Hear the Music Again
Last week I had a dream. I know, I know, “Listening to someone talk about their dream is a nightmare,” to quote Seinfeld. But bear with me.
In the dream, I was on death row for a minor traffic violation from years earlier. Don't ask me to explain dream logic. It had all the makings of a Kafkaesque nightmare, but unexpectedly the focus of the dream quickly shifted from the sentence to what I would do with the time I had left.
What wisdom did I need to pass on to my children?
What affairs did I need to set in order?
What creative works did I need to finish?
Death, whether our own or that of a loved one, brings an urgency that cuts through all the noise in our lives and helps us see what really matters.
This is captured in Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Only on his deathbed does Ivan realize how much of his life had been spent pursuing what others considered respectable rather than what was truly life-giving. The things that once seemed so important suddenly looked hollow. As death approaches, Ivan wonders whether “those scarcely perceptible impulses” he had spent a lifetime suppressing “might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.”
It’s a haunting realization. What if the truest, most vital invitations in our lives are also the quietest? What if we’ve become so accustomed to the noise of achievement, distraction, and routine that we’ve lost the ability to hear them?
That question echoes in the words of Christian songwriter John Guerra. His song “Reckoner (An Axe Laid at the Root)” offers one of the most incisive diagnoses of our contemporary spiritual malaise I’ve heard in recent years. He writes, “It’s not that we doubt that a stone can turn into bread. It’s just that we doubt that we’re hungry at all.” Perhaps that’s our condition. We aren’t lacking for invitations from God so much as we’ve lost our appetite for them, feasting instead on a smorgasbord of spiritless substitutes.
Like the crowds Jesus describes in Matthew 11, we no longer hear the flute that calls us to dance or the funeral song that calls us to mourn.
But Jesus doesn’t end with lament. The rebuke gives way to invitation. As Eugene Peterson paraphrases the moment in The Message, “Jesus resumed talking to the people, but now tenderly.” Christ is “ready to go over it line by line with anyone willing to listen.”
Are we willing?
When Jesus says, “Come to me,” the invitation isn’t simply a rest from our burdens. It’s an invitation to wake up and hear the music again.
Jesus invites us into a different way of life altogether, one marked not by fear and striving but by rest, joy, and abundant life. Hopefully we don’t have to wait for a deathbed, a diagnosis, or a crisis to hear the music. But if that’s what it takes to awaken us to what truly matters, perhaps even the funeral dirge can become a gift.
May we hear the music again. May we dance when joy calls for dancing, mourn when grief calls for mourning, and recognize beneath them both the constant invitation of Christ, always calling us into the truest life we can know.
