It was a strange time in his life. He had been many things, experienced many things, perceived many things in as many ways, fought and lost many battles, won still others. But, never in all that time would he ever have used the term, stable. Young, handsome, energetic? Maybe, once. Bright, eager? Still, albeit tempered. Passionate? Sure, but with a more nuanced meaning. Confident? Perhaps, maybe…not sure. Focused? Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Stable is an odd word, one best used to describe a table or toilet seat sufficient to the task of supporting their respective burdens with certainty and ease. Give them your worst and what comes out bruised is ego, not the thing itself. They’re…trustworthy.

Trustworthy! Eeeww, how unsexy. He had hoped for a word more like solid or chill. Probably, the word that best illustrated his present life was rest. The overwhelming feelings of inadequate job performance, deadline anxiety, friendship uncertainties, identity questions, and fears of many kinds, including those of “right” doctrine or “biblical” theology (whatever that means) were all beginning to fade into the background.

The experimental days of project du jour held less fascination for him than previously. Instead, the growing appeal of quieter, simpler ventures held sway over the quickly passing days. He yet harbored dreams and aspirations, the hopes of any person with a heartbeat. However, they were rather less…insistent, less bothersome somehow, full of timeline-laden expectation and anxiety.

His trajectory fifteen years earlier had been one of skyrocketing up the ecclesiastical ladder of success (you better believe there’s such a thing). He had begun this upward career-clamoring by means of big, glittery, evangelical worship leadership. His growing bevy of names to drop, gloat-able experiences, and boast-able accomplishments all kept astride his equally rising ego…and the accompanying stress.

But there was a problem. His thirsty soul was getting in the way. When it appeared there was nowhere to go but up, his soul shouted Stop! in the name of love; let’s go down instead. It was barking louder every day, refusing to be ignored. A spiritual thirst had taken hold coupled with a theological crisis of epic proportions, denying the upward mobility to which his career seemed to be pointing.

In a few short years, he had gone from the music staff of a large, well-healed, hard to ignore big-box church in a wealthy, resort town to a much smaller, über-educated, College town church to a still smaller but diverse one stuck in a semi-arid, fruit growing valley in the middle of, quite literally, nowhere. Here there were no names to drop because people with “names” tended not to live there. Gone were the multiple monthly, high profile gigs that promised regional notoriety and decent pocket cash. Gone was the euphoric environment proffered by the diversity, youthful panache, ideological smorgasbord, and creative playground of a College town. Gone were the long, rainy days so conducive to his creative process and emotional make-up.

Taking its place was residence in a small city known more for its slow drivers, monster truck rallies, poverty, gang violence, county fair, and conservative politics. Where would such a man as he find kindred spirits in such a place? God’s faithfulness however, even in an environment seemingly hostile to his personal mode de vie seemed to emerge serendipitously as a fine dust collecting on the windshield of his spiritual bus.

In his ever-mutating thoughts on the matter one thing occurred to him as a central feature of his life over the past few years. He had learned to stop. If ever there was a singular gift to a healthy spiritual life it is Shabbat, Sabbath, holy pause.

The idea is beautifully mirrored in the fermata. Looking a bit like a beady-eyed Cyclops with bad hair it is the musical symbol that, like the crossing guard, tells all ongoing traffic to pause indefinitely while other, more important matters, may be addressed. It holds things back, avoiding danger and confusion.

To pause suggests a willingness to stop indefinitely and count one’s steps. The days of our lives (no relation) hurtle through time and space at a frightful tempo. We are often blind to this fact (as was he) largely because we become hypnotized by how much momentum and power we pick up along the way. But, despite their apparent beauty and order, without sufficient space for pause, they begin to sound more like an unwieldy stampede of bucking, snorting notes headed for unseen cliffs of cacophony (think Lucille Ball after too much Scotch singing Schubert).

The fermata is the Sabbath of music. It shows up not as regularly but performs a similar function. In music, as in life, are surprise, delight, order, disorder and angst…beauty. As any composer will tell you however, music is made even more magnificent against the backdrop of its own silences. Rests are the music of silence. The fermata is the rest of exhalation. It holds things in place, defusing the potentially damaging effects of kinetic energy. Rather than something wonderful ending up a steam train careening over a cliff, the musical Sabbath of fermata puts the brakes on. Sabbath secures us to the manuscript where the Composer’s grace and skill can adjust potential weak spots and lovingly dote on us. Our music can cool down, let off some steam, and regroup before beginning its forward movement again. Music is made more beautiful through its silences, its pauses. God makes us more beautiful in exactly the same way. As we pause long enough to take care of overused musical sentences, our emerging symphony is writ large across our life manuscript where all may experience its beauty.

He yearned to say that advancing age had brought the wisdom he craved. He’d had his moments. But ironically, some of his most egregious errors, lapses in judgment and felony mishaps had occurred smack dab in his late middle age. Chronos is never a guarantee of kairos. Subsequent time and reflective pauses however had brought a sense of perspective that fanned out behind him like an ever-growing wake, revealing his course, in a sea more than half traveled. The music was slowly beginning to make sense.

These considerations allowed him pause (pun intended) to reflect on some of the reasons for his place in life. Although not without pain and challenge, the idea of stability no longer seemed so…tedious. No, it was a gift, a grace lovingly massaged into the music of his life.

Maybe it wasn’t such a strange time after all.

Photos courtesy of www.bluemassgroup.com, www.rogerbourland.com,

www.theoildrum.com, and www.cruisecritic.com, respectively.

The impossibly orange morning sky mocks my melancholy and seeks to repeal my commitment to a sober day. The feathered fingers of precocious light embroider a morning otherwise condemned to generous helpings of over-thinking and under-living. Like passive-aggression to a psyche better suited to hiding than fighting, I brace myself for the full welcome of morning and, coffee in hand, steep in my self-righteous adherence to less than full inclusion in the happy chatter. If another somber, artsy day of writing and pain-mining was truly what I was after, then why the open laptop at the center table of my local Starbucks? Dear God, am I becoming “that guy”- the artsy, Mac-toting, liberal coffee snob?

Those like me are typically well-versed in the finer points of self-pity and overwrought, dilapidated prisons of Freudian fear wed to Jungian collective consciousness, albeit devoid of the intended mutuality to which it points (or much consciousness for that matter, either). The artistic temperament, housed in most musicians, writers, painters and the like, excels at emotional dumpster diving for those occasional jewels found at the bottom of a whole lot of shit. For some strange reason, it contributes to the creative process, for me at least. The smelly job of wading through my fly infested felch gives a certain twisted pleasure if the reward is a gleaming bit of writing or lyric or melody.

Even as I write these words I can’t help thinking to myself, is it any wonder type-As generally hate guys like me?! Growing up, I was that kid who was either so preoccupied with his own swirling world of imagination that I could just as easily walk into walls as find my desk or whose swashbuckling stories of whim and woe – many of them stolen – regaled whatever girl was most likely to buy into it. In fact, a gift with words (my parents and friends called it bullshit) from an early age made finding friends an easy task, especially girls. This was not because I was particularly good-looking but more so because I was a skilled navigator of whatever self-projections were the most captivating. One might say I was a bit like a buzzard who scavenged tidbits of social detritus suitable to any given moment but who prettied them up with the fineries of clever, droll turns of phrase.

There’s a problem with this however. It has meant that a pleasant, even-tempered melancholy, peppered liberally with witty banter instead of good, old-fashioned hard work and embracing failures, have propped up my life artificially. I’m smart enough to have talked my way out of being wise. And now, at nearly 50, I realize just how little I really know; how little I’ve truly lived. It would have been better to shut-up until I actually had something worthwhile to say!

Now, lest I begin wallowing in self-pity and regret, let me assure you that this demeanor, although prevalent, is not an entirely accurate picture of my modus operandi. I suppose the most apt metaphor I can find for my life is that of the Major Seventh chord.

The Major Seventh chord is non-definitive, unlike the Dominant Seventh chord that pushes its way around until it gets what it wants: resolution. The Dominant Seventh chord is the spoiled child that has never had a need go unmet. Ever. And we get to hear about it regularly and insistently. It needs ground zero to be happy and is pissed off when it must hang around for any length of time without that resolution. It’s like the guy standing at the urinal but forgetting to put stuff away before walking out of the restroom. It’s unsightly, largely unnecessary (unless you’re from Australia) and, well, kinda stupid.

In musical terms, the Major Seventh chord has a raised seventh degree of the scale. She has moved past the standard seventh to a higher plane of consciousness less impacted by the need to settle everything but still yearning after something else. It is still built on a good foundation of a root, followed by a strong and happy major third, and another minor third on top of that. All the building blocks are in place to produce something of strength and beauty. To add the seventh is to add something uncertain, even unstable. The number of notes begins to feel crowded like too many people on a bus after taco night at the pub. Something has to give.

The Dominant Seventh says, in essence, fuck you, this is my show and you bloody well better serve up my demands for a trip back to home plate. The Major Seventh chord has a higher sensibility about it. She never demands anything. She suggests something, something angst ridden and indefinable. Her top note signifies searching, longing. The seventh note of an eight-note diatonic scale is what musicians call a leading tone because it’s leading us back “home” wherever “home” happens to be. However, in her case, there is a kind of contentment with the in-between liminality of a bossy Dominant and a restful Tonic. A quaint story of dubious origin tells of Mozart’s father, Leopold who, in his final attempt to get Wolfie out of bed, went to the piano and played the first seven notes of a diatonic scale, leaving it unresolved. Within seconds, feet were heard flying down the stairs to play the final note. To a musician, it’s a sin akin to lighting the curtains on fire and then walking away.

Major Seventh chords practically defined the 1970s’ Adult Contemporary music scene. Artists such as Bread, America, Gordon Lightfoot and Don MacLean built entire careers on them. They’re perfect for songs about lover’s triangles with the loser singing. They reek of the melancholy I’m so in love with.

And that is my point. Those of us condemned to live in the spongy greyness of our own articisms can ill afford too fine a definition of who we are. We don’t want to be too pinned down, boxed up or, God forbid, understood. And yet, deep within, there remains a fervent longing for just that: to be known, heard, experienced. If I am to find my best self, I’ll have to settle for the delicate balance of sadness and hope enshrined in the Major Seventh chord. It is life in the rain, an honest addiction to melancholy.

Frankly, it has served me well.