Tag: hope

Adoration

It is cold and dark but still I step out of the car, drawing my coat tighter around me while crossing the mostly empty parking lot. Ascending three stairs and pulling open the heavy door, I slip inside.

An hour a week, set apart.

Monday nights, although it could be any day or any night – any time at all, really.

Whatever works.

Once inside, a hush envelopes as I exhale into silence. Dimness casts geometry shadows on domino pews edging the aisle to the altar, bathed in light. I pad noiselessly past the other people who stopped here, too.

Maybe for life, for light, for silence, for answers, to speak, to listen.

Who knows why?

There are as many reasons as people.

I slide into a worn pew, soft chanting from somewhere wafts around me and I settle onto the kneeler. Before me is the monstrance – haloed in light and just

perfectly still, perfectly quiet, perfectly there

for you who might step into that space and wrap its essence around you like a comfortable cloak, and think about what you may.

Soaring on Strings

What has forty seven strings, seven pedals, and over two thousand moving parts?

If you guessed a harp, you are correct.

This weekend, I accepted an invitation to attend a solo concert given by a renown harpist. In doing so, I was treated to an afternoon that I will not likely forget.

The soloist was Merynda Adams, a lovely musician who is as experienced playing gigs at celebrity weddings as she is accompanying philharmonic orchestras world-wide. The delightful setting that afternoon was a quaint farm church in the small village of Meyersville, at the juncture of three off-the-beaten-track country roads in central New Jersey. No bigger than an average sized classroom, the church provided a cozy gathering place that seemed the perfect vessel for an intimate concert.

When she began to play, two things struck me immediately. The first was that the cascade of notes swirling, dancing, and cavorting through air could not possibly be coming from just one instrument; the assault was overwhelming in its beauty. My second reaction was to be mesmerized. Watching the artist’s hands flutter fluidly, rapidly, lightly, effortlessly over the strings gave me reason to affirm the capacity of human intellect to accomplish miraculous feats such as this one – the playing of this harp.

I was reduced to tears on more than one occasion for the splendor of the music.

Experiences such as this garner faith in the propensity of the human spirit to do good things. For all of the negativity we encounter each day, Merynda Adams and her harp give me opposing hope. Hope in the tenacious notion that if we use our gifts wisely and well, the results can transcend our human condition to lift us above and beyond, in spite of ourselves.

That is heavenly music.