BEGINNING AGAIN THE UNFINISHED SYMPHONY – Part II
As we said last week, one way to begin again the unfinished symphony is to keep ourselves open for inspiration.
Another way to begin again is to submit ourselves to the divine composer-conductor. Or as St. Paul put it, we need to submit ourselves to the Spirit of God who liberates us from being slaves to passions so as to be divine sons and daughters free to do God’s will.
A lot of us are like Frank Sinatra’s song and want to do it “My Way”, even over God’s way. Theologian and philosopher, Robert Fitch, once said that if the sin of the Roman Catholic Church has been tyranny, the sin of Protestant churches has been anarchy. With its emphasis on individualism and freedom of opinion, Protestantism, and especially Congregationalism, often have degenerated into the anarchy of everyone for themselves.
And in America, our tendency toward political, religious and spiritual anarchy often arises out of a spiritual and intellectual vacuum. Many of us need a cohering center for life, but lacking it, we become a law unto ourselves, heedless of any higher claim.
The British historian, Arnold Toynbee, says in his book, A Study of History, that we humans need “to see the universe as it is in the sight of God, instead of seeing it with the distorted vision of one of God’s self-centered creatures.” Dr. Toynbee goes on to say that “human nature’s moral goal is to make the self will coincide with God’s will instead of pursing self-rewarding purposes of its own.”
The sometime editor of the Observer in London, Connor Cruise O’Brien, has remarked that there is a kind of “spiritual vacuum” at the heart of Western society. “Call it loss of spiritual moorings, it stems,” says Geoffrey Godsell of the Christian Science Monitor, “from the breath-taking material progress and revolutionary change wrought by the human race over the past two centuries – the full impact which has begun to be felt only over the past decades.”
Consequently, there remains, says Editor O’Brian, “an unsatisfied need, the need for oneness, for the sacred, for God.” And if that is not filled by authentic spiritual reality, by the authority of God, we “may not be all that pleased,” says Mr. O’Brien, “when some rough beast shambles in to fill it.”
Indeed, if God doesn’t act as the center of our life story, our unfinished symphony, some other authority will – be it money or passion or pleasure or rage or violence. But when God is the composer-conductor of our lives, how beautiful our life’s story can be, because even the sour notes and discords God can rearrange into a melody of good. Because as the Bible says, “all things work together for good for those who love God, and are called according to his purposes.” (Romans 8 28)
