You cannot sing by rubbing toothpaste on your elbow. No one has ever even tried these things in the name of passing the product off as vegetables and music, so implicit the rules are carved into our conscience.
Still, an original, amazing creation can be cultivated within the boundaries. The garden is unique to its climate, unique to the people who nurture or neglect it. The tone or timbre is unique to the person who vocalizes or plays the particular instrument.
One takes the seeds they have and the notes on the scale and the possibilities are limitless.
I haven’t heard people argue against this sound logic. No one is buying graham cracker lemonade plants in the produce section at the grocery store. We aren’t fooled by a sludgy mix of goo next to ripe red tomatoes and crunchy sweet peppers. No, it’s fruit and vegetables we want and expect.
No musician has ever made it onto stage rubbing toothpaste on their elbow. The audience would be weirded out and leave immediately. The liberty and expression that comes with songwriting and performing is meaningless without melody and rhythm. It’s music we want and expect.
I wonder sometimes if logic is too logical to the culture of today. Anarchy balks at logic, because rules are too rule-y. I read a book, Blackout, by Candace Owens. She muses on the state of black Americans as well as the history, present, and future of our nation. She surmises that we have become, altogether, so free and enlightened about ourselves that we’ve gone off the deep end of logic. Free—our enemies around us all defeated. Enlightened—because we are living at peace with individual rights and liberties.
Owens suggests that instead of being satisfied with our affluence, the culture of today looks for ways new ways to be at war. In short, people aren’t content to live at peace. There is always a new level to conquer, liberties that are curious and obscure to outsiders that live in other nations. Folks that would be delighted to feed their children or send them to school—think of their puzzlement over the “right” of aborting healthy babies and the “right” to pose as anything other than their birth gender.
Indeed, human nature is at war with itself, always self-seeking yet never satisfied. Always wanting what’s beyond the boundary without realizing there is only confusion beyond them—toothpasted elbows and graham cracker slop. What happens when an abortion brings you unexpected grief, regret, and self-loathing? What happens when gender-bending brings confusion, emptiness and isolation? Is it any wonder suicide plagues our young people? That a diagnosable mental illness affects one in four Americans?
It’s fairly easy to draw the conclusion that living life without natural boundaries is darkness and confusion. In the Word, God’s people try to escape the rules and fall into anarchy territory:
These are rebellious people, deceitful children, children unwilling to listen to the Lord’s instruction. They say to the seers, “See no more visions!” And to the prophets, “Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions. Leave this way, get off this path, and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!”
Isaiah 30:9-11
Sound familiar? Our culture is filled with people who hate authority and the laws of nature to the point of self-destruction.
God warns them, “this sin will become for you like a high wall, cracked and bulging, that collapses suddenly, in an instant. It will break in pieces like pottery, shattered so mercilessly that among its pieces not a fragment will be found for taking coals from a hearth or scooping water out of a cistern.”
Isaiah 30:13
But this is what He wants for us:
“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength…the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion…How gracious he will be when you cry for help! As soon as he hears, he will answer you.“
Isaiah 30:15,18,19
Life inside the lines is full of color, creativity, opportunity, contentment. In hindsight, it’s never been as much about rules—this and that—as it has been about order. The kind of order that makes way for healthy relationships. The kind that upholds a marriage vow as a promise so that when the waves start rocking the boat, nobody bails.
The kind that introduces forgiveness that wipes the slate clean.
It’s the kind of order that leads the way for children by example and doesn’t hedge questions about identity and sex before they are mature enough to understand it.
The order that balances the truth of God’s word (in quietness and trust is your strength…) with the crazy, chaotic world that screams, mob-like, “Don’t tell us what is right! Tell us pleasant things!”
I’ve seen it in my own life over and over—fruitful with peace, love, and self-control.
It’s abundant—like a well-watered garden planted in the sunshine.
It’s beautiful—like music.
