Passion
One of my favorite educators is a symphony conductor. Benjamin Zander has been a faculty member at The New England Conservatory as well, but his primary role is with the symphony. If you’ve ever seen Zander present, you’ll know immediately why he is such an exceptional educator: his passion.
In one of his talks for TED (http://www.ted.com/) called “Classical Music with Shining Eyes” he tells the story of involving a whole classroom of underprivileged children in listening to a piece of classical music. Did you get what I said-”listening to?” Not even a more active learning process. But his passion was infectious and he had the children positively glued to the music.
In his book The Art of Possibility, Zander, writing with his wife, who-interestingly enough, is a counselor-describes what he calls “one buttock playing.” He tells the story of working with a pianist one day who had a solid intellectual and technical grasp of the music he was playing. While in many ways he was quite an accomplished musician, he was “firmly centered in the upright position.” Zander says he blurted out: “you’re a two-buttock player.” After the laughter subsided, he worked with the pianist to join the flow of the music, to allow his body to enter into the process so that he could “catch the wave of the music.”
I love that phrase and the concept it describes. There are those transcendent moments when what we do is more like what we are. We are one with the flow of our work, our ministry, our caring, or our relating.
My prayer for the day is that we would be one with the flow of the Kingdom, experiencing God’s joy as we learn the process of “one-buttock playing.”
About the author, Jeff Terrell
