(This week is the 40th installment of the book, “The Band Director’s Lessons About Life”, which TCRN is publishing as a series during 2020. This week, band director and spiritual author Donald Lee relates a parable about “being God”. For a complete listing of previous episodes in this series, click here.)
You are the music while the music lasts.T. S. ELIOT(Twentieth-century American and British poet, dramatist)
“The Mozart is coming along pretty well, but you haven’t quite got the sense of the style,” I said. The high school band was learning the notes and rhythms. But that’s just the beginning of music. I tried to give them a sense of Mozart’s time period.
“Picture Vienna about 1770. The genteel class is the most genteel it will ever be. Vienna and Paris are the centers of European culture and wealth. The gold and spices from foreign colonies have been pouring into Europe for over two centuries, and most of it has gone to the rich. This is the height of the Classical Age. The Enlightenment philosophers have set Europe ablaze with new ideas. Everything is going well. The clothes of the rich are works of art. You have to be rich just to own them. Men wear frilly shirts, knee socks, and those silly white wigs you’ve seen in movies. Women wear massive and ornate dresses. Just wearing them was the sixteenth century’s version of crossfit. Manners are exquisite, and nothing is permitted to disrupt ‘proper’ society.
“Now, sit up straight. Adjust your wig or your dress. Look the part and be the music.” (Cue the downbeat.)
It was their best yet. When you picture what you want to create, when you “become” what you want to create, all you have to do is “be it.”
“Now, let’s compare Mozart to the Holst. Holst wrote The Planets at the start of the First World War. If we think back to just before the war, say 1912, what did the world look like from London’s perspective? Gustav Holst was probably England’s leading composer of the day. This was the height of the Romantic style. Nobody had yet thought to call it “twentieth-century” music. The music is incredibly expressive and pictorial. Holst is aurally describing Jupiter: The Bringer of Jollity. That happy-go-lucky king of the gods was at the top of his game. And everything was going right for merry old England. The British Empire spanned the globe—the empire upon which the sun never set. It was the greatest empire the world had ever seen—the wealth of which had been pouring into Britain and helping it to rule both the nineteenth century and the seas. The last two decades had seen a worldwide economic expansion, the great ‘fin de siècle.’ The world economy was firing on all cylinders, and Britain led the way. British railways ran on all continents, connecting even London and Constantinople. It was a happy and glorious age. Holst puts all that into “Jupiter.” The themes and motifs express joy, elation, playfulness, and triumph, with wild abandon.
“Now, sit up straight. Adjust your tie. Look the part and be the music.” (Cue the downbeat.)
If you know “Jupiter,” you’re likely hearing it in your head right now. I am. The students played a good rendition of it. If students can picture the times, the people, the places, then they can understand, express, and “be” the music. They can be it because they can see it. We build first in our minds. Mind is the builder. Once it’s in there, we can get it out—we can manifest it in the material world.
Reflection
The same is true in life. Before we can achieve any goal or become the person we want to be, we have to “see” it in our minds. Remember Napoleon Hill’s famous quote from parable 14? “Whatever the mind of man can see and believe, it can achieve.” You have to see it before you can be it—visualization before manifestation. Everything we see in the physical realm existed first in the mental realm.
This is why it was so brilliant that Jesus came to live among us as an example. Jesus brought us a picture—himself—of how to live. Anyone who has read the Gospels can see Jesus, in your mind’s eye, walking the dusty roads of Galilee, sitting amongst the olive trees in Gethsemane, squinting in the bright summer sunlight reflecting off the white stone walls of the temple. Jesus wants us to put the image of himself into our head, then to “be” that image. That’s why he came, to be an example for us—an example of how to manifest the Love of God in the material world, an example of how to be spirit in the physical world, to be in the world but not of the world.
Be the music. Be the love. God is the music, and the music is Love. We learn music, rehearse music, perform music. That is, we learn Love, practice Love, perform Love. In the end, we express the Music/Love that’s been inside us all along. We ultimately become Love—one with Love. The Love is in us, and we simply learn to let it out, to be the instrument through which the Divine Love expresses itself.
We are souls. We come from God and return to God. God is our source and our destiny, our beginning and our ending, our alpha, and our omega. For it is in God that we live and move and have our being (see Acts 17:28). It is God that is within us. We simply need to let him out—to be the lamp through which the Light of God shines into the world. Vibrate in unison with the music of God.
Be the music. Be the Love.
Donald Lee is a spiritual author and speaker. This article is part of a weekly series for 2020 in which TCRN is publishing his inspirational book, The Band Director’s Lessons About Life: Volume 1 – 50 Parables on Life’s Performance Cycle, in serial form – one parable per week. You can learn more about the author at his website: www.ComingHomeSpirit.com, or order a copy of his complete book on Amazon, or get his free mini eBook and sign up for his weekly blog. Follow Donald on Facebook.
