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I was talking privately to a friend about all that's happening with legislation, life changing decisions that are going to impact our lives, and those of our children and grandchildren. When I quietly expressed my concerns on some issues, he said "don't worry, have faith, there are elections coming up."

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The subject of faith takes me back to a Spring evening at the symphony. The chance to hear the local city orchestra play Mozart was enough to make me dust off my little black dress and my lone pair of high heels and make an evening out of it. There's a part of me that loves the ordered, mathematical precision of Bach, especially on a guitar. But here is just something about Mozart that speaks to me. Perhaps what I find so heartrending in Mozart's music is the intensity of change from one mood to another. Other great composers have expressed the extremes of life: affirmation, despair, the sanctity of grace, the rush of sensual pleasure, fertile touch and barren void. But only in Mozart can all these emotions co-exist in the infinity of a short song, making it fuller, richer, touching a chord deep within.

Mozart was a man redeemed through his art, finding forgiveness as reconciliation with what lives deep inside. He inhabited the landscape of the absolute. Not absolute as defined by black and white, but in those gray shores, where beauty ebbs in and away, like the tide, where everything is contingent and nothing simple, and time is so very short. A place where, as Henry James’s Madame Merle says, "an envelope of circumstances encloses every human life". It is a place where genres fuse; where concertos become operatic and arias symphonic; where glee and grief, the downtrodden and the sanctified, become one. A place where time is much too short, as with each note we are aware of our allotted span dwindling, time in which we not only have to find our true path, but derive some joy from the journey.

Music is as life is. One can not write music like that if one has not lived a life beyond the safe middle ground. Just as one can not lead without having been honed by the experience of the worst the world can throw your way.
As I listened, I imagined how Mozart must have struggled through these compositions, through the changes of lightness to deep night, happiness to melancholy, engulfed by the blazing brilliance of his vision, yet with no refuge from those days both irrevocable and unrecoverable. His music flowed like wine, spilled like wine, not as a a toast to his detractors and the conscious they did not posses, but as communion with something as profound and old as heaven.

He wrote his works in a span of just a few years, dying at the age of 35, on the surface, the work seeming effortless. But what must have gone into those works and how he continued in the face of adversity. He didn't listen to the critiques of reviewers selected for their negative view, he didn't stop when times were dark, because he believed in his vision, he believed in his music. And as I listen to the swell of the concerto I think of the composer and I think of each of us, perhaps afraid of the seemingly uncontrollable nature of our future, and whether we as one person can change that.
How easy it would be to let fear take over, for despite our best wishes that the center of our lives will hold firm, it never does. I took a dear friend for a flight lesson this last week. It was a sleek, high performance aircraft I needed to get some currency in and I let him fly from the copilots seat, my being a licensed instructor, and talked him through a takeoff, and then a landing. It's hard, there in such brief moments, to explain risk and hesitation, the wind and the drift and what you need to do to react to it quickly or risk losing it all. Life is like a shifting wind on final approach, one slight change and all patterns alter. One moment life feels full and content and the next your safe landing is in turmoil, or maybe you are. Things change when you least expect it. It's like being on short final, landing assured, and suddenly you're switched to another runway, another path and everything changesI've flown enough that I've felt real fear in an aircraft, shooting an approach to minimums in rugged terrain, snowflakes the size of postage stamps slamming into the window, my right hand on the throttle and sweat trickling down my cheek. I had never felt more present, more myself, more in the moment than at that time. The fear was right on the edge of either paralyzing me or propelling me into this place of being utterly engaged, that magic moment when I know I am honing years of practice into precision flying, and I'm suddenly out of the fear, into the light.

I could manage the fear because I have faith. Not blind faith in the promises that all will be well. But faith in my training, faith in my mechanic, my copilot, my airplane. Faith in what has been proven to me, not merely spoken to me. And yes, as well, faith that with needles centered, the runway should soon be straight ahead. For as it says in Hebrews 11:1 faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
But fear in an airplane I've trained for, I'm conditioned for. I've drilled and practiced and take a checkride each year to keep my skills up. But like any human, I still fear what I can not control, the unexpected emotions of my heart, the unreliable character of our bodies, and certainly the daily reminders of our own mortality. We watch it on the TV, see it in the faces of the first responders, or watch it being lowered with highest honor into the ground at Arlington. Denying the uncertainty, the fragile underpinnings of life, might make one feel safer, especially now. But doing so would not make life more predictable. especially now in these times that threaten the core foundations of what made this country great. Going along with pretty promises and ignoring the past are not going to make my future any safer.

Faith is the ability to close one's eyes for a moment, knowing that when your eyes opened again, the world would still be there, just as your strength will be. In Ulysses - James Joyce talks about the "ineluctable modality of the visible." You shut your eyes, open them again, and find the world continues without your witnessing it. It's a beautiful reflection on time, on faith, and on how we the people hold onto what is important.

But faith does not also mean that you sit and do nothing, blindly hoping that things will get better by your inaction. You need to learn early on that the people or powers you somehow expected to assist you, were completely interdict. I have walked in the darkness of the forest, trusting the Lord to watch over me and fallen flat on my face, the earth reaching up, if not to smite, me, to at least give me a gentle kick in the pants as to reality. As I sat up blinking, brushing the leaves out of my hair, it was apparent that although the Lord watches us, he will still allow us to fall, he will still allow us to fail. Though I had a pistol on my hip, the rifle I was carrying was unloaded, as I knew the area in which I would walk was treacherous, and it was undamaged. I reached into my pocket, as with the fall, I wanted to make sure the ammo was still there, and it was, the live rounds clean, the primer dented deep into the unexploded round, not much bigger than a fingertip, yet big enough to contain a life. Small things, powerful things, sometimes it just takes the actions of one small thing in the world to make a resounding noise.

The coming days won't be easy for any of us. I can't tell you how we will survive, but I know that with faith, and the tools of the patriot I have a chance. Faith doesn't mean the absence of fear, it means having the courage to go ahead, right alongside the fear. The word "courage" in English has the same etymological root as the French coeur, which means "heart". With faith, with the courage that faith brings, I can acknowledge what I can't control, and place my heart and my mind wisely with what I know I can see and touch and feel, not simply words. With faith that I can separate the truth from all the lies that have been put out by the media, with faith that's backed by records, facts and the company one kept. With that faith I step into the voting booth, where I will connect with the truth of the moment as I move forward into the uncharted land of the next. I have a tape of Mozart on my stereo this morning, listening as I did that night months ago. As the music crashes around me I harness all my fear and uncertainty about what the upcoming months may bring, and surrender to the music. Just as with faith I will challenge and survive whatever life throws our way. The composer speaks to me in heightened sound, crystallizing an emotion, an insight, and experience. For the space of a song, we breathe together, and my breathing slows and I'm transported as if from the tumultuous edge of a snow squall to the still, clear air on the other side. A peaceful courage fills me, and I know that whatever happens in the coming days, I will survive, sure in my faith as to how to best live my life. It will be a life, sung to my own song, not dancing to some Pied Piper of promises. It will be a life heard, as I take my place, a single voter but a strong voice, in the voters booth where I will make that resounding noise. Where I will be heard.