I want to start this lesson with a story that is dear to me. In the dark ages, I was the concert piano technician/tuner for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and worked with a lot of celebrities. Frankly, the Good Lord blessed me with a reputation, which was undeserved, so that it was a sign of status to have me as a piano tuner. I tuned for many, many famous people, artists, musicians, authors, captains of industry, diplomats etc., etc.
There was a famous author who retired to Savannah Georgia, and lived on this street, in a four-story federalist "row house." Attached to the alleyway in the back was a beautiful little cottage that was created from what had been the "carriage house" where the carriages and horses were kept, prior to the automobile. It was built in the 1840s, remodeled in the 1970s when Carter was president. The house next door was occupied by the Secretary of the Interior (one of his homes.) Hodding Carter III, a journalist, and politician who at the time was Assistant Secretary of State was a frequent guest, as were several others of the "Georgia Mafia," the affectionate nickname given the politicians close to President Carter, also well-known concert artists and authors and celebrities of various sorts.
My friend the retired Author (who we will call Arthur - to protect the guilty) was an aging, wealthy homosexual gentleman, polished, cultured and truthfully one of the most impressive people I have ever known. Let me admit that I learned very much about art, music and literature from my conversations with Arthur. Many evenings we spent discussing everything.
He did not live in chaos and covered his sexual proclivities with great dignity and his home was a bastion of the Savannah Society set. He hired me twice a year to come to his home, and care for his wonderful 1903 Steinway 9 foot grand piano. He made several trips to Atlanta to play my Knabe 9 foot grand piano manufactured in 1877.
Arthur quickly fell in love with my original compositions and discovered that I had wide ranging interests and very quickly our conversations became philosophically deep. He would schedule for me, while I was there, to tune for several of the wealthiest people in Savannah and Hilton Head Island. To seal the deal, he would give me possession of his carriage house for a week. (The bait he used for his young lovers) Basically, I would work three days, be terribly overpaid, make just shy of 2,000 dollars in those three days, and then I would have four days to enjoy Savannah.
Arthur was curious immediately that I held strong faith in Jesus Christ. He could not make my music, my skills, my philosophical knowledge equate to his understanding of someone with very strong and easily stated faith in Jesus Christ. To him, those people were ignorant and superstitious. He also could not understand why I was not repulsed by his homosexuality. You see, I let him know very quickly that his cultured act was no cover to me, that I understood he was absorbed with sex with young men, and that I would never be one of them. And I told him in such a way that he respected me for my honesty and discretion. I said, "We will have this conversation, under seal, upon blood oath and it will never be discussed outside this instance" (the reason I am intentionally giving some misleading facts and not using his name. It is still under seal, but he is long gone and this story is instructive.)
Arthur threw great parties, and he truly enjoyed people. He made a habit of throwing a big dinner party on my last night and always insisted I attend. The dining table seated 24 people, and people at that table represented billions of dollars of wealth. (If I started naming them you would not believe me).
Arthur was also spiritually insightful and understood who was a hanger-on, clinging or attracted to his wealth, and who truly enjoyed his company. I played concerts in his home for diplomats and Kings, (literally) and two presidents. All that time, every six months, for several years the conversations became deeper, the questions of God's existence and possibilities of salvation (eternal life) drawn with more distinction.
He told me two years before his death, that he had become friends with a local Roman Catholic priest - and, God forgive me, I assumed it was just another homosexual liaison. On my last visit, on the last evening, he invited the usual society people, and during the dinner, he lifted his glass, offered a toast and said, "We are celebrating our friend Marion's last evening. (my real name) Marion has added so much to our lives this last decade, so much color and meaning to our lives." The table applauded. I wanted to crawl under the rug. I was in shock, this was the first and last time this happened. Everyone clinked glasses and sipped wine, then he said. "And I have news." There was a moment of somber silence as Arthur seemed to have to gather the courage to speak. "Marion, my dear friend, this will be our last visit. I will not be here six months from now. The doctors confirmed last week that I have terminal liver cancer."
There was a cloud of heavy silence that hit the room, a sigh and embarrassed silence as the great and corrupt Savannah society were rudely reminded of their own mortality.
I said, "Arthur, my dear friend, how hopeless and horrible that news would be, if this, the mortal body, this eating and drinking and enjoying life were all there is. How could anyone ever live with the psychic weight of it? Like animals meeting our biological needs, until one day some doctor says, 'That discomfort in your belly is death itself and very soon the biological functions of your body will cease. I can't imagine the psychic weight of it!"
Arthur looked at me with tears in his eye, not primping or weeping, just that extra glint of too much moister in the eyes and said, "That is why I wanted to share the news tonight, with all my closest friends. You see," he said, looking me in the eyes with an intensity I had never experienced, "I wanted to witness that from the time we first met, I began to wonder how you build the part I get to keep."
He motioned around the room, where hung millions of dollars of impressionist art, pieces by Monet, Manet, Rembrandt, Cezanne, and Cassatt. "I can't keep any of this." An old man with mutton chops, (his, lawyer, CPA, literary agent and accountant) who seem delighted with the news said, "You can't take it with you, can you, Arthur. But rest assured it will go to good use." Arthur ignored him and said, "Marion, I wanted you to know especially, that I have been careful these last several years to build the part I get to keep."
A woman who had been in love with him for decades, the wife of another man, began to weep bitterly. Others began to speak, to offer loving and in some instance, I'm sure, hollow and empty words, but I was caught away in a vision. It was silly, I knew Arthur to be old, yet, I had grown to love him and enjoy the times in Savannah that he arranged for me. So it was incongruent, that the news of his impending death would send me into shock. But it was not shock, it was honest grief and the presence of the Holy Spirit. I saw Arthur and myself, and a party of people marooned on an inhospitable planet. To survive we had to have a functioning space suit. And when we first arrived our spacesuits were brand spanking new, subtle, and easily serviceable, and easy to take for granted, the envy of others whose suits were growing worn and brittle. All the wise folk in our group, from their arrival on that inhospitable planet, were busy working with the spacesuit manufacturers, across galactic communications, examining multiple possibilities of suit designs. Which were illusions? merely proximity of what was needed? and which were REAL survivable options? It was a gamble. Groups on the colony argued about what was true design and what was something less. IN pride they all held that their model, their design was real.
I saw Arthur working very intently building his suit, and I saw myself and someone else, working on parts of it, as Arthur smiled at us, in an almost patronizing way. The noise of the table drew me back to the moment. It was rather like an Irish wake and the morose, death-denying humor had begun. Arthur reached and grabbed my arm, looked me in the eye and said, "I'm wearing my suit. It is enough, it is complete. And in the morning, I want you to meet your fellow tailor."
In that very moment, it was affirmed to me, that the perceptions of this plane of existence mock the philosophy of materialism. Were I the isolated autonomous human I believed myself to be, how could Arthur have shared my vision, and stated, "And in the morning, I want you to meet your fellow tailor"? That statement represented something more concrete, something more real than the conversation happening around that table. AS happens in this human life, Arthur aided me in my healing salvation as much as I aided him.
The morning arrived and I met Father Marks at breakfast. Rather than being the boy I sinfully and cynically expected, he was almost 90, a childhood friend of Arthur's. Some five or six years his senior. He taught me the most important word and concept I have learned in these many decades of living. That word is "synergism" and more precisely "the synergistic work of the Holy Spirit - the LORD and GIVER of LIFE." He said to me, "I prayed for more than 60 years, that God would send to my dear friend Arthur, someone who he could not dismiss, who he could not seduce, who he would love on a higher plane, who would share with him Christ's love. Oh, he seduced me years ago and ruined my witness and it has been the greatest grief and failure of my life. But I have learned that the Holy Spirit functions on a level of wisdom beyond our comprehension and synergistically turns even our failures to good IF we love Jesus Christ. My Son, do you love Jesus?" I did not have to answer because tears were streaming down my cheeks. It is the gift of tears, the witness of a love so deep, it cannot be verbally stated. I saw the image of my first little prayer altar. And the theologically shallow Lutheran Prayer book I owned (and still do) and on the seven days of prayer, the young Marion Robinson had inscribed, as an entrance way to the daily prayers, "I love YOU, Jesus." That was my talisman, the protection against the superstitions of religions and heresy; the ONLY reason I was praying the prayers was because I ALREADY loved Jesus.
What is the synergistic working of God's Holy Spirit? It is a wisdom for our salvation, above the means of our rational understanding, if we will but open ourselves to love HIM, to love Jesus Christ, to marvel at his teachings, to weep at his Cross, to marvel at his resurrection, to feast upon his body and blood, with heart-rending reverence, to never deny his presence, to accept all that he has to give us, wonderful and marvelous gifts of the Holy Spirit in power, in love . . . every one of which we would sacrifice in a nano-second just to be eternally with, in and of HIM. If you do not intrinsically grasp what I am saying, you are not truly Christian, yet.
Sorry, I did not get to the part about how the old pagans, prior to Abraham found salvation - that will be the next lesson. This lesson, suffice it to say, was about how the NEW pagans find salvation. Arthur, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author, the old skank, who in his last years found Christ - MEMORY ETERNAL! I hope this lesson was not a waste of time for you.
https://soundcloud.com/jo-delaurean/sets/piano-butch-robinson
Archpriest Symeon Elias
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