Spiritual Guitar

A chill, a lingering vestige from winter, settled onto the roof and slid silently down supporting pillars at
each corner of the porch. He first felt it as it brushed against his ankles. It crept onto his lap and nipped at
his fingers at play with the guitar balanced across one knee. But, his fingers resisted the cold’s numbing
bite and continued to pluck and strum. Coils of bronze pulsed excitedly over lengths of vibrating steel
strands and, amplified by a spruce-paneled chamber, resounded—molecules pushing against other
molecules—stirring everything touched, surrounded by, and immersed in spring’s evening air. Melodic
movements of sound, discrete and discernible taken by themselves, built one upon another like waves
piling up on an ocean beach will merge their voices into a single, comforting blanket of white noise. A
tingling rippled through the guitar strummer. It reinvigorated his numbed fingers, uplifted his fallen
mood, and brightened his darkened mind.

Physics cannot wholly explain the phenomenon—the ping-twang ringing effect of guitar strings at
twilight in the early spring. Maybe there are angels and seraphim, gathered in a cluster encircling that
source of sound, who can explain. Their unheard hovering beating to rhythms of the meta-realm, they
might be silently signaling arrival of an eminence in which all aliveness reverberates, as if all living
things are played similarly to stringed musical instruments—pulsing coils of experience wrapped about
strands of being brushed lightly by mysterious fingertips.

It is puzzling how perspectives on truth evolve in mortal minds. Within the span of less than half a
millennium truth has turned away from a perception of life as being a miraculous event to that of a
stochastic accident. An assumption that there is no intelligence at work strumming the strands of being
has become overwhelmingly politically correct. Rigorously applied scientific definitions seem now to
deem intelligence to be but a random whirl of energy pulses about inconsequential bits of matter. These
pulses only appear to channel themselves into patterns, but those structures that develop are perhaps no
more meaningful than canyons carved into the earth by wind and water. They are incidental accidents. By
popular definition of what is accidental, Life (capital L) falls from the lofty realm of miraculous to the
lowly level of “unexpected, unusual and unintended external event which occurs in a particular time and
place, without apparent or deliberate cause.” Therefore, we should not be troubled by Tillichian ultimate
concerns or by suppositions of a supreme intelligence, or by a moving-finger-writing-on-a-wall.

And yet, we mortals insist, and we persist in our insistence, that there must be some meta-meaning—
meaning beyond that observable and experienced in the five physical senses. We have the audacious
temerity to ask what strummer plucks our strings.