Playing in the Worst of Times

     I choked up when I heard this cellist playing a piece written by a prisoner in a Nazi stalag. Instead of succumbing to despair when he was tossed into this camp, French soldier Olivier Messiaen turned to what he knew: composing music. With the stub of a pencil and a bit of paper from a sympathetic guard, he wrote what became one of the Twentieth Century’s masterpieces, “Quartet for the End of Time” - after all, he feared his time was up.     
     Then three other imprisoned musicians joined Messiaen with a ramshackle violin, cello, clarinet, and piano to premier his score outdoors in freezing rain before four hundred inmates and guards. “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention…,” he recalled. Shortly after, the musicians gained release when the same guard forged papers with a stamp made from a potato.     
     How could Messiaen lift himself above the hopelessness of a Nazi camp? I began to understand when I heard Colorado Symphony cellist Judith Galecki perform one section of Messiaen’s composition. Her hushed bow strings played “Praise to the Eternity of Jesus,” Messiaen’s declaration that we can rise above anything trying to lock us up because God is timeless and transcends everything.     
     My circumstances never sink as low as Messiaen’s, yet when they are tough, I don’t always live above them. Could I rise above my problems if I developed a perspective of the bigness of God?     
     I think so.