Chord Structure

This morning I woke up a little earlier than I have for awhile. I feel an urgency today to synchronize my heart even closer to the heart of God, for He knows what is coming today and knows when I need extra grace to encounter things I may know nothing about. That's one of the wonderful things about God, that His Spirit is always ready to prepare me to meet everything, and I don't need to know what it is ahead of time. But what I do need to know is God's presence with me and who I really am in His eyes. I need a secure attachment to His heart that will give me the assurance and peace that I need. But that can only happen as I cooperate with His preparation in my heart on a daily basis.

I enjoy my intimate times with God in the morning. But I also know that I am still not really pressing in to receive all that He wants me to enjoy in His presence. I am increasingly aware, the closer I come to knowing His heart, that I am only scratching the surface of what I could be experiencing with Him. But that too in a way is good news, for as I become more and more aware of how much I am not tapping into, that can work to intensify my appetite make me more hungry to compel me to be more intent on tuning in more acutely to His heart and lingering longer in His presence. I know that the more I am willing to marinate in His presence the more of His grace and love will be available for Him to squeeze out of me throughout the day to bless others that I may encounter.

As I opened my Bible to listen for what He wants to share with my heart this morning, I decided to restart my meditations in the book of 1 John. I have spent many weeks now lingering in John chapters 14-17 in parallel with 1 John and it has proven to be extremely enriching encounters for me. My heart and soul have been awakened in ways I have not experienced before, but as I said previously I feel I am only barely scratching the surface of what I am confident is embedded in these parallel passages. I want to become as passionate about Jesus and His revelation of the Father as John was.

So I began reading in the first chapter of 1 John and not surprisingly I began seeing many connections to other things both in 1 John and in the book of John that I had not noticed the last time I read through here. Some of them are direct links that I like to mark in the margins of my Bible, but others are not quite so direct but still resonate closely. As I began noting the links so I can find them easier at a later time, it began to dawn on me that the patterns I am starting to see here are very similar to patterns that I learned about years ago in music theory.

Now, for those who know little about music, this may prove to be rather boring. But to my mind this is actually a very exciting discovery. At the same time however, I also realized very quickly that what I am seeing emerge from Scripture, the patterns I see with varying degrees of connections, are like trying to learn about music by only studying the very fundamental basics of how chords are constructed. But if all one knew about music was the theory and mathematics of how a chord is constructed, they could not experience the thrill of just basking in the glory of a full blown musical production and they would be very shortchanged indeed.

That is a bit depressing at this point. But I suspect this is most likely very true. How the angels must agitate with eagerness trying to get us to turn our attention away from the stupidity of the mundane things of this world that constantly distract us while they yearn to introduce us to the amazing, thrilling, enriching experiences and music of heaven that we cannot even begin to imagine because we so stubbornly resist allowing heaven to dwell in our hearts. Our theological theories, our petty arguments about what God is like, our dark views of salvation that promote such horrific assumptions about God must make angels cry every day. All heaven is intent on introducing us to the music of the heart that ever fills the atmosphere of heaven; but on earth we remain content to listen to the harsh tones of man-made music that only produces shallow pleasure but does little to transform our lives for enjoying the pleasures of real thriving.

Yet God is not put off. His patience is far more than our dullness and He keeps bringing us around again and again with His offers to tutor us in the ways of heaven. He created and designed us for far greater pleasures and joys than anything we have yet tasted, and He does not desire for us to postpone experiencing those joys for after the Second Coming. He wants us to enter into the joy of the Lord now so that we can become examples of joy attracting others to desire to enter into a similar joy of personally knowing the One who is to know is to have eternal life within.

I don't think it is wrong to become aware of the basic fundamentals of heaven's kind of music. Its better than being completely ignorant altogether I would think. I know in my own brain that music is different than for many. My mind has always related to music from the perspective of intervals – distances between various notes relative to each other. There are many different potential intervals between notes, and when you consider more than just two notes there are multiplied variations of intervals that all intertwine to produce even more complex effects.

The intriguing thing that I have only begun to discover about music is how various intervals interact with each other. There are very powerful, compelling intervals that resonate intensely with each other such as an octave, a fifth or a third. These are well-known intervals that show up nearly all the time in music. What is more interesting however is that these basic intervals also produce what is called sympathetic resonance with intervals that are similar to themselves. What that means is that when you play two notes on a stringed instrument that are say, a third interval apart, sympathetic resonance is induced rather strongly in strings that are a fifth interval even though they were not played.

I will not bore you with the details much beyond this. But what I am trying to share is that there are fascinating and very complex mathematical explanations for why music sounds the way it does and what makes it appealing to our ears. There is also the factor of harmony and dissonance in music. Some assume that dissonance is bad while harmony is good. That may have some validity at a certain point, but on the other hand it is far too simplistic and can even be misleading. This thinking is usually more reflective of the black and white kind of mentality that can be so debilitating in religion where people assume that every idea or action must be categorized as right or wrong. That kind of dogmatic logic quickly becomes counterproductive and even destructive if not remedied.

I learned that music cannot move and flow and produce pleasure in our minds and hearts if there is no tension or dissonance involved. So too, our lives cannot thrive and grow if we are not challenged with things that appear to be dissonant at first or that produce a certain level of discomfort. This may sound like heresy to some who prefer being dogmatic, but I am convinced that when we live in God's presence for eternity we will be constantly encountering things we don't understand and that at first may seem like dissonance to us until we begin moving into even higher levels of appreciation for the complexity of God's wisdom and knowledge and love.

So I find myself just beginning to sense the similarities between what little I have learned about music and what I am starting to sense while reading concepts related to each other in Scripture. I see patterns between words, concepts, phrases or truths that link to each other and that say almost the very same thing but maybe in slightly different words. These are like listening to notes that are an octave apart in music. These kinds of notes have so much in common that we give them the very same name yet realize that they are in fact different in that their frequencies are direct multiples of two.

But I also find many things in what I come across in Scripture that have obvious connections to other ideas that are not so directly similar but are very closely related. These remind me of the tight relationships found in fifths and third intervals in music, relationships that make up the vast majority of our music, at least in the Western culture I am familiar with. I understand that Eastern cultures and maybe others have different ways of thinking about music that can sound strange and foreign to the Western mind. That does not make them wrong – just different.

I have noticed over the years that as I have tried to document the basic connections between various thoughts that I find all throughout the Bible in margin notations, some of the verses I mark are overflowing with cross-references while others seem to have very few. I find this revealing, for there seem to be foundational truths found in certain passages that act almost like hubs that anchor spokes going and coming from them to many other things ideas. The complexity of the interactions between various truths and concepts become so intense very quickly that it is easy to become overwhelmed trying to make sense out of them all. How can a person figure out all the connections in order to make sense of how it all fits together?

Ah! It is starting to make even more sense now. My musical mind knows intuitively that God never intended for me to be able to appreciate the power and joy of experiencing music only after I have mastered all the mathematical formulations that constitute how it all is constructed. If that were the case no one anywhere would be able to enjoy music much at all. Music is not meant for only super-mathematicians but is designed to simply be experienced and enjoyed whether one knows much at all about how it is constructed or not. Being able to appreciate the logical constructions of how it is designed might enhance one's ability to enjoy it. On the other hand, if a person becomes too obsessed with needing to know all the details and making sure they are just right, that kind of perspective may even destroy their ability to enter into the joyful bliss of just letting the music wash over them and let it do what it is designed to do at levels of the soul that are far beyond our capacity to figure out logically.

I am starting to see part of the problem that God is up against with us, particularly those of us who find ourselves obsessed with trying to figure out all the right answers for everything. We can become so consumed with having to know 'correct doctrine' that we can turn away from the very experiences that the doctrines were meant to bring into our lives. We can become so distracted by insisting on not accepting anything from God unless we can first approve it with our left-brain logic and verify it with sufficient proof-texts that we might literally block God's work of salvation in our lives and miss out altogether on eternal life, all the while believing we are on our way to heaven.

Knowing how chords are constructed and having a better appreciation of how they interact with each other in logical progressions is very helpful at times for me when I want to express myself or desire to reconstruct music I have heard somewhere else. But I do not need to know any of the answers that my brain craves to understand about what chords are being used where before I can simply let music do its thing in my soul and experience the benefits that far surpass my brain's ability to analyze and explain it all. If my musical appreciation were limited to how much I can explain the enormous complexity of how music is put together, I would be a hopeless case. But if I simply allow the power of good music to just have its natural effect in my life and be willing to lay aside my penchant for knowing the answers I often desire to have about its construction, my soul is enriched and I can experience feelings and transformation and experiences far, far beyond anything my logical brain could ever hope to explain.

In a similar way I find myself challenged in how I come to God's truth. For most of my life I have been taught that it could be dangerous to move even slightly past what can be proven, explained, analyzed and verified with multiple proof-texts, and even then is must be verified by the proper authorities. Because of this approach to religion I have remained starved for much of my life from experiencing what my heart was designed for – intimacy of fellowship where I receive love and passion from the Source of all love and be thus empowered to pass on that love in blessing to those around me.

When I was about 17 or 18 I was given a psychological test to figure out what was wrong with me. Having some knowledge of how such tests are conducted, I was very careful in how I answered the questions. This infuriated the amateur who had insisted on giving me the test. But I had sensed from the beginning that she had ulterior motives and was up to no good. When she passed on my test results to a psychologist, he arrived at the conclusion that what I really needed was to 'love and be loved.'

I was dumbfounded but also rather bemused. I thought to myself I could have told him that without going through all the testing and bother they had gone to to try to figure me out. Of course I was starving for love. But I was not impressed at all with what he insisted was the solution for my problem. He said that if I would simply enroll in the college where he worked hundreds of miles away, that I could find a nice young woman who would provide for my needs for love and then all would be well. Fat chance, I knew. He knew nothing about me and had no awareness that I have always been socially inept. Trying to make friends with girls has always been problematic for me, but he was quite confident that this would solve all my problems.

What was the problem there? I was given a test to analyze simplistically what mental problems I might have. Now, I'm not against looking for problems with tests necessarily. But far too often we fail to appreciate how little use it is to simply analyze small parts of our lives while overlooking the major things that have far more impact. Sin has given us tunnel vision, and the tunnels we tend to look into are almost always the holes that don't lead us to the light that we need to escape our darkness.

I am coming to see that a lifetime of learning facts and doctrines and answers to questions few people are asking has left me empty and disillusioned with religion. But God is faithful and has slowly been turning my attention in a different direction, the direction of paying more attention to my heart and reining back the obsession of my head to have to know everything first. This is the way of love. Love, like music, is something a person must experience at a much deeper level than the logical brain will ever be able to figure out or explain. One of the curses of religion has been to convince us that what God wants is for us to know all the right answers or perform in just the right way so that He can be pleased with us and then consider us worthy to take to heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What I am discovering is what God longs for the most is for me to allow Him access to the nebulous parts of my being where I don't have the answers, hidden parts where I am full of pain, fear, shame, condemnation or rage that no amount of logical explanations or 'correct answers' can ever change. He wants me to open my heart – a part of me I didn't even know I had for many years – and allow Him to simply ravish me with His love that will feel like an immersion in the intense joy of experiencing surround sound flooding my body with rich music that overwhelms me with joy inexpressible.

We were created for joy. Nothing short of this will ever satisfy the deepest cravings of our soul. This need for joy can never be satisfied with pleasures, for pleasures are most often counterfeits of joy. It is true that joy can result in enormous pleasure; but pleasures usually fail to satisfy our need for joy.

I have never forgotten what that psychologist told me about my deepest need. He was right – I desperately need to love and be loved. I still have that fundamental need, for I am part of the human race and we were all created with that deep craving. But while his offered solution felt like an insult, I was made aware that I needed to pay more attention to finding a real source of love if I was ever to feel more alive and fulfilled and satisfied. Until I could find true love I would always be living in malfunction and dis-ease.

I came to realize after many years of marriage that not even a woman could ever be able to bring to my heart what I need in this area of love. Not that I have tried to with a number of them. But what I am coming to realize is that humans are simply not capable of providing the deepest needs of our heart. We are fallen and are all in desperate need of love, so none of us have the resources or capacity to provide for this intense need in another person. The best we can do along this line is to become more efficient conduits of God's love so that others may become more attracted to discover the original Source we have tapped into so they can also feast on the good stuff for themselves.

I want to become a better conduit of God's love. I want to have my own desperate desire for love find real satisfaction by feasting on the unlimited supply of love designed to ravish my heart directly from the God who created my heart. I want to become such an example of transformation by being loved that others cannot miss the spectacle, and in their hunger might come to ask where I found all the good stuff. I don't want to keep God and His love at arm's length until I understand how all the chord structures work or all the answers to life's questions. I want to move past all the nonsense of religion and plunge into the joy that my Daddy wants to pour into my heart so that I can truly come alive. This is the life I want to live. So help me God!