lush life

Monday evening was the final regular rehearsal for the Gay Mens Chorus for our Lush Life concert, featuring the music of Billy Strayhorn. This week is production week, with a tech rehearsal Wednesday, dress rehearsal on Thursday, and the concerts Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Monday morning was also the day of the shootings at Virginia Tech, which was surely on everyone's minds as we gathered for our rehearsal that evening. And we sounded wonderful. The music Billy Strayhorn wrote is amazing. And the music we are making from his scores is also amazing. It was an occassion of beauty, in sharp contrast with the horrors of that morning.

Spiritually it is wise to remember how easy it is to focus on life's tragedies and give them more energy than they deserve. It's an instinctual reaction left over from a previous evolutionary stage when life was more dangerous, and tenuous. But it's wrong now to let our lives be characterized by fear and tragedy. Appropriate expressions of compassion for those who are suffering must not lead to a worldview that makes those horrors the norm, and that blinds us to the much more common beauty and joy of life. Violence and hate are the aberation, a perversion of the natural order, the sad state of unfortunate individuals, not a picture of human nature in general, nor the divine ideals.