I need a volunteer, and I need someone that doesn’t know how to play piano. Is there anybody
that does not know how to play piano? Seriously, I need somebody. Terry, you’ll do it. You do
not know how to play piano? Amanda, can you get off that bench for a second? Let’s hear your
best. Please go ahead. That’s really bad, isn’t it? Why does that sound bad? Terry’s a great
person but why does that sound bad? She has no clue what she’s doing, right? Thank you for
volunteering, that’s very courageous of you.
Amanda: dissonance and consonance. Real quick can you play a dissonance sound for us?
Dissonance is like that, something’s not right here and then all of a sudden there’s the result.
Give one more example. Beautiful. We need resolve in our lives. There’s a lot of dissonance in
our world.
We live in a world and it’s the world of modernity. It’s a world where everybody kind of makes
their own rules; everybody decides what’s right and what’s wrong; everybody kind of does their
own thing. It’s pretty much like Frank Sinatra, “My Way” taken to the 9th degree. It’s the world
that we live in. The world that we live in is a world of dissonance. What I mean by that is we
don’t all have this moral compass, we don’t all have this same faith or believe in God or even
what is objective truth or how reality even works. Because of that, we have a lot of dissonance
in our lives and when dissonance is taken to its most radical level, it’s tragedy and we have a
lot of tragedy in our lives. God wants to bring that dissonance, that tragedy, to resolve. He
wants it to bring beauty.
The truth is that we all have this innate sense of beauty. We know when something sounds
beautiful, even if we know nothing about music, we can say that it sounds really good. We
know if somebody is singing bad around you, you’re like, ‘hey that sounds really bad.’ We just
know what beauty sounds like.
We hear in the scriptures today, and I want to reflect on a phrase from St. Basil. St. Basil talks
about God, and he says, “God, who is the Creator of all, has harmoniously arranged the whole
universe just as a master musician produces a single harmony from a great variety of tones.”
The first reading talks about David. We hear this notion that a musician improvises their own
music on the harp. After doing a little study of what this means, improvising is a negative term
here. It’s saying that this musician is trying to make his own song. He’s also trying to devise his
own accompaniment. Not only is he trying to do his own thing, but he’s also trying to make
other people follow his crazy ideas of what really isn’t beauty, but what really isn’t music.
We have a lot of voices in our world that are trying to do that. Voices that try to not only
express what is untrue but also voices that try to get us all believing in untrue. Voices that bring
about dissonance rather than harmony. In the Church we call this natural law that on each and
every one of our hearts God places His natural law. Just by being alive, we can know some
level of truth, some level of goodness and some level of beauty; it’s written on our hearts.
All the great philosophers over time, Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates all talked about natural law
as being implanted on our hearts and natural to us, meaning that for all people, for all times,
for all places, for all eternity there is a law planted on our hearts that is unchanging. There is a
law planted in us that can’t be manipulated or tweaked or rationalized. This law brings us to the
truth of what is good in our world and what is evil. The basis of moral theology can be boiled
down to that point. Do good and avoid evil. If we all did this in our lives, our world would be a
better place. Do good and avoid evil.
In the First Reading we hear that sometimes we don’t do that. Sometimes we improvise,
sometimes we make our own accompaniment, sometimes we live our lives like Frank Sinatra
and say, “I’m going to do it my way. I don’t care what God’s way is.” When we do that, it not
only impacts ourselves, but it also impacts our family, it impacts our parish, it impacts our
world. We all know that right now we live in such a time of polarization, such a time of division,
such a time of dissonance and none of this dissonance comes from God. All this division that
is being created is not the Father’s desire. God desires harmony. He desires to bring us
together.
I’ve been tremendously blessed to travel many parts of the world, in Africa and Central
America and Europe and people of all different languages and cultures and sometimes being
with the poorest of the poor. The one thing that has always connected me is music; it really is
the universal language. It doesn’t matter what country I’m in or what language they speak,
there is always a universal language of music. I always found that whenever I am with
someone that I don’t know, a stranger literally from across the world, if we spend the evening
singing together, they play drums or I play guitar or they sing in their language and I sing in my
language or we harmonize together, it creates this unity and this bond. One of the reasons that
we sing together at Mass, that when we come together and we sing as God’s Body, it creates
this harmony and this sense of togetherness.
In the world that we live in, in this post-modern world, it is a world where there are no rules and
there is no truth. But there is truth and there are rules, but the truth and the rules aren’t created
to oppress us. God’s not giving us His law to oppress us and to keep us from being the people
he wants us to be, He gives us this law and the rule to help us flourish. So, Terry thank you for
volunteering but it’s clear you haven’t had a lot of musical education (laughter).
In music there are many rules. There is timing, and there is pacing, and there are notes, and
there are scales, and there are harmonies, and all of these rules and laws are to help bring
about beauty. Just as someone from America experiences someone in Africa, there is that
same rhythm, there’s that same type of music that exists. It’s written in our hearts. Because we
live in a world that has thrown aside any structure or thrown aside any law or thrown aside any
truth, we are experiencing a lot of dissonance.
I would just encourage us to really find ways of overcoming that dissonance and returning to
harmony. What are the ways that we can sing together? What are the ways that we can speak
and have authentic good, genuine human dialogue? What are the ways that we can care for
each other and love each other?
One of the natural laws that’s brought about in the Gospel today is this notion that Jesus is
trying to tell us, He talks about hell about forty times in Scripture, and this is one of the times
and it is about not caring for the poor. What He’s trying to get at here is that there is a
relationship that we have with each other, even with the poor and it’s a universal law that when
we see somebody who is worse off than us, that our hearts should go out to them, that our
hearts should care for them.
I was downtown the other night. It was during the Indians game, and I don’t like paying for
parking, so I walk really far, and I park in very shady areas. And this guy, of course, came up to
me as I parked my car and as I start walking away, I see out of the corner of my eye that it
looks like he’s carrying a hacksaw. I don’t know what he’s actually carrying but something like
that.
My first thought is, “Oh no, I’m about to meet my maker, this is going to be bad.” Then he tells
me something about parking, that I can’t park there after six. Well, I know you can park there
after six, it’s free after six. Then he starts approaching me and I’m like, “Oh boy, here we go.”
Then, of course he says, “Hey I need some money.” My first reaction is that I just want to get
where I’m going. I pulled out my wallet and I’m thinking this is stupid I should not be pulling out
my wallet right now. By the way, it’s not a hacksaw, it’s a sawzall. I don’t know why he’s
carrying it, but all these things raced into my mind and I didn’t know what to do at that moment.
It wasn’t until afterwards, it happens to me and I’m sure it happens to you, that I thought back
and I realized the guy was asking for food. He wanted to have dinner and what if I were to say
to him, “I’m going right now to this show I have to be at but when I come back can I take you
out to dinner?” What if I actually got to know him and resonate with him?
Because we live in this world that has completely thrown out any sense of harmony or any
sense of law or any sense of good or any sense of universal truth, there is a tendency to divide
and there is a tendency to have that dissonance. I just think it’s important that we realize those
moments in our hearts when we realize there’s a dissonance. Maybe it’s between you and your
spouse or you and your family or you and your coworker or maybe it’s between you and that
person that you just can’t stand. When there is that dissonance, can we try to find harmony?
Can we try to find resolve? Can we try to find something that we can relate to in that other
person that God is calling us to see?
The law that is written on our hearts is love. We’ve given in to the dissonance of hate and
division, let us now return once more to love.
