Specter Getz

If you don't like it, tough. I wrote it at Luna cafe at like 11pm over the best plate of portabella mushrooms and ravioli I have ever had. The sauce alone likely took 2 years off my life, but added in quality what it had to have taken in quantity.

For so long my times of contemplation always had a specter drifting about, sometimes fading in and out, others crystal clear. This specter was birthed by having come across a quote from jazz musician Stan Getz, “My Life is Music…at the cost of everything else.”

So I went on agonizing, “Is my life Christ at the cost of ANYTHING else?” And this one specter haunted me for years always challenging me to identify one thing I had really given up for Christ; it told me I had to flee everything and everyone but Christ to be as devoted as it had been to its master. And as I failed to give up everything I began to fret.

As I sit pondering this conflict again I am brought to look at this question in a new way. I imagine Specter Getz once again walking up to challenge me just as he has successfully done dozens of times before.

I can see the complacent look on his aged face. He wears his devotion to his craft on his lips as the Pharisees wore their devotion around their necks. And so he stops in front of me, not really bothering to look at me, more looking through me, as though he’s already working out the next dissonant progression of notes he’s going to puff out, and he says, “My Life is music at the cost of everything else. Is your Life Christ at the cost of everything else?”

In my mind Getz hesitates for a moment, as if out of courtesy, then starts to walk back into the shadows. Like a nervous school boy, excited to try his hand at answering the teacher yet afraid he is wrong, I finally get out my response, “My Life is Christ to the salvation of everything else.”

In a voice that betrays years of sitting in smoky bars and lounges until too early in the morning he simply says, “Yeah?”

Then in as much an effort to explain myself to him as to work it out for myself I continue, “You always tell me that music cost you everything else and at first I thought Christ was suppose to cost me everything as well, because he says he does. But I never saw how it was different until now.”

“The things I lose to Christ I lose in the same way as trading a painting of a field for a chance to lie in it, to stare up at the clouds and feel the same wind on my skin that is making the clouds above sail slowly by. The things I give up were never really mine, never even real, just phantoms of what they could be, only a hint. But by giving them to Him they are infused with new power, with new significance, true beauty, deeper magic.”

“The master you serve called you to forsake all else, and now your life is occupied by something that can never fulfill you. My Master calls me to forsake all else so that it may be put in its proper place, transformed, and work to bring Him glory and me joy.”

“Yours is about how much you have lost, mine is about how much I give and what I do with what I get in return,” I finish. Stan doesn’t say anything as he starts walking away for what I can only assume is the last time. I want to call after him and ask if this is what he had been waiting for me to say. “Have you been trying to teach me this, or are you just bored with our little game?” “Were you truly trying to torment me, or was this all a big game?”

I don’t bother to say any of these things, and somehow they don’t seem all that important. Not in light of my new thought to ponder.