The night hit a high spot when the two boys made the scene. They brought out the violins from their cases and began to tune them, a sight that fascinated me, because, despite their tender age and the diminutive size of the violins, the little boys behaved like professionals, the result no doubt of a training that requires everything to be de rigueur. In like manner, they propped up the musical score in front of them, lodged the violin’s lower bout on a shoulder to keep the chinrest ready, held the bow above the strings, then looked at each other for the signal to begin.
We were all smiles as we awaited the first piece, none more so than the boys’ grandfather, who was celebrating his birthday and for whom the boys were offering their performance as a surprise gift. And as they played, I could not help being transported to a world in which everything was flying, less for lack of gravity than for an excess of joy. Everything—houses, people, trees, dogs, surprising the birds.
I often get this feeling in the presence, not just of the beautiful, like the sight of the children playing music, but also of the numinous.
The mysterium tremendum comes over me especially when I read the Gospels. In his account of the Ascension of Christ, Mark writes that Jesus said to his disciples, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
Jesus added, “These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons, they will speak new languages. They will pick up serpents (with their hands), and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
And then Mark concludes, “So then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them, was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God.”
In this passage, brief and clear, Mark could not be more direct. As he describes it, the natural conditions yielded to the divine, suspending the physical laws, among them of gravity, such that the apostles might well have seen everything take to the air as Jesus ascended, and felt their hearts soaring like kites while their eyes followed the Lord for as far as the day allowed.
And we know that, rather than disheartened, they were encouraged by the Lord’s departure. Mark tells us that “[T]hey went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.”
Quite coincidentally, after the regulation “Happy Birthday,” the boys played “The Prayer,” lyrics and music by David Foster and Carole Bayer Sager, a most popular song, which opens with this line—“I pray you’ll be our eyes, and watch us where we go.” Was it not that, at the moment of the Ascension, the disciples were the eyes watching Jesus being taken up into heaven, but that thenceforward, as he promised, Jesus would in turn be the eyes watching them?
And of that evening I ask if there can be a love greater than the love of the birthday celebrant watching his grandchildren, age 9 and 10, revel in melody? And if there is a love more infinite than that of God as he watches each one of us play the music of time?