More Puddled Livers

While aimlessly wandering round the anglican cathedral, enjoying the stone and space of it all, the great bellowing organ piped itself up out of the dust and began playing some great monstrous churchifed music. My first thoughts were just to remark at how cool the acoustics were and that someone obviously knew what they were doing when they built the place, cos even though I was right at the back I could hear the sound nicely. After a minute or two I stopped thinking about the architecture and acoustics and wandered a little closer to the centre, to enjoy a bigger sound experience. The beast was waling out some seriously deep notes that progressively rolled around in waves of volume, with spikey higher ones that rattled inside my ears alternating from side to side which I enjoyed a lot. Having said that, after a minute or two of listening I dismissively turned round and was about to walk away, having acknowledged what was going on, but for some reason I stopped and instead decided to just enjoy a bit more of what I was hearing and it was then that I was struck by the other people listening too. I'm not talking thousands here, but there was definitely a clump of people who for a few minutes at least had stopped their wandering and closed their mouths and heard and that thought alone almost moved me to tears. I'm not sure if it was just cos it was a collective experience, or cos they had paused everything else to respond to something that had captivated them, or cos it reminded me of how we all need, are hungry for something beautiful and unexpected to rise up out of the dust and call us in a way that we can't resist. But for a second or two my eyes filled up. I was surprised by the number of men, frozen silently, men I wouldn't have expected to be interested and yet interested they were, enough to wait, enough to stand. I wondered why they were there at all, if it was just another thing to see or if they actually believed in the God the place was built for. Maybe the thing that moved me most was the reminder that men's hearts aren't as hard and hopeless as they might appear and that when His voice rises up, even when we've almost forgotten where we're going and why we're here, that all we can do is stop and listen.