Strained Grace

This weekend there were guitars.

There were guitars and a hymn and there were voices rising and raised hands, and who could help it? “Were the whole realm of nature mine” — even this, the raised hands, the bowed head, the murmuring of thanks — it would be “an offering far too small.”

I had thought this. I had thought this standing there worshiping with the guitars and strings. The empty space filling those guitars. The empty hands, released and raised. The cries all rising.

It can startle. In the willing hands of the believing, the emptiness can sing. He means to fill our emptiness with song. The way home, I had hummed quiet.

This weekend there were wounds. Sometime before bed, I say something offhand and he says nothing. He doesn’t have to. I turn and can see it in his eyes and it’s so loud. Hollowness can have a language of its own.

Behind a closed bedroom door he turns his back and I shake my head. Fling hands about, confused. Ugly. Want to raise my voice. I get the irony of this — and irony, it can hurt like swung steel. What I don’t get is how he’s not getting me and I’m not getting him and how did we get here so fast?

The empty space, it’s between us. All this dark chamber.

It was after the guitars had been put in their cases that morning that someone had said it to me, told me about strings and space, about how to make music.

Music is made in stress. A string pulled tight, it has to be plucked, it has to be stressed. Moved from its comfortable, resting position. The bending of the string induces stress. As the string bends, as the string arches in stress and then releases, it vibrates — and there is the offering.

This one clear note, high and long. Stressed and empty and stretched right out, this is the space of song.

In stress there can be song. The resonance is in the surrender.

After the lights are turned out, I lie there in the dark, in this tight silence between us, remembering how the cries can rise.

Music could be here.

I ask and he speaks and I listen and try to echo back his heart, that I have heard him, and I turn to him, bend, move out of the comfortable position, out the rest of self-protection, and I reach for his hand. This bending, it’s a stretch, a stress — but where else can the songs be found?

In the dark emptiness I find his and he squeezes my hand.

The resonance is always in the surrender.

The stress, the spaces right full of emptiness, these can be song makers. God means to make song out of stress. Out of all this emptiness.

Maybe this is always how to make life-worship: He holds tight and He strums and I could surrender to the music of God.

I shift a bit closer, and I’m retuned and returned, and it’s there in the shadows, like a refrain — this sonorous offering of thanks.

Father God, I bend the knee knowing: You intend to take all my stress and make it song. I bend the knee knowing: the resonance of my life happens in surrender. I bend the knee and offer You my emptiness — in You it can sing.