Always an Amateur

In a story recently told by a recorder teacher, she described one time when she took intensive lessons with a world famous recorder player. Within minutes of starting the first lesson, the famous one announced, “Well, it is clear you will always be an amateur.” How that must have sunk in deeply and hurt. Yet, it is also the reality of what I encounter in my own recorder practice and music making.

I have just finished working on two measures of a Handel sonata, running through it over and over again to get my fingers to know where to go next and my tongue to know exactly where it needs to be and how to open and close off notes. I spent maybe fifteen minutes on the recalcitrant notes, breaking them down, noticing each movement, trying to get them smooth, graceful and reliable. It was frustrating, hard work, and now I have knots in my shoulders and a bit of a headache.

The difficulty I have reminds me that I will never be more than an amateur, and never will play as well as that “amateur” teacher. So why is it so hard to admit I will never be more than an amateur? Why do I keep pushing up against those barriers of learning as an adult, at a time of life when my mind and my fingers are in decline, and will never reach the heights of technique to which I aspire?

Maybe it is the sense that I am still making progress, that I can get better, and the music will be able to find expression in my efforts? Even though the sonata is not considered among the most challenging or artistic of pieces, it still provides a challenge to my skills. It demands my attention, my practice and my commitment to turn it into something of beauty.

Maybe it is because my audience is so impressed with even the amateur level of playing that I can do? Let’s face it, when the only recorder you have heard is your child in third grade squawking through “All through the night” in a way that is anything but soothing, then my playing is virtuosic. Having an audience with no or little basis of comparison gives me a decided advantage.

Maybe it is because I appear to be having fun with the music, and the pieces are fun to hear? The audience doesn’t need to know how furiously my brain is working, noticing how many glitches there are along the way. If I am lucky, they will not where I lost my place and have to find my way back. They just know that it captured their attention, drew them out of their own distracted thoughts into a new sounding world.

Maybe I can find a way to let go of feeling that being an amateur is a failure? While I will never be paid for making music, I have paid to hear many famous musicians and wondered with some why I wasted my money. I might not be able to make the commitment that being a professional requires, but I can still commit my time and continually learn to be better. I can still be an expert with those who know so much less.

Maybe I can see join with the “amateur” athletes who train for the Olympics. Although they are able to dedicate mcuh more time, I can make the commitment as they have to become as excellent in their chosen sport as they can be. I can maintain a regular discipline of practice and working with coaches to continually refine my technique and build my own style.

There is one etymological perspective on the word amateur that I find appealing. In “What’s an Amateur” the Latin word “amator” which literally means “lover of” is the root of our current work. There is no better way to say it, since I am a lover of the recorder, of its many forms of expressiveness and the music written for it over the centuries.

So, being the lover of the recorder, I can bring my love into other peoples lives, and maybe I can inspire them to try it for themselves.

Sidewalk Directions

I was walking from my home in DC to a movie theater, a journey that takes me across the Mall, with its views of the Capital to the east and the Washington Monument to the west. A young, clean-cut man in his twenties, who was pushing a stroller, asked me which direction he would find the Museum of Natural History. He had emerged from the Metro station and lost his way, several blocks the wrong direction. As I gave him directions, he started out to find it, but since my trip was going the same direction we settled into a conversation.

He told me his name was “Christian.” That caused a bit of surprise, and led me to pay closer attention. It is not everyday you meet a person who introduces himself as Christian! A flag went up in my mind signaling that this could be one of God’s playful intrusions into my life.

It was not a dramatic conversation. He had newly moved into the area and was just beginning to explore it. As a long time resident, I noted how there is always much to do, especially with children. I realize now that I never even saw his child or learned anything about her. Or maybe it was a him? Talking about children isn’t the usual male topic.

He explained why he chose Alexandria after leaving the Air Force, with family near by and lots of opportunities matching his “skill set.” I answered his question about what I do. It is the common getting-to-know-you chatter in a city of career focused people.

As he turned left to walk down towards the museum while I was continuing straight, the goodbye was a simple and understated as our getting to know each other. His “Thank you for helping, Sir” caught me by surprise. Clearly his military training to respect an elder, but I am unused to being called “Sir.”

During those few minutes we walked together along the sidewalk, I experienced more than I expect in casual sidewalk encounters or providing directions around a confusing city. I cannot say with certainty that God was with us. I cannot know that anything happened beyond the unusual event of one man asking another for directions, and our breaking through the usual anonymity of city life to actually talk together for several blocks.

I walked on toward the theater with a new sense of hope for him, for me, for our future as two men journeying through life. For a short time we experienced community, which is definitely a gift from God.

Cross Purposes

I have not been posting here over the last few months as daily life has distracted me from the process of intentional reflection. Now as things settle down, in spite of it being the height of holiday rush, I hope to return to my discipline.

It is not that I haven’t been writing. Pieces were begun but got stuck or lost their focus or became too personal for public reading. So, reaching back to a piece I started about a year ago, here is something for Advent.

In “Joseph’s Dream,” an essay posted on Episcopal Café, the Rev. Dr. Roger Ferlo reviews Joseph’s perspective on the birth of Jesus. Ferlo reminds us how much inner conflict Joseph must have felt when he discovered his wife-to-be was pregnant. How it was during a dream that Joseph learned who this child would be. What caught me was Ferlo’s reflection on how that inner chaos of Joseph matches ours:

“. . . our deepest desires at cross-purposes with each other. We feel it when we want at the same time to embrace our families and to escape them; when we harbor private grief or grievances in the midst of public joy; when in spite of the holiday, or because of it, we seek to escape to a darkened room, to banish all semblance of dreams, to sleep in blankness.”

I have been experiencing that kind of internal chaos. The sharp contrast between simultaneous feelings has been startling and confusing. My desire is to banish the negative and only feel the positive, which is impossible. They both demand attention, and are part of the same experience, engaged in the chaos.

I can only blame myself. I have been working for years to notice my feelings, and to notice when I have moved into denial. In my experience, denial shoves the negativity being avoided into a secret bank account, where it accumulates compound interest at high rates. When the denial fails, the bank account automatically opens to show all of fear and pain that has collected in the darkness, battering my soul.

So, I try to deal with things as they come, not bury them inside. However, that requires being open to my emotions, which do have a life of their own. Last year during a baptism at church, I found myself brimming with hope for the little girl who I don’t even know. I felt proud yet humbled in making the promise aloud that I would support her in her life in Christ. Tears came to my eyes as we sang a hymn while she was processed around the congregation. It was embarrassing, wiping my tears and blowing my nose during the last verse.

My tears came partly from my knowledge that I would not be remaining in that congregation, that my time within that community was temporary. Even as I made the promise, I knew I would not be available to care for her. My path would take me away to a different parish. While I try to justify it by saying I would fulfill my promise with some other child where ever I might be, I had a deeply felt desire to care for that particular infant.

So often, we are all like Joseph, with our “deepest desires at cross purposes.” As we enter Advent this year, “as with Joseph, the dream will come however much we try to block it, making of our mixed desires and the world’s distress the stuff of revelation.”

May God grant all of us the courage to be open to God’s revelation this Advent.