Learning to Play the Music of the Gospel

I just finished the final exam for my Piano class. Partly because music is on my mind right now, and partly because we've already heard several Conference talks about marriage and family, I've decided to skip Elder Christofferson's talk, at least for now, and share thoughts influenced by Elder Wilford W. Andersen's talk, The Music of the Gospel. In this talk, Elder Andersen speaks of the difficulty of dancing well when we can't hear the music we're dancing to. Going through the motions feels difficult and awkward without music to support the movements. He likened this to trying to live the principles of the Gospel without feeling the joy Gospel. I'd like to share that same moral, but with an analogy even more closely related to my Piano class.

At several points over the course of the class, we were given pieces to practice and play. When we were assigned a particularly challenging piece, the teacher would sometimes play the song for us, so we could know what it sounded like and get a feel for the song. This is like having someone who loves the Gospel teach us to love the Gospel, too. It's a good way to learn to hear the music, but sometimes, we didn't have that luxury. Sometimes, we had to figure the music out on our own.

We had learned to identify the notes and the various symbols on music notation so, theoretically, we could simply read the music that was written on the sheet, and play that. In practice, however, it wasn't that simple. We could pick out the right notes and hold them for the correct amount of time, but we couldn't really play the songs until we heard the music and knew what it sounded like. At least, I couldn't. Plunking out notes gave me an idea of what the music was supposed to sound like, but until I had an idea of how the song was supposed to go, I couldn't really play it. I could play the notes, but I couldn't play the song.

The Gospel may be something like that. We know what the commandments are. We've heard them countless times. We know what we have to do to live the Gospel, but if we try to live the Gospel knowing only the letter of the law, and not "hearing the music," as Elder Andersen had put it, we will falter. The good news is that even if we can't yet hear the music, or if we've gone out of tune somehow, we can sound it out. As we learn the letter of the law of the Gospel (including such commandments as "Thou shalt not kill"), we can also learn the Spirit of the law of the Gospel (including such principles as "Life is sacred; respect it"). The more we learn about the spirit of the law, the closer we get to truly understanding the Gospel, just as I was able to grow to understand a song gradually, just by hitting the keys. Only once I learned both the "letter" of the music and the "Spirit" of the music was I able to play the songs with the emotion those songs were trying to convey.

Thankfully, many of us don't need to "sound out" the Gospel because we already hear, and dance to, its music. Many of us have been raised in the Gospel, or had great mentors when we came into the church. But for the rest of us who haven't heard the music yet, or who may be slightly out of tune, we can pick up the tune of the Gospel the same way I picked up the tunes of the songs I learned in Piano class. We can learn the music of the Gospel gradually by learning how to play the keys.