Cantus Firmus

I've just read an article by Jill Carattini about how the telling of our life stories or narrating the biography of someone else is full of awe & complexities. She quotes Roger Lundin, a biographer. To be able to recognize the competing claims & the intricate complexity of human motivation is a gift & a necessity for writing a good biography, just as it is a necessity for understanding fairly & creatively & justly another human life. The task of putting our life or someone else's into words is more difficult than we often admit. How would you describe a deceased grandparent to children who never met that loved one? The lives of historical or Biblical characters are equally challenging. Jill then quoted some from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who spoke in musical terms as he tried to describe his life to a friend. He introduced the idea that life cannot be reduced to one note or a monotone. The cantus firmus, meaning "fixed song", is a pre-existing melody that forms the basis of a polyphonic composition. Though the song ushers in twists in pitch & style, counterpoint & refrain, the cantus firmus is the enduring melody not always in the forefront, but always playing somewhere within the composition. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, life was a great work of sounds & symphonic directions, & the cantus firmus was the essence, the soul of the concerto. God wants us to love him eternally with our whole hearts, not in such a way as to injure or weaken earthly life, but to provide a kind of cantus firmus to which the other melodies of life provide the counterpoint. One of these contrapunctal themes is earthly affection... Where the cantus firmus is clear & plain, the counterpoint can be developed to its limits. (1)

Bonhoeffer was facing execution as he confessed life to be an awe-inspiring symphony, a melody to behold with attention & appreciation for a great array of intricate choruses. In this intricacy, there is no better song composed than one that finds as its ground bass a wholehearted love of God. Where the enduring melody of life itself is a tune written & played for God, the composition can resound even to heaven. This type of melody endures beyond the chorister who sang it.

When Jesus spoke of life, he spoke of multiple realms, of life as it is on earth & in heaven. Like a great composition, there are layers to faith & belief, communion & the Kingdom, story & song. There is a sense in which all of our stories are similar, written by the great composer of music and sound. And yet each song is also uniquely our own. For me, as no doubt for you, there have been minor sounds when God seems absent or life seems removed from any chorus of hope. Then again, there have also been moments when the cantus firmus of truth & love resounds in major tones & God comes near in the doxology.

So how do we tell the story of a human life? How do we articulate counterpoints & melodies & tempos? Like the one after God's own heart, perhaps we start with the song at the center of our own souls, as we listen for the arrangement in our neighbors':
By day the LORD directs His love,
at night His song is with me -
a prayer to the God of my life.
Psalm 42:8

His presence is the cantus firmus, set in the deepest center of a life, discovered & held over a lifetime. His love is the enduring melody that puts our stories to song.

(1) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters & Papers from Prison ( New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), page 303.