“What could a man possibly hope to accomplish by
playing music in the street? It wouldn’t bring anyone back from the dead,
wouldn’t feed anyone, wouldn’t replace one brick. It was a foolish gesture . .
. a pointless exercise in futility”[1].
Watching the unnamed cellist arrange his seat and prepare for another
performance was Kenen, one of the protagonists in Steven Galloway’s novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, set during the siege
of Sarajevo in 1992. Days before, a Serbian mortar shell had drifted into the besieged
city and landed amongst twenty two hungry citizens. In place of the bread they
so desperately desired, the ‘visible world exploded’, and little was left
except an empty crater. What could be
done in the face of such destruction? The cellist chose to perform, placing his
body and cello within the crater where lives had been extinguished. For
twenty-two days, one day for each of the dead, he played Albinoni’s Adagio, a composition the remnants of which were discovered in the firebombed
music library of Dresden in 1945. Amidst besiege and war, fear and confidence
found a home in the stirring beauty of human courage set to music.
What kind of response is a cellist sitting at the site
of so much carnage and confusion? This is what Kenen of Galloway’s novel wants
to know: what does the art of performance mean when placed against the brute
facts of sniper fire? For much of the
novel, the actions of ordinary citizens striving to exist in a frail and
failing city only deepens the discontent with the desire of one man to perform.
Food will be bartered, drinkable water sought at the brink of dying; bullets
will be avoided at intersections that function like Russian roulette. And
during this, an Adagio will be
carried by the wind through bombed out apartments and piles of twisted metal
that once ran as a tram for business men and school children. The sheer fact of
the cellist: his location, his eyes closed in concentration - or is it prayer- ,
his movements coordinated to the rising and falling of notes long ago memorized,
confuses the reality of war. People eventually will gather. Flowers will appear
as gestures of sorrow to the deaths and thankfulness to the one whose music stirs
life into the hearts and minds of those struggling to feel the contours of
human life within the darkness of death’s shadow. Twenty-two dead. Twenty-two
days, the cellist performs.
It is an odd
politics that performs rather than fights; an odd politics that signifies a
resistance to the powers of death through peaceable human actions and desires shaped
by heaven’s grace. The ordinary appeals for deliverance or redemption through
words and petitions meet their fullest expression in the human body positioned
against the threat of carnage and confusion. We hear this kind of politics in
the song of the psalmist this morning.
Even now (the LORD) lifts up
my head *
above my enemies round about me.
Therefore I will offer in his dwelling an oblation
with sounds of great gladness; *
I will sing and make music to the LORD. (vs. 8-9, BCP)
The psalmist, like the cellist, finds in the reality
of performance a kind of holy sanctuary that opens human suffering to the very
presence of God.
We also see the politics of performance in the refusal
of Jesus to allow the threats of Herod to dictate the contours of God’s
mission. In the open, where presumably Herod could strike like a sniper, Jesus
heals and restores, overcoming the power of evil and sin that hinders the pathway
to human flourishing through the grace of God. “Today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be
on my way . . .” What could Herod do that isn’t already anticipated in Jesus’ actions
against all power and authority that has forsaken the power and authority of
God? The lament for Jerusalem that signifies the destiny of prophets only deepens
the significance of Jesus’ redeeming work; his performance of grace that ushers
in the Kingdom of God. His destiny outside Jerusalem’s gates will see his very
body become the site of God’s own lament; a song so deep and penetrating that
the notes will reach through death’s door only to climax through an eruption of
alleluias.
In the meantime, there is the task of teaching and healing.
Within the scope of Herod’s sight, the work on the third day becomes the manner
through which Jesus performs. His body, now under threat, opens up vistas of hope
for those possessed by sickness, and those in need of love. St. Paul will speak
of our mortal life as the ‘body of our humiliation’ that will by grace be ‘conformed
to the body of glory’. That is, to the body of Christ. Through this body, our
own receives healing and grace. In Christ, we discover our destiny.
It doesn’t take long for Kenen, our doubting Thomas,
to discover the significance of the cellist’s actions. Soon after witnessing
the performance for the first time, Kenan finds the music seep into him. Instead
of questioning the efficacy of a musician in the context of a city under siege,
Kenen sees a transformation like that preached by St. Paul and embodied in the crucified
and risen Jesus. Before his eyes, “the cellist’s hair smoothes itself out, his
beard disappears. A dirty tuxedo becomes clean, shoes polished bright as
mirrors . . . buildings behind the cellist repairs itself . . . cobblestones of
the road set themselves straight . . . Kenan watches as his city heals itself
around him”[1]. A
pointless exercise in futility has all but raised the dead. All it took was
grace of a human life to offer up to the heavens zāmar, the Hebrew word for songs of thanksgiving and lament. In
the end, the zāmar of the
cellist displayed the politics of peace and hope, despite the raining down of
more mortars and sniper’s bullets. Joining with the zāmar of the psalmist, Jesus’ performance broke opened the
skies and exposed the body of our humiliation with all its violence, pain and death
to his own body. In the transforming body of Christ we are taken up into the
song of redemption that reverberates throughout our mortal flesh. What do we
see in this vision if not the transformation of our lives and what do we hear
if not the sound of beauty that is the sound of our salvation? Listen and hear, watch and see, lest we become
deaf and blind to God and the song that is the grace of resurrection.
