Sunday, February 5, 2012

A Single Note

Your life is a single note, played by a single instrument, in a single song of an eternal symphony.  All your life is a single note in a complex aria, but the concert never ends.  Like other notes, it rises up, almost uncertainly at first, then reaches a point of clearness---almost confidence---and finally fades away as if in its prime.  It all happens so rapidly; the note fades at that very moment when it seemed to be coming into its fullness.  And all your living, all your loving, all your hoping, and dreaming, and despairing; all your life is expressed and made manifest in the bittersweet tone of that one note.  All the joy and heartache of a human life is given full voice in the richness of a transitory note, in a never-ending symphony.  All your words, all your learning, all your myriad thoughts come to this: one brief note in an eternal performance.  All the many words that could never capture "truth," in the end, are captured fully by one ephemeral note.  Then there is nothing more,  except the symphony itself...which never ends.  Our only task is to live joyful, hope-filled lives until our music fades.  We must sound our note strong and clear before it falls silent and recedes into the Mystery from which it came.  The journey is from Mystery into Mystery, but there is no fear, for we ourselves are Mystery.  It is our home.  

And after your note fades out, slipping mutely back into the continuing opus of life, it is swallowed up again into the measureless swell of music that "bears all its sons away."  The beauty of it is that no note functions in isolation.  In the great concerto of the spheres, notes rise up and fade away, they appear and disappear, but they all take part in an inestimable drama that never ends.  All your life is a single note in a vast, unknowable but infinitely beautiful symphony that is the very life of God.  And there will always be life somewhere. 

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