Most of us get the occasional x-ray. What if an x-ray could be re-purposed to show what is going on inside of us in a new way?
During the cold war era, the Soviet Union forbid forms of Western music like jazz and rock-and-roll from entering the country because it was the music of the enemy. In 1946 two Soviet entrepreneurs came up with a creative solution. They built a recording machine from scavenged parts of old gramophones and produced their own bootleg records, copied from original recordings smuggled into the U.S.S.R.
What fired my imagination is this: these underground record producers used the unlikely source of discarded x-rays as their only available source of plastic soft enough to be imprinted by their recording machine. As the fascinating article in the May, 2017 issue of National Geographic describes it:
An x-ray of broken ribs emitted the lilt of Russian tango. A Broadway show tune quavered from a dislocated pelvis. A human skull was the morbid backdrop for American jazz.
This unexpected juxtaposition of the x-ray’s purpose to reveal and the music’s purpose to inspire intrigues me.
We think of x-rays as private and personal. A hospital will not send your x-rays even to your own doctor without your permission. How could what offers such a revealing look inside oneself be transformed to carry creativity and new life to many? Music is widely considered an international language, transcending boundaries and somehow capturing glimpses of the human condition.
When do spiritual x-rays spin out music that touches the hearts and minds of widely divergent people?
Think of King David, caught in the prophetic x-ray vision of adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Uriah. Rather than deny or explain away his moral failings, David “writes over” this x-ray with his own words of Psalm 51, which are music to our ears when we find ourselves in similar circumstances (all the Psalms were initially sung in Old Testament worship):
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit. (vs. 1-2, 10-12)
For anyone who has known moral failure (and does this not include all of us in some way, shape or form?), this is sweet music indeed.
Or think of the virtuous apostle Paul, writing over the x-ray of his blemished and compromised life these words, which set many of our toes tapping because they resonate so easily with the cadence and beat that is our daily experience :
And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. But if I do what I don’t want to do, I am not really the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.
I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love God’s law with all my heart. But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 7:18-25, NLT)
Life hands spiritual x-rays to all of us. We didn’t even know we had signed up for one, and yet suddenly here is the x-ray in our hands, often when we least expect it. Such x-rays penetrate “between bone and marrow.” They show us interior pictures few others see—character, motives, priorities.
We can deny them. We can try to hide them. We can fixate on them. Or we can use them as the raw material of music that we ourselves create…even if the only one who will ever hear it is God.
