Mortal Remains
The Symphony of Comprehension
by S. M. Hutchens
There's a little girl in our church, severely retarded, who likes to sing with the congregation. She can't come close to carrying a tune, and what she produces is a kind of croaking descant that enters and leaves the hymns at odd and unpredictable intervals. It's not tuneful in any recognizable sense, but in a way difficult to describe it seems to belong, and not simply because she is one of us and "it takes all kinds." As far as her singing is not part of the music, the congregation carries her along, and as far as it is, there is a larger aesthetic picture in view, of which it is a mysterious and inexplicably authentic part. As such, it points beyond the song itself to the transcendent ground of music, from which come things that are part of our songs but that also draw us beyond them to music's very font.
When I was younger, I would have regarded her noises as something charitably to be borne, would congratulate myself for putting up with them, and hope things could be arranged so she would go happily away—but I'm getting old now and can hear and see quite a bit better than I used to. The universe under divine governance is becoming larger and less comprehensible to my present sensorium, and I am feeling the need for better equipment. It occurs to me that with respect to a great many more things than a little girl's song, we are dealing with larger pictures than we can take in when we try to order our perceptions on "what belongs" in the many things we have been given to contemplate to that end.
When, for example, the songs of the birds and insects and perhaps of falling waters are in mind—the things we are used to thinking of when we consider the pleasant sounds of nature—the crack and boom of lightning and thunder break in upon us like the awkward vocalizations of a child—they interrupt; they do not belong in the schema.
Or do they? Beethoven put them in his Pastoral Symphony so that, after the storm and because of it, the renewed world would be sweeter and more joyful than it had been before. The natural picture was masterfully enlarged. Everything was seen to belong in it, once perspective was gained. This is not precisely the beauty of Aristotelian symmetry, but it is a pictorial illustration that the transcendental beauty perceived in symmetry is to be referred immediately back to the ineffable mystery of a transcendent, communing Ground. ("That which may be known about God is plain to them, for God has shown it to them.")
The Finale to Come
A romantic imagination might stop there, resisting a full picture pressed upon it that includes the roar of a flood, or the scream of a hare in the eagle's talons, cacophony presented as music, or some deliberate perversion of nature—and not only by those who charge God, if he dares to exist, with pointless evil that extinguishes all value there might be in enlarged perception. But our Scriptures have an answer for that. They tell us that suffering, with all evil, is not fundamentally "natural." It is an icon of and participant in something that has entered a world that was not made to be its home—but even so, will be "put in its place," will be comprehended.
As far from imagination as it must for now remain, the biblical picture of the peaceable kingdom, of nature as it should be, is the unimaginable place where the lion (who is built to kill) eats straw like the ox. But even the devil and his angels play their parts in the finale by providing for the glorification of the saints, the demolition of the first creation, and the tenancy of hell, all to the glory of God. Thus the Great Work is finished; everything, including the curious descants, belongs; and the Maker can say with finality at the end as he did in the beginning that all is Very Good.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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