Pay Attention to Time

Day 4

Buechner turns to consider music and the way in which it invites us to pay attention to time…

“And then music, whatever music is—I don’t really know what music is, it’s sound—but it seems to me the medium of music is basically time, whereas the medium of painting is space. In a painting you put one thing next to another thing, put the blue background next to the red heart on the wall, and so on. But the musician doesn’t deal in space; he deals in time, one note follows another note the way one moment follows another moment, the way tock follows tick. And I think that what the musician is trying to do is to say, Listen to time, pay attention to time, pay attention to the sounds and the silences of time. Experience the richness of time.

“The Greeks with their wonderful gift for distinctions made that distinction, which anybody who’s ever gone to theological seminary knows well, between Chronos time—chronological time, watch time, calendar time, time to eat, time to go home—on the one hand and Kairos time on the other, which is not time thought of quantitatively, but rather qualitatively—it was a good time, it was a sad time, the time had come to do something, a confusing time. And I think what the musician, or what music, is doing at its best is to say, Pay attention to the quality of time, to the Kairos time. I even amuse myself sometimes, because I’m a verbal person, by trying to put words to what it is that a particular composer is trying to have us hear about time.

“I’ve listened to a lot of Bach lately. We went to a wonderful Bach Festival in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, this spring and heard the Christmas oratorio and those great plumes of music. And it seems to me that Bach is saying, Listen to the grandeur of time, listen to the stateliness of time. Or Mozart . . . Karl Barth once said something about when the angels of God appear before the throne of grace, they’re all singing Bach, but when they chatter among each other, it’s all Mozart. Whatever Mozart is saying—there’s a phrase in Mozart that I hear in everything I’ve ever heard of him almost, a plaintive little la-da da da. The poignance of time maybe, I don’t know. And Debussy, the strange sort of illuminess of time, whatever word you want.

“But each one of these composers is saying, Pay attention to the quality of time. The Kairos-ness of time. And in a way I think of the phrase keep time. You can think of keeping time in the normal sense as keeping to the meter of music, but music, in a way, is saying keep time in another way—keep it, keep in touch with it, keep your hands on it somehow. Keep in touch with the sadness of your own time, with the joy of time, with the marvelousness of time, with the terror of time, with the emptiness of time, with the fullness of time.”

Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, p26-27.

To help you reflect…

Listen to some music. What quality of time is it communicating to you?

Reflect on each of the qualities of time that Buechner encourages us to keep in touch with in the final sentence of today’s passage (the sadness of time, the joy of time, the marvelousness of time, the terror of time, the emptiness of time, the fullness of time.) What comes to mind as you sit with each of these qualities of time? Which ones do you have “your hands on”? Which ones feel more out of reach?

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash