The wind blew ferociously across the stage last weekend at the White River State Park pavilion, where the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra was performing on a summer pops series. Families clustered on the grounds beneath us, sitting in lawn chairs or sprawling on blankets in the afternoon sun. They might have had little awareness of the blustery weather on stage, were it not for the constant flapping of the music on the stands or the frenzied attempts of my fellow musicians and I to secure our lawless pages with clothes pins.
I was sitting next to the concertmaster on the first stand, responsible to bring each piece of music up from its safe harbor under a leg of my chair and attach it to the music stand, turn the pages early by the strategic removal and replacement of clothes pins, and miss as few notes as possible in the process. The wind came in sudden gusts so strong they nearly blew our bows from our hands as they glided across our strings, while the audience smiled up at us from below, thoroughly entertained. (For those who may not know, this is part and parcel of the stage musician’s love and loathing of outdoor summer venues!)
All of this was going more or less well when the wind made a curious discovery: a music stand, face on, makes an excellent sail! It was at that point that I became inadvertently guilty of something stupidly heroic. It happened without warning: the wind slapped the music stand, sending it into a freefall. My left hand, violin still firmly in its grip, shot out to grab it. Simultaneously my left foot pressed down the base of the stand, bringing it rushing back up toward me and my fiddle. CRASH!
The Bible is brimming with impulsive behavior: Jeremiah denounces everyone in sight, smashing things like clay pots and false prophets to get his point across; Stephen picks a fight with a suspicious crowd in Jerusalem and pays the ultimate price; even Jesus gets glandular in the Temple, running out the money changers in a symbolic cleansing of injustice. While these are arguably well-intentioned acts, they come at a high price. They may be justified, but they argue undeniably in favor of counting the cost.
I don’t imagine that my stage antics at the Whiter River State Park attained to biblical proportions—although, the rush of a mighty wind certainly has that Bible feel about it. But they did put me in touch again with the importance of thinking before you act. After the CRASH, I found myself licking a bleeding finger, replacing a sliced e-string on stage, and contemplating a varnish repair on the top of my instrument.
In matters of faith it can be difficult to identify reasonable lines of action and response. How do we help people without actually hindering their growth? How do we advocate for others but not co-dependently? How do we strike a proper balance between love of neighbor and love of self? How do we act compassionately without donning a superhero cape or a martyr cloak? There are no easy answers to these questions. The best we can do is to slog through with eyes and hearts open and, yes, brains tuned to the common sense frequency. At some points we will overreact, at others under-react, and now and then hit it just right. More crucial, though, than missing the balance point is the blessed audacity by which we bother at all. This is what makes life sacred and good, even when it goes CRASH.
The stand blew over twice more during the concert. I watched it fall, once within inches of the guest performer who regarded us like would-be assassins. I would have loved to leap after it again, but resisted the urge. There are times and places for heroics, but never stupidity.
Yours unreservedly—within all reasonable limits…
Wyatt