Imagine Pope Benedict XVI playing his piano, his head bent down as if in prayer, his mouth pursed in deep concentration. Only his fingers move dancing over the piano keys. What music comes out from his hands?
It is music to show us the way out of the spiritual tangles of our lives, music to pull us out of abject conundrum. Music to tell us the story of how the world escapes the grasp of any one person’s control, how so much different it has become from times past.
And if the world was once easily changed by the will of powerful men. We see now that it is not that way anymore. Indeed, the world grows ever more complex with every new development of technology and every new twist of history. The modern age was the age of the individual. Now we see how truly small the individual has become in the larger ever-expanding context of the universe.
The individual is not the center of everything. The center is not anywhere specific. It is competed and fought for still. And yet it moves from place to place. And for most people it is only a momentary blip inside the virtual world of global information. Who is the most famous today? What event gathered the most likes? These things change by the minute now. Nothing stays the same for too long. And we are right to wonder if anything really matters too much in this world where nothing ever lasts for very long.
The world is greatly changed. That much we can be sure of. If we must learn how to deal better with it from hereon then we must learn to become different. To change with the times. To change ourselves.
And what better way is there but to change what we do everyday? To spend our days in prayer as to return to piano-playing are just as worthwhile as anything else. Especially if we have come to such an age when we have to wonder why God still keeps us alive, waking us up from our dreams of every night into another good morning.
We must have to decide what to do with it. Will this day be truly ours? Will we set ourselves free by it? These are questions raised by the Pope’s piano playing. Is he playing mostly to save his own soul? Is he trying to save all of us? Why not both?
Let us presume he has done all he can to save the world otherwise. Like most of us, he must have grown up thinking the world would be saved by more peace and less hunger, more freedom, a shorter divide between rich and poor as well as between the powerful and the powerless. He has been Pope. If he could not bring us any closer to those ends when he sat on that throne then we must presume there is no easy way to get there.
And the piano presents itself to him with a choice of black and white keys. A small tap of a finger sends a mechanical impulse into the machine that sends a hammer into a set of strings. A series of taps, a line of different notes, a phrase of music. They all blend together in the mind and always we become more aware of something within ourselves. Something to tell us the world is not only cold logic. We are not entirely alone even when there is no one else in the room besides ourselves.
The music is still music even when there is no one there to listen besides the player and his God. The music is also prayer. And who is to say that is not as powerful as being Pope?