Dear Reader,

When my oldest daughter was six years old, she was under the impression that she had written Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  (Not the whole thing; it’s a long symphony — just the “Ode to Joy” part.)  She was not at all boastful about having composed the immortal melody that drives the glorious final movement of Beethoven’s greatest symphony; she just plunked it out occasionally, single-fingered, upon the piano, happy to have come up with such a joyful little tune.

We more or less let the situation continue, cute and uncontested, until it reached a bit of a crisis point.  She discovered that a friend of hers had also written Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  Sometimes one must finally give credit where it is due, if only to avoid a spurious copyright dispute between six-year-olds.

But perhaps my daughter wasn’t entirely wrong.  Perhaps it’s not surprising that multiple children held the same belief.  They had, of course, heard the melody at some point and internalized it as their own, but it is right and nearly unavoidable that they do so.  That particular melody, in its simple perfection, seems just so natural, almost necessary.  It is inaccurate to say that Beethoven merely discovered it, that had he not, someone else (my daughter, presumably) would have.  No, he created it, for we are beings capable of joining our Creator in that act.  But Beethoven did so in accord with those universal laws by which human hearts and minds and, in the case of music, ears are ordered.  That’s what allows it to be such a joy-filled melody, and a melody which, in a sense, belongs to all of us.

A few years before my daughter performed it in our living room, I heard it performed in a concert hall, and moments before that, I heard something else performed.  The something else was snuck in ahead of the advertised feature; it was a modernist piece that was “inspired” by Beethoven’s Ninth.  An attempted new “Ode to Joy,” I guess.  If you’ve experienced atonal, chaotic-sounding orchestral music, you’ll have the idea.  At some point, the composer came on stage to explain it, which is the sort of thing that has to be done with that sort of music.  He played a few notes from his work and said, “So, can you hear the echo there of Beethoven?”  It was a rhetorical question presented to two thousand people, but the old man a few rows ahead of me answered very loudly: “No.”

Here things get a bit controversial, but I’ll take my stand. That man spoke for me and for most of those other two thousand.  God bless the devil-may-care honesty of old men.  We were all dressed up for the concert, but the emperor had no clothes on.  A discordant, dissonant, arrhythmic “Ode to Joy” is not enjoyable; it is an Ode to Something Else.  A musicologist may tell us it has some underlying rules, but they are man-made, not the rules of sound and harmony and rhythm like a heartbeat that are given to us by nature.  It does not feel properly ordered to the human being.

Sometimes life reminds me of the piece of music my daughter and Beethoven wrote, and sometimes it reminds me of that other piece.  When I wake early and pray, when I work hard by daylight and dine with my family by candlelight, when I spend such time as is appropriate to my state in life reading news in the morning, but not more than I spend reading an old book with my wife in the evening, when I kiss her goodnight and rest and rise and then do it all again, quite similar, tomorrow — indeed, whenever virtue orders my soul and nature orders my days, in such times, even if many things are painful and hard, life nonetheless seems right and good.  In such times, life itself is an ode to joy.  When instead I am discordant, dissonant, and lacking rhythm, when I wallow in chaos or try to rise out of chaos by fabricated means instead of natural, sacred ones, even if many things are going as I wish them to be, I am, nonetheless, joyless, and life becomes an ode to something else, something less than joy.

In either scenario, I may have feelings of pleasure, gaiety, even elation.  But they will rise and fall, as feelings do, alongside melancholy, heartache, and grief.  Joy, on the other hand, need not rise and fall.  Joy is a state of being, a deep spiritual solidity, which is under our control to hold or to release.  The formula is simple.  We surrender joy when we try to make a “truth” for ourselves; we have joy when we surrender ourselves to the Truth for which we were made.   

The world seems intent on pressing us toward that first kind of surrender.  We find dissonance between any two channels of information, and we feel it between the artificiality of our virtual worlds and the things beckoning us back to the actual world.  We smother the natural rhythms of days and nights, seasons and years, even those of our own bodies, replacing them with chaos or flatness.  And the discord between people and between peoples is ever-present and lately horrifically expanded. It all seems now to be reaching a crescendo, as the discord, dissonance, and arrhythmia in the world have passed the point where anyone can still pretend it sounds good.  Like that old man, we all ought to just say “No.”

The power is that we can – we can say no.  We can reject the external chaos and keep it external.  It need not shape our innermost being.

Last week in Ukraine, as air raid sirens wailed, twenty members of the Kiev Symphony orchestra gathered in Maidan Square.  They stood on the steps of a two-hundred-foot tall monument, the top of which is a statue of a woman holding a guelder rose branch, and the bottom of which is a marble pedestal in the shape of a Christian church.  As enemy forces encroached ever closer to the city, the musicians raised their instruments defiantly, and, to the unrestrained cheers of a gathered crowd, they performed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

Whatever sorrows may press upon us, whatever dignities are stripped from us, joy can never be taken by force.  Joy is our birthright as human beings.  Whether unto a six-year-old child or a beleaguered nation, joy, by the immense grace of God, belongs to all of us, ours to own if we will have it.

Sincerely,