Chloe's Violin

My granddaughter Chloe is learning to play the violin.

Chloe is a really delightful child, full of passion and sassy.  She is beautiful, witty, and tempramental.  She loves music;  she always has.  She comes over to my house and wants to play on my guitars. I sometimes let her plunck on the cheaper of the two, and she would say "Grandpa, do you like my music?"

One day I answered "That's not music."

She got a look on your face like I  had just hit her in the gut. "Isn't it beautiful?"

"You are beautiful," I  answered. "That's just noise."

It's fun to watch Chloe, in whatever she does--laugh, dance,  beat on a drum, play the guitar. I could watch her for hours.  Everything she does is a dance to me, every word she says is music.

But plunking on my guitar is not music. 

Now, Chloe is learning to play the violin--and she's making music and it really is beautiful--sometimes.

I am a little concerned about that.  Can a little girl with such a fire for life channel that fire through a bowstring?  Will she be enthusiastic about it for a while, until it turns into work,  and then let it drop going back into the fantasy of pretend music, or will she go on to the place where she will make beautiful music as a virtuoso violinist?  Will the music she feels inside of her own heart go out to others with  the same zest she feels inside?  I hope so. But I know for that to happen, she must work long and hard,  disciplining herself to get the music out.

When we are young, we have music  inside--we all do.  We want to let that music out, but we do not have the ability.  We plunk tunelessly on guitars and pianos,  we make karate kicks at invisible opponents,  we run marathons in our imaginations or score winning touchdowns.  Other people call it "pretending" but it's not really a pretense. It is our attempt to display the image of God we know inside.  We were made to do great things, to master the universe, each in our own unique way.

But we find we can't do it without discipline.  At some point,  fantasy runs into reality, and we give up at the difficulty of living. Unexpressed, the music dies.  As we grow older, we forget the tune. 

There is a natural rhythm in live, a kind of "donut" of passion with a hole in the middle called "drudgery." We begin a new endeavor enthusiastically.  We are eager to pick up a musical instrument, take up exercise, or to begin a quiet time with God.  In our minds, we imagine ourselves to be a great musician,  athlete, or saint. That imaginary future success sustains us for a while, and we feed off the joy of the imaginary, but it isn't real. It's not even a real hope, but a wish,  so it doesn't last long.  After a day, a week, or month, we start to get bored with it.  Our passion goes on to something else.  We get bored, and what began as  music soon becomes a mindless drone.

But we keep plugging away,  not because we want to, but because we know we should.  We make a choice of passions. We are tempted by other things which promise a momentary joy, but we do not give in to them. We deny them, because we know that all temptation is a form of adultery, a call to cheat on our first love.  We keep at it, running laps,  scratching on the violin,  reading the Bible through the "begat" chapters and the endless complaints of the prophets,  until somewhere inside the drudgery we see the glimmers of real music and real joy, not the pretend joy of the beginning but the realized joy of knowing what we are doing and doing it well. 

I heard a statement recently about practicing music, that if you really want to be good at is you should practice two hours a day. The first hour is rote repetition, scales, skill building, while the second hour is pure joy.  We can't get to the joy part without the drudgery.  A ballerina spends hours practicing forms, bending at the bar,  starving herself,  building endurance,  so that she can perform magic on the stage.  A magician practices his sleight of hand until his fingers almost fall off, and until he can't stand to look at another card.  Then he starts to do real magic.  A saint gets callouses on his knees  in silence--fasting, praying, reading,  meditating, until he can come to that place of seeing visions of third heaven.  There is no easy way through the dark night of the soul, but there is a fiery dawn on the other side. 

So Chloe is learning the violin.  One day, it may sit alone in her closet gathering dust, like my guitar did for years, her mother's viola, or that old exercise machine we were going to use every week.  I hope not, though. I hope she will be wiser than we are while she is young enough to enjoy it; that she will work through the drudgery of discipline until the music she has on the inside can come out of her fingers and amaze the world.