The music is less about who is playing, and more about who is hearing.
You sit on a barely cushioned black wooden bench. Your feet rest lightly against three small metal paddles, applying the bearest pressure. Your eyes are closed. Across the room an old man sits quietly, his hand resting on an old leather-bound journal placed delicately on the mosaic surface of the coffee table. A couple sit closer to the slightly elevated stage. They drink wine like time sliding away and listen only to what the other is saying. Young men with fancy shoes lean at the bar, fishing, some of the girls with short skirts bite. Although the room is full of tobacco smoke, wood fills your pores like incense, your head is full of piano hammers waiting to go off. The ivory is warm from where your fingers and face have christened the keys with your wait. Then, you begin to play.
The dampener is on. Your fingers dance across the board like electric-fire, alive with the beat of your heart and blood pulsing through and through your veins. Chord to chord to crescendo to fall quietly into the slow trace of true intention. The music is beautiful. Blue like the sky or creation singing with you. There are no stage lights. The stage is made of coarse wood and the piano is slightly out of tune. The curtain behind is faded red and torn. No glamour to drown out the clamour around you.
Everyone continues on. They have not stopped to hear you play. Men in brown jumpers play poker and shout at tables arranged along the side of the wall. The couple in front blow smoke into each other’s mouthes, and the boys at the bar whistle, out of key with your melody. You have played your heart with piano strings and black-white keys. They have not listened, haven’t heard your sweet symphony. But wait. There. At the back. In the shadow by the door. In the last seat left, where he is easily ignored. The old man cries. The cavernous cracks that time and life wrote on his face gleam with streams. He alone heard. He opened wide his eyes and ears. And, as he gets up to leave, placing the journal in the inside pocket of his jacket near to his heart, he smiles.
Worship is less about who is playing, and more about who is listening.
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