Canter Bridge

Ensconced in a miniscule workspace at one of O’Hare Airport’s Red Carpet Clubs, I come upon these words from Isaiah chapter 51 in my daily reading:

Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces,
who pierced the dragon?
Was it not you who dried up the sea,
the waters of the great deep;
who made the depths of the sea a way
for the redeemed to cross over?
So the ransomed of the LORD shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

The Bible appropriates ancient pagan myths of theomachy (war between the gods, sometimes cited to explain how humans came to exist) in the service of its story of loving creation by the word and at the hands of a single Creator whom Israel names as YHWH. Bending villainous, polytheistic material to their life-fomenting purposes, the biblical authors celebrate YHWH as the divine conqueror of chaos, the maker of that order which is both beautiful and nourishing.

So does the quintessential creation account—whether in the opening lines of Genesis or in that prophetic invigoration of the disheartened captive that comes to us in Isaiah—become food for the soul of those who have known chaos and feared to find themselves lost in it. Indeed it is chaos rather than non-existence that most threatened the ancients. ‘Truth be told, it is still this way.

Which brings me to my rather humble story of YHWH, who dries up the threatening deep and cuts the ancient sea monster Rahab into bits on behalf of his little redeemed ones. It is unimpressive tale, yet it places me where I belong—among YHWH’s ge’uliym, his redeemed ones—by those small brushstrokes that are commonly the ones that appear on my corner of the modest little canvas where my unremarkable life takes its shape.

In 1984, a giant of a man named Wilton Nelson died in his beloved Costa Rica. He was a scholar and a missionary’s missionary. When my family and I arrived in Costa Rica in 1988, the ESEPA Seminary I served happily for sixteen years was only in its third year. It was undeniably a work in progress, still as much hope and heart’s cry as established institution.

It seemed almost as though people had returned from Wilton’s burial service—most evangelicals could still tell one where don Wilton had been buried—to found ESEPA without pausing to shower and change out of their buryin’ clothes. Though I never knew Wilton, his legacy was everywhere at ESEPA. ‘What would Wilton do?’ in the light of WWJD bracelets seems a quaint question. Yet it was often articulated at critical moments in this project of service called ESEPA that seemed to bear the imprint of Wilton’s soul, as though a kind of Father Abraham still walked our halls and inhabited our planning sessions. Wilton had served, as I was to do for a decade and a half, with the entrepreneurial Latin America Mission.

I heard stories of how this scholarly historian preferred most of all to be mounted on a horse that was up to its armpits—trustworthy authorities assure me that horses have armpits, though my own experience in equestrian biology is limited—in Guanacaste province. Wilton ambled about that then remote Northwest corner of Costa Rica, teaching in little churches, evangelizing the most impoverished homesteaders’ jungle villages, combining that ‘strengthening of the things that remain’ and that soft blowing on newly lit candle-flame that one does as a ‘missionary’s missionary’.

Wilton and his wife had two sons. The slant of my own historiography is to be glimpsed in the fact that I do not recall Mrs. Nelson’s name and in the similar deficiency that I don’t know whether the couple had daughters.

One of Wilton’s sons was Pete. Pete and his wife Carol were themselves a generation ahead of me in the ranks of Costa Rica-based LAMers. We youngsters looked at Pete and Carol as the kind of missionaries who had got things done. Now retired back in the USA, Carol survives her late husband whom we lost in untimely fashion some years back. Pete and I were not close, yet that seemed an accident of busy lives invested in disparate projects. In fact, at least as I recall it today, our eyes met on the odd occasion when some circumstance in the LAM community brought us together. It was enough to register the fact that we understood each other and, to some degree, tracked with each other and our work across the considerable vocational distance that kept us moving on tracks that were, at their nearest, merely parallel ones.

I hear from Carol several times a year. It is a digital, rather remote, but not unsatisfying way for Nelson and Baer eyes to continue to meet.

Pete’s other son is John, born native to the Costa Rican soil that became my own only by adoption. John went on to Wheaton College and the Julliard School of Music and, notably, to an astonishing career as a symphony orchestra conductor. His own sojourn as the principal conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra left his fingerprints all over that ensemble’s rise to the top of the second tier of American symphony orchestras. Ironically, he had come and gone before my own family’s move to that iconic community of the American Midwest, with its Brickyard, its decent folk, its unstoppable quarterback, and its orchestral jewel.

I had never met John until last night. ‘Which is where this story arguably becomes worth the telling.

First, if your readerly interest has the stamina, we must go back five years in time.

But I must warn you:

• It’s about music.

• It’s a little complicated.

• Sometimes YHWH’s cutting up of chaotic Rahab happens in the quiet corners of the world where—to put once more Isaiah’s mark on things—he alone is lifted up.

I have attempted to pilot Overseas Council for just over years. As with most leadership tasks, I find leading this most remarkable organization to be grueling work. The travel alone comes close, upon occasion, to crushing the soul of a man, even when whittled down to only the necessary movements across a world where grace abounds in our day at least as flowingly, if one may, as at any other historical moment of its riverine course.

Four years ago, as the need for weaving margin and sanity into the pace of my travel became necessary, I returned in theory—though sadly, not in deed—to my roots. Even as I write these words, the first of two classical pieces I knew as a child—Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathetique’ Symphony, that is to say, his Sixth—plays its deep, poignant song in my headphones, a function of the ‘random’ function of my iTunes library and in its own way testimony to Rahab meeting her demise.

Two of the first two records I knew as a child were my mother’s 33 1/3 LP of this symphony, another vinyl recording of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and my father’s 78 rpm version of Bennie Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. Gene Krupa’s drumming in ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ has never left my heart, nor Dvorak’s confident musical exposition of a new world nor Tchaikovsky’s probing at dark yet lively truth that is too real for words alone.

As I sat down to write these words here in this United Airlines Red Carpet Club, the one who dries up the sea gave me a gift—again—of music to suit. ‘Pathetique’ means far more than its English false cognate would suggest. But I get ahead of myself.

Music, almost literally, saved my soul. Back at Wheaton College, when freshman innocence had given way to the deep, almost depressive reality of the incapacity to believe, I had no way to find my way back to faith. Music held me up while a new path was made for me, no doubt by the same Lord whom Isaiah names as he who makes path through turgid seas.

Three times a week, in the watery desert of unbelief, I walked into the practice hall where 42 of us took our measure as the Wheaton College Men’s Glee Club under the towering, terrifying, and by all accounts inimitable figure of the recently deceased ‘Coach Clayton Halvorsen’. As music happened, I touched—week on week—a reality too true and beautiful to be denied. Music, a savior of sorts, held me safe until faith returned to me or until a new way was made for me to come back to faith. I cannot say which one.

So music, you see, is more than novelty, entertainment, and free downloads to me.

Again I must apologize, for I cannot tell this story without multiple digressions.

I was trying to talk about my roots. Four years ago, I decided to build some margin into my travel. I hatched a plot by which, instead of running idiotically out of a conference room in Dallas or Paris or Cairo or Hong Kong to catch the next plane to the States, I would stay the night and get some sleep. More importantly, I would research the key classical music venues in that city. If the home team was in town and on their game, I’d attend. I’d begin to collect invigorating symphony-hall experiences the way some guys—well, me in fact!—rack up major league baseball stadiums. (I’ll never forgive those damned Yankees for abandoning the old house before I could get there to see it …)

One day in 2005, I walked across the street from my digs at Hong Kong’s Salisbury YMCA to gaze upon the Hong Kong Cultural Center and tell myself that one day I’d see and hear Edo de Waart and his company embrace their Philharmonic vocation in that very place. I wondered, though, whether I really would. And, in the end, I didn’t.

One thing, however, I did do. I began to follow the career of Maestro John Nelson—he was, after all, Wilton’s son—and to collect his CDs. I participated in my double-digit way in the launch of his foundation, Soli Deo Gloria, which commissions composers of Christian conviction to write works in the ‘classical’ genre. I stalked, in the Internet sense of the term, as John expanded his space among young conductors in the majority world, mentoring here, befriending there, blowing upon the embers of faith in a sector where there is, sometimes, too little. I cried on my computer keyboard as I read of the first performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass in Costa Rica, under the baton—of course—of a man who was born there and cared enough to return. Though it sounds pretentious to me as I write these words, he seemed a man after my own heart. I learned from sister-in-law Carol of John’s wife Anita and her own vigorous participation in what from a distance seems ever so exotic and elegant though is no doubt comprised of a thousand thousand small and inglorious steps in the same direction.

Then, last month, as I pondered the pages of my late-2009 calendar and the uncharacteristically relentless travel schedule of which they warn me, I found via a canceled appointment that I’d have a day to myself in Hong Kong at the end of a long journey. I wonder, I said to myself, whether the Hong Kong Philharmonic might be playing that evening. A quick check brought delightful confirmation that they did indeed have a concert scheduled.

Then, this jaw-dropper: The guest conductor would be none other than Maestro John Nelson, leading the Philharmonic in a program of Haydn and Berlioz and fronting the formidable talents of soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci.

Emails were exchanged, facilitated by the sister-in-lawish exertions of Carol Nelson, a backstage invitation offered, enthusiasm was stoked, a ticket purchased, a ticket lost in the mail, a white guy from Pennsylvania talking his way, ticket-less, into a Hong Kong symphony hall then through a formidable screen of dubious post-concert security.

None of it for naught.

Last night, at a time when weariness might have crept into a tired journeyman’s soul, I sat instead front and center, practically under the un-batoned, conducting hand of Wilton’s son. Backstage, afterwards, I was treated to the gracious affection of new friends John and Anita Wilson.

A gift, small, dense, durable, doxological was placed into my small hands, where it is cradled with what a favorite writer calls ‘abiding astonishment’.

Somewhere, on this day, someone has a large redemption story to tell. No doubt angels sing loudly, perhaps stomp their golden feet, at the telling of it. I have only this small one.

How do these things happen? How does sound, fury, itinerary, flight delay, Asian appointment, cancellation, an excessive if under-control Protestant work ethic, a soul that would die if it were to wander far from the music of the spheres and its expression in our earthly tonalities, and the grateful memory of a missionary’s missionary who had the obstinacy to die before I could meet him issue in such things?

Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces,
who pierced the dragon?
Was it not you who dried up the sea,
the waters of the great deep;
who made the depths of the sea a way
for the redeemed to cross over?
So the ransomed of the LORD shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

How, if you’ll excuse me, I have a plane to Knoxville to catch.