My garage is also our family room. For a brief period of time, it housed Katie Van Kooten and we got to listen to her practice. From the first moment I met her, in her Torrey interview, it was obvious that Katie had “the right stuff.”
I actually asked her to sing, over the phone, for her Torrey interview . . . because she said she was good and I wanted to hear for myself. I did. I admitted her on the spot, because Katie also was really smart . . . and a believer and she had a great voice, even over my speaker phone.
I have never doubted her since.
It is astounding the gifts God gives some people. The chance to see those gifts develop in others is one of the great advantages of getting older.
Understanding music is beyond me. Music, it seems to me, is a nearly perfect human discipline. It is incarnate mathematics. It forces the head, heart, and hands (in the pianist) to work at the same time. In every performer it demands intellect, passion, and body to cooperate in a way that at the highest levels of music helps the rest of us to see what it means to be whole.
Plato understood the importance of music. His cosmos was an image of perfect harmony. The man in perfect harmony was the man who could best see the Face of God. He believed that music impacted people at the deepest level . . . and to be careless about tunes was like being thoughtless with a nuclear reactor.
My wife helped tutor me in all of this in the early years of our marriage. She dumped my eighties pop and began to teach me to listen to music. She worked hard to help me hear it and not just tell stories in my mind. This training made me ready for the time when she invited Katie to stay with us for a short time and I could hear heavenly sounds coming from our garage!
Those were good days and continued my education. All of this prepared me for the treat last summer of standing (very briefly!) on the stage of the Royal Opera House.
Katie took us on a tour of the Royal Opera House and I have never seen anything like it. The ranks of costumes, dancers preparing for the show, the orchestra pit . . . any work I have done in theater was dwarfed by it all. I had played with toys, but here was reality. The people who greeted her there were like monastics . . . intent on their calling and in a world where that calling was understood without explanation. My memory is full of red velvet, gold, great glass walls, bright eyed young people, wise musicians laugh wrinkles as they told tall theater tales, and towering sets rolled to the side. It is all a glorious jumble like the plot of Magic Flute!
To see her there was like seeing a person in the place she belonged. I was a proud teacher, gloriously surpassed. Katie is, in most ways, beyond me and that is good. I have to work with college-age kids. She works with some of the most skilled artists and adults in the world. She is all grown up and Hope and I could not be happier.
The day was also a reminder of the good done by modern secularism. Because I think secularism is deficient in important ways as a philosopher, my main posture (I have noticed) on this blog has been to point out these deficiencies. But most modern secularists are also children of the West, who have inherited a great Christian culture, and they have often protected it very well.
If it had been left to the Church in England, priceless treasures like the Royal Opera could not have been saved. This is mostly because the Church there is too weak, too broken to do this great task. When an English atheist or agnostic contributes to saving such things we owe them a great debt.
Saving treasures of human culture is not God’s work because culture is good in itself. It is good (when it is good) because it is the product of God’s image: humankind. Human beings create, because God creates. God loves His creation and so He loves the creations of His creations. Opera is the grand-culture of God when done properly.
In that sense, the secularists (and they are mostly secularists) of the Royal Opera have acted as Christ would have us act if we could. Their works are great and good (in this regard) and I honor them for it.
What of the Church? We will not always be so weak. In God’s good time, revival will come and when it does we must remember to honor the aging secularists for doing what we could not. They may not be able to keep the culture long, but they have not done everything badly. As their sins find them out (if nothing else demographically!), then charity demands that the bad be mercifully forgotten and the good remembered. We must treat them then as we wish to be treated by them (in their power) now.
We need more opera singers as desperately as we need more pastors. This is not because singing opera is more important than pastoring. It is so difficult to sing well that we must cherish those few gifted individuals and encourage them to use their gifts to the maximum.
Part of the problem is that we too often settle for music we like and understand. Instead, Katie sought greatness. She may not achieve all her goals, but she has gone further toward them than I could have dreamed.
The Royal Opera does not just contain beautiful music. It is beautiful. The setting is perfect for the voices . . . another lesson not to put great things in unworthy vessels. And then I remembered . . .
As I stood at the back of the Royal Opera and looked at the stage where the next day dear Katie would sing for the Queen, I felt ashamed. This great talent had been forced to sing in my garage! And then I realized Hope and I (especially Hope!) had given her what we could. We were a small part of a better thing!
My garage is not the Royal Opera. I am almost ashamed that she had to practice there, but it is a reminder for those of us who are not so gifted as Katie Van Kooten. We may not have much, but we do have a room where the young Katie can sing. We may not be great, but we can give a cup of cold water (or a room with the washer and dryer) to someone who can be.
Thank you Katie for sharing yourself with us. Hope and I pray that you continue to be more than a golden voice . . . becoming a whole soul singing for all Creation in Paradise!
