By Roger Ferlo
It was about 20 years ago, soon after I turned 35, that I decided it was time to learn to play the cello.
It turned out to be a religious decision. I had just become the rector of a small parish that had, so to speak, been through the wars. Nothing to do with the organist, thank God. The conflict centered on the rector who preceded me, a priest whom I have never met but whose parish I am sure I would have joined had I come to town as a lay person. He was one of those brilliant, charismatic sixties priests who had spent his early career in college chaplaincy, and happily never recovered. He brought his edgy, transgressive theological style to a parish that thought it was ready for it but really was not. The impact he had made as a writer, teacher and preacher had been extraordinary. Clearly, people’s lives had changed because of his ministry. But like most of us, he was also very good at excusing his several personal failings by theologizing them, and some parishioners loved him for this—that is, the ones who stayed.
It all fell apart in the end. The evangelical bishop refused to officiate at this third marriage, and basically forced his resignation, which made the parishioners feel that they were being besieged for their liberal views by the know-nothing fundamentalist right-wingers in the diocese, although it was clear to more level-headed people that even the present bishop’s more liberal predecessor would have been hard-put to accept the third marriage.
Anyway, by the time I showed up, many people were licking their wounds and loaded for bear, and the bear was me. So I took up the cello, figuring that would be cheaper than therapy and more rewarding in the long run.
In all the turmoil of the parish in those first years I was there, the music didn’t come easily. But I discovered that though I wasn’t great at this, I wasn’t all that bad, and as the weeks and months went on, the music began to center me. In a chaotic life, it became my one means of self-discipline. In the more difficult moments in that parish it became my only means of prayer.
But it was not just the music I loved when I played the cello in those days. I loved the sheer feel of the instrument in my hands. The shape of it, the sheen, the exquisite purfling, the absurdity of that scrollwork at the top, the flaming wood grain on the back, the miraculous way that inert slice of board could burst into the sound of a living voice. I didn’t play it so much as cling to it.
That clinging almost undid me. I was in my office one day, chatting with a parishioner, when the parish secretary called up the stairs to me that the cleaning lady was at the door. She had just come from the rectory, and was pretty distraught, something about my guitar falling over when she was vacuuming, and how it had broken in half, and could I come down and help her pick it up.
The news hit me like a sucker punch. I tried to put a good face on it, and act professional with my parishioner, but she saw right through me. I rushed out of the office, ran up the hill to the rectory, slammed into the living room, and there it was—the cello was on the floor, its neck broken off and splayed to one side. A large splinter remained attached to the body, with a piece of purfling jutting out like a broken finger bone. The poor cleaning lady was standing there crying, because she thought that it could stand up by itself on its pin, and she had only left it that way for a second, and was it worth a lot of money, and she didn’t mean to do it—
As you might imagine, I wasn’t feeling very pastoral at the moment, and I’m amazed I didn’t just fire her on the spot. All I wanted was for her to go home, and to leave me alone with—well, with the body. I realize now with some embarrassment that that’s how I thought of it. I found myself crying wretched tears of grief and loss, anger and frustration, because the one thing that had empowered me to endure what seemed to me in those early days the unremitting pressures and betrayals of parish life now lay in pieces on the floor in front of me.
Of course, I had lost all sense of proportion, both about the parish, which was full of good people, and about myself. As my cello teacher told me on the phone when I called him in panic, that in spite of appearances I lived in a pretty musical town, and he knew an excellent luthier, and in his long experience what was broken could often be fixed—
Wisdom. I love music teachers. I visited the cello in the shop a few days later. It had been completely disassembled, and its cracked face was now being painstakingly patched from within—the long, narrow cracks disappearing as if by miracle, the damaged inlay matched and restored so skillfully that only an expert could detect the difference. It took months and months, but when the work was done, it really could be made to sing again, cracked and patched and scarred, but whole.
Now you might expect that I want you to see in this story a parable of death and resurrection, But that’s not exactly why I’m writing this, although whenever I pick up my cello I see in its cracks and patches the history of my ministry in that place, which went on to be enormously productive and satisfying.
No, I tell this story because I know God works through us in our music and art. What musicians do with their various contraptions of wood and strings and pipes and wind brings us so close to things divine that it can steal our breath away. But I also know that no matter who you are, and whatever name you bear—Monteverdi or Mozart, Hampton or Hindemith—however good you are at what whatever you do—your finest achievements are but fragile things, as fragile as the wood of my long-suffering student cello.
It is so tempting to carve for ourselves idols out of such fragile wood, to make of our art another god, to pursue our music just for the music’s sake. In the hyper-competitive hurly-burly of our professional lives, all of us succumb to the temptation of thinking that in the end it is only the music that really matters, or the sermon, or whatever bottom line our jobs force us to toe. But there is no other God besides me, says the Lord. Everything we do and say—any music we have the grace to make—we make in the shadow of the cross.
Now there is wood that endures—that rough and jagged piece of executioner’s wood lifted high like Moses’ serpent in the desert, standing up by itself on its own pin, drawing all the world to itself like a sure-footed compass. All our talents, all our losses, all our triumphs, all our failings—the cross draws everything we are and everything we do into the searing truth of the wounded and resurrected Savior—the Holy One patched and scarred as we are, yet living, breathing, triumphant and loving.
Life can be hard. What is broken can truly be fixed, my teacher told me. It’s not true for everything, perhaps, but it is true for this. In the end, it is the cross that matters—that living sign of redemption about which we can do no other than lift our breaking voices in song, and tune our broken instruments in sounds of endless praise.
The Rev. Roger Ferlo is Director of the Center for Lifetime Theological Education at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he also directs the Evening School of Theology. He was trained as a Shakespeare scholar, and frequently leads audience discussions on religion and drama for the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, DC.