Rushing past a joyful noise

In an article for the Washington Post's Sunday magazine, Gene Weingarten described a test the newspaperconducted during which world-class violinist Joshua Bell would play some of the finest classical music by the greatest composers on his 300-year-old Stradivarius. But here was the catch: Bell would be dressed as street musician and perform in a Washington Metro station during the morning rush hour. It was designed to be "an experiment in context, perception and priorities - as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"

I was intrigued by the premise of the story and wondered what I would have done. Would I have recognized something unique when I heard it? Would I have taken the time to actually stop and listen, or to throw a buck into the open violin case? Would you? Well, if we had, we'd have been in the very small minority. During Bell's 43-minute concert, only seven people stopped, 27 people gave him some money, and the rest of the 1,097 rushing commuters just kept going.

The fact is that I can really identify with those busy men and women trying to get to work on time. After all, most of us have our minds on our plans for the day: meetings to attend, memos to write, projects to complete. Or maybe we'd be worrying about some personal problem at home, wondering where we'd find the time to handle everything on our daily to-do list - or just playing with our cell phones or Blackberries.

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All are perfectly reasonable excuses for being too preoccupied to notice anything out of the ordinary on our daily commute. Except, well, some people did notice. The first to stop was a man who prefers rock to classical music, but, for the first time in his life, actually stopped to listen to a street performer and for the first time, gave him a tip. Describing the music later, he said, "Whatever it was, it made me feel at peace."

Who were these people who paid attention to the music? Weingarten wrote: "There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away."

Whatever that says about us grownups, it's probably not the way we'd like to see ourselves. We'd all like to think that we appreciate beauty, particularly anything out of the ordinary. Yet beauty, whether made by human minds and hands or God's magnificent power, fills our world if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Taking life's beauty for granted is bad enough, but taking for granted our God-given ability to appreciate it, too? Now, that's a sad song, indeed.

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For a free copy of the Christopher News Note: "The Beauty of It All - Celebrating God's Universe," write to The Christophers, 12 East 48th Street, New York, N.Y. 10017, or send e-mail to mail@christophers.org.

- - -

Dennis Heaney is the president of The Christophers

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