Bagpipes are gifted with two voices. The melancholy drone reminds us of its earthbound connection, a track laid down to attach us to the real world.
When the pipe lets loose its second, shrill and ethereal voice, we are lifted to high places, released from earthly fetters.
We are mesmerized by the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” On bagpipes, it stops us with its wondrous melody, the drone anchoring the soaring tune to earth.
The day before Easter, a dozen bagpipers let go the voices of their instruments, blending their earthy drone and heavenly pitch. The closer they marched, the sharper their voices split the air. They stopped directly in front of me, kilts and caps and stockings coming to an abrupt halt. As they neatly turned, something dangling from the waist of a kilt before me caught my eye. An incongruent plastic water bottle glistened against the tidy, plaid pleats.
The unexpected water bottle caught my full attention.
I’m not sure exactly how an unanticipated water bottle allowed me to enter fully into the event. But the costumes, the bagpipes, and their dual voices suddenly became uniquely “mine”—the music’s beauty distilled through the humor of a lowly, so misplaced, bottle of water. It was my own snapshot, my insider view.
Then, fewer than twenty-four hours later, in the church service I attended, Easter was everywhere. It was in the one hundred-strong choir. It was in their voices, like the spirited high voice of yesterday’s bagpipes. It was in the orchestra. Like the bagpipe drone, the instruments grounded the cosmic heaven-and-earth Easter story.
Easter is huge; it is profound. But I had a problem. Where was today’s “water bottle” moment for me? Hearing the earth-shaking Easter story one more time did not make it “mine.” It was routine. The cosmic message was too vast, too big to grasp. The heaven and earth connection was too abstract.
I needed a hook to connect to the profound message. It was too enormous to get my head around.
Until, that is, sitting there in the pew, I recalled my own recent shortcomings. Now they fell on me—cold and stinging like hail. When I thought about them, and owned them, my failures seemed big as the universe.
Raw nerves were exposed. My humanity embarrassed me. It was personal.
So finally, my Easter water-bottle moment had arrived. My humiliation hung on me like that bottle. It was so out-of-place. So obvious. And I had to own it.
The wayward water bottle! My own missteps! Suddenly, Easter came alive. I badly needed that Easter Message to meet my newly-admitted condition.
It would. It did. And that alone, lifted me.