What do you think is the most important thing you are contributing musically?
I want my solo piano music to create what the ancients called, "Thin Places" - hallowed locations where it is said that Heaven and Earth converge. These intersections or spots were usually located in wild, lonely places in nature where the veil between Heaven and Earth was said to be so "thin" that the two worlds merged and intersected, one flowing into the other. Music can reveal "thin places."
One of the tracks on my newest CD is even called, "Thin Places." My hope is that the songs can be a vehicle for creating, or unmasking, "thin places;" so that the intersection of Heaven and Earth can occur anywhere: At your office desk, in your favorite reading chair, or on a lonely highway.
The visitation:
I remember reading Laura Hillenbrand's, Unbroken, a brutal account about Louie Zamperini, the WWII airman whose plane crashed in the vast Pacific thousands of miles from the nearest land. Sharks were raking their backs along the bottom of his small life raft; and his starving body was literally eating itself to death in an effort to survive.
On day 40 adrift at sea, Louie suddenly sat up. He had heard something. And saw something: Above him in the clouds were 21 figures...singing to him. The two other men in the boat heard and saw nothing. This was not a hallucination: Louie felt absolutely alert and lucid. As Louie continued to listen, he noticed he was drawn in by the song's melody and found that he had memorized it as he listened.
This unearthly event had created a "thin place" for Louie. I find it intriguing that when he needed comfort, God did not speak to Louie, He sang to him. He did not address the suffering man with mere words of assurance, as in, "Louie, I am with you. You'll be o.k." Rather, among all the means available to Him, God sent in an A-list vocal team, with a melody Louie could sing to himself for comfort when the agony of loneliness would once again sweep over his bow. Through music and melody - not mere words alone- a "thin place" on the empty Pacific broke open for Louie, anchoring his hope as a tether for his soul.
