A Holy Thing

My new life as the Lone Ranger of the piano continued yesterday as I played at the memorial service of Ron Schaer, the man I played for in December when he left this life in his euthanasia moment. (See Death Concert post from last month). I played Schubert’s Ave Maria, Gershwin’s Embraceable You and Arlen’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow, weaving them into the service filled with poems, testimonies, slide shows and stories. Each did their magic, translating the spoken words into the power of heart-opening tones that allowed for the needed grief and celebration to dance together. My new role as a pianist, one that’s been slowly simmering for many years, is not to dazzle with technical flourish and virtuosity, but to let each note sing out its full promise and charge the air with a kind of beauty we all carry and need reminders to visit. 

 

I knew nothing about Ron when I first played for him, but it was good to hear his story and how he had touched so many people in his life and his work. It was good to be in a gathering of people with their phones tucked away, willing to speak from the heart, choke up and laugh. I was particularly struck by the reading of a little piece that a Rabbi Chaim Stern had written:

 

“Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream to be—to be. And oh, to lose. A thing for fools, this. And a holy thing, a holy thing to love. For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was gift to me. To remember this brings painful joy. ‘Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.”

 

Amen. And isn’t that the source of so much of our misery? Our fear to love what we know we can lose. So we keep an arm’s distance (or a football field’s), or give all our attention to machines or stuff ourselves with sensation and distraction to keep mortality in the far distance. Then when loss inevitably comes, we go through the public gestures quickly and can’t wait to get back to work. 

 

But to love something beyond reason, be it a person, a practice, a place, indeed, ourselves, that we know must change and decay and eventually be extinguished, seems to be a thing for fools, yet indeed is a holy thing. Oscar Wilde wrote: “Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.” So when loss comes to our doorstep, it is wise to admit it, to sit together in sorrow and also allow celebration and gratitude into the room. That’s what people did yesterday and I was honored to be a part of it.