Beginning the Song

Photo Credit: Ryan Roth-Klinck

By Andrea Lingle

I am sitting in an old auditorium. Stark white walls set the black-robed chairs in relief. The stage, which I am facing from a raised viewpoint in the back, is a darkened canvas, surrounded on three sides by a decorative frame. There is a disco ball hanging from the front edge of the opening, like an orb of potential fun. It probably is part of an old school. These chairs have probably held generations of feet, swinging inches above the ground, listening to generations of mouths trying to explain “how things work.” Now it is a folk-art center hosting a group of people teaching children how to play bluegrass music. Currently, I am listening to a loosely cardiganed mouth trying to teach fourteen beginner guitarists how to play an “A” chord.

The sounds coming out of the various sized guitars is not the A chord’s ideal form, but it is the beginning of music.

These budding musicians are not the only discordant things one hears right now. Rising housing prices, the cost of food, who’s in, who’s out, what’s correct, what’s allowed, what’s true shriek like razor blades on guitar strings. These are the discordant sounds of our shared life together.

In the beginning…the earth was formless and empty—a chaos embraced by Spirit…Then God said, “Let us make…”

There are beginnings. There are crashings and callings and tentative strummings. There are mistakes and reorderings. There is trial and error. There is frustration and failure.

With every new idea, community, family, organization, garden, or world, there is breath and a beloved formlessness. Why did the Genesis Creation story not read like this:

In the beginning, God created all that is.

There was an animating Idea and an action. Enough said. Here we all are. You and me and the kids strumming guitars in former school auditoriums. But the story tellers knew that the process is what brings the story to life. It is in the delighted smile of the twelve-year-old who learned how to strum today, and not the Hertz per second, that music dwells. It is in the embrace of a dying loved one and the constant self-emptying of a river and the monstrous wail of a frustrated toddler that Truth dwells. It all must be dwelt with and wrestled with long past the break of day. This is the truth of beginnings. This is the hope of Grace.