How to Get to Carnegie Hall
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? The traditional answer is: “Practice, practice, practice.” The popular interpretation of Malcolm Gladwell is: “Ten thousand hours of practice.” Hour after hour after hour, the practicer slogs on, doing the same scales day after day, first in D, then in A, then in C. Then thirds, then fourths and octaves. Then plodding through exercise books, exercise by exercise and book by book. Even when one moves from the scales and exercises to practicing an actual piece of orchestral music, one isn’t just sailing through the song. Instead, it’s mostly about practicing the tricky bits. There are even books one can buy where the whole point is just to learn the difficult sections of various concertos, one after another after another, hour after hour, year after year.
The person engaging in the practicing may feel like Sisyphus, doomed to roll the same stone up the same hill every day only to find it at the bottom the next morning. And again, and again, and again, day after day, the stone gets rolled up the same damn hill. The story of Sisyphus surely wouldn’t be one we still tell ourselves millennia after it occurred to some exhausted Greek unless it was a feeling, an experience, most of us recognized. But in truth, anyone who has taught a beginner after years of toil knows that the Sisyphean experience isn’t quite true. We don’t feel that we’re making progress, and yet, somehow, eventually, some of us find ourselves at Carnegie hall. And when we listen to the squeaks and scrunches of the beginner, we know that, somehow, almost like a miracle, we’ve come all this way from that.
There’s a word that Aristotle liked to ponder, μέγεθος, megethos. He said that rhetorical force requires it. In order to prove that something is important, you need to build that thing up in the minds of your listeners, to show that the thing matters. That building up is megethos. It only appears once in the New Testament, where it is translated as greatness (except by Eugene Peterson, who translates it as utter “extravagance”). Ephesians 1:18–19a says, “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing megethos of His power toward us who believe.” (NASB95) I say, it is megethos that gets one to Carnegie Hall — an almost imperceptible process of accumulation that leads to something surprisingly big.
The idea of megethos doesn’t absolutely require that it feel like a slog, even though it seems that it often does. Sometimes, in the context of a community, it can in fact happen remarkably quickly. I recently read an article that was discussing the #MeToo movement. Previously, sexual assault had generally been considered and discussed by the public on a case by case basis. If a woman (usually) dared to accuse someone, her testimony was held up to individual scrutiny, and usually picked apart. Maybe something happened that she hadn’t wanted to happen, but surely she was somewhat to blame — so went the assumption. The public’s job, it seemed, was to tease out the ways in which she contributed to the situation. Thus it always went. A case would come up, it would be picked apart and discarded by the public, and forgotten. Then the next case would arise, be picked apart and discarded, and so on.
Then came the hashtag. All of the sudden, instead of single testimonials which were inevitably scrutinized and reduced to nothing in front of the traumatized person who dared put her story before the public gaze, the Twitterverse was deluged with the tiniest of phrases, the barest of testimonies — sometimes accompanied by more details, but often not. “Me too.” Over and over and over and over. Previous testimonies, occurring by themselves, in isolation, had truly been Sisyphus’ rock, being pushed uphill by the victim, and then rolled back to the bottom, for the next victim to attempt to roll up, with inevitable results. Now, though, the public was being inundated with a very simple cry of pain, and it echoed and reverberated and was amplified by each new reiteration of the same claim.
It was an instant, notes the author of the article, Stephanie Larson, of megethos. It was a pile-up. All of the sudden, after decades of victims not being heard, the dam burst, and people started to find their stories were taken seriously for the first time. And the reason was because these stories weren’t being listened to in the same way they always had. They weren’t being listened to with an eye on the potential holes that could be widened and used to explode the whole story. There were just too many, and too few chances to question them. The sheer volume of them changed how they had to be processed by the public. Instead of being interrogated, then, the tweets were finally heard as the cries of pain these testimonies had actually always been. They went from being heard as arguments that were open to refutation, to being almost viscerally (as viscerally as a social media phenomenon can be) felt as emotional outpourings, as open wounds. It was megethos that led to social change around how our society deals with the claims of people who tell stories of sexual assault, because it was megethos that led to those claims being received differently by the public at large.
My church was recently studying the parable of the persistent widow, as described in Luke 18. In this parable, the widow is seeking justice, and goes day after day to pester the unjust judge. Finally, her pleas accumulate to the point where the judge realizes it would be far easier to just get her the justice she seeks so that she will finally go away and leave him in peace. Her persistence itself is what gets results, not the justice of her cause, the eloquence of her arguments, or her pathos. Her persistence itself is what changes the judge’s mind. Persistence can feel like a Sisyphean act, but in fact be operating as megathos, creating the proverbial ‘tipping point’.
Of course, the word megathos doesn’t appear in the Luke 18 parable. Instead, as the person doing the teaching pointed out, there is a very odd word that shows up. At the beginning of the parable, the author of Luke explains the point of the parable: “to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart.” (NASB95) This is followed by the story itself, and then questions from Jesus: “Will not God bring about justice for His elect who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them? I tell you that He will bring about justice for them quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” The word translated as “quickly” is τάχος, tachos. The teacher asks, “If answers to prayer always come quickly, then why does Jesus have to tell a parable to encourage us to pray, and keep on praying, and not lose heart?”
The word tachos, according to Greek dictionaries, doesn’t mean “out of the blue,” but rather, it means “as soon as is appropriate” or “without unnecessary delay.” The idea of appropriateness (τo πρέπον, to prepon) is another one that is important to giving rhetoric its force, according to ancient Greek theories. And it also ties in to a particular idea of time. The Greeks had a number of words for time, but the one that gets the most focus today is their idea of καιρὸς, Kairos, which appears a number of times in the New Testament. It gets used in situations such as “My time is at hand” and “The time draws near.”
Kairos carries within itself the idea that time is not just a fourth dimension, an infinitely extended series of Sisyphean moments, going nowhere, or an amorphous blob of chronicity, but rather, there’s a structure to it. For much of the pagan world before the Greeks, nature was chaotic and largely unpredictable. For the Greeks, however, reality was in a certain sense a static (or eternally recurring) thing, a given, and the role of humans was simply to find their place in the cosmos and stay there. There was a Kairos element to time not because someone was guiding things, but because everything existed within an immutable order. The Hebrews, however, understood time as being guided. There was structure to it, but only because it was guided by a person who had a grand narrative arch, and a telos, in mind for the whole thing. This allowed for the possibility that humans could actually play a dynamic, meaningful role in that narrative.
In a biblical worldview, Kairos is tied up with persistence. Humans need to persist in seeking justice, even when it appears that it’s as useful as rolling a stone uphill. This is because Kairos is ultimately not within the human purview, even though humans are inextricably bound up with it. From the individual micro-perspective, time is frequently Sisyphean — just one moment after another after another, with nothing happening, nothing moving forward. Yet people do get to Carnegie Hall, somehow, and the world does seem to change at a dizzying speed. Nothing happens, but then we look back and realize that everything has changed. This is the idea of tachos in Luke 18’s parable; something new arrives as the result of megathos, an accumulation that seems to be doing nothing but is in fact building up to something, and then in a flash reveals something new — a transformation. From the human perspective, what happened beforehand was an endless exercise in persistence. From the divine perspective, everything was coming together, and the results were showered upon the world as soon as the Kairos moment arrived.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously noted in his letter from a Birmingham jail,
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season’.”
As a white moderate who really values order and the absence of tension, I have spent a lot of time considering this quote. American culture tends to valorize the intrepid iconoclast who, like a bull in a china shop, charges into a situation hellbent on changing things, on getting results, even when the chances of producing a positive result are slim. I’ve watched enough TV and movies to know that we are all fed the story that this type of person is a hero, the kind of person we should all aspire to be. The idea is reinforced by the fact that the hero never produces the poor results that statistically were all but guaranteed. His (or sometimes her) rash gambles always pay off. The Kairos moment is always right now. We’re not so interested in the idea that Kairos moments usually are preceded by, and require, long Sisyphean slogs of persistent action that seems to go nowhere — that tachos may seem to appear out of the blue, but in fact, behind the scenes, is the result of a megethos.
As an order-loving white moderate, part of me thinks that maybe King just grew up on too many Marvel movies, that maybe King just wasn’t willing to wait for Kairos. But then again, I have to take his critique seriously. He isn’t the only Black person to complain that Whites, century after century, never seem to think it’s the “right time” to take other people’s appeals for justice seriously. Perhaps the problem is the idea that anyone has a right to claim Kairos for themselves. After all, the idea that time has an arch to it — which is an idea that was very important to King — depends on the presumption that God is ultimately in control of that arch, even though human persistence plays an important role. No one gets to set the timetable for another man’s freedom; no one gets to say that “this isn’t the time,” because no one really knows what’s going on behind the scenes, and how close megethos is to erupting into tachos. If a person has the opportunity to pursue justice, as a human being, the time is always now to pursue it — to go through open doors and to try and open those doors that seem stuck shut.
However, the results are never in human hands, and this means eschewing the bull in a China shop method and sticking with the patient uphill slogging — which may itself involve a certain amount of disruption, but, even if it involves demanding immediate change, is always prepared to have to keep demanding it over the long haul. Superheroes are often obsessed with the idea that they have to follow their course come what may because they are the only ones who can do what they do, and the world will literally explode into a ball of fire if they don’t accomplish some impressive feat right now. Nothing else matters; the world is depending on them to accomplish the task. They are frequently made to say such things as, “I know it’s impossible. But I have to do it. I have no other choice.” They have the burden of being the gods who not only have to give it their best, but who have to make the outcome happen, because there is no other god outside themselves who can be trusted to take their efforts and transform the situation to prepon.
Sadly, when humans start thinking this way about themselves, the results aren’t usually nearly so positive. Ravi Zacharias, the recently deceased evangelist, apparently excused the sexual abuse he perpetrated as just a bit of collateral damage from the fact that he had been tasked by God with saving souls. He seems to have forgotten that he wasn’t ever going to save a single soul himself, and that what God required from him was patient persistence. King himself was known to frequently cheat on his wife, a fact that apparently gave many churches in the South all the reason they needed to dismiss his movement and everything he represented. I can only imagine that he excused his behavior in ways similar to Zacharias.
So, King wasn’t perfect in his orientation toward Kairos, but neither were the people he was criticizing. His critics, I gather, were content to sit back and constantly say, “No, now’s not the time.” Perhaps they were right, but they weren’t in the appropriate position to judge that. They should, instead, have been getting in the trenches to help roll the rock up the hill alongside their brothers and sisters, day after day. They should have been hoping expectantly for a breakthrough, even while knowing that the timing of it was not up to them.
If it was hard for people in the 1960s to engage in the patient, mundane work of pushing for change, Dr. Brent Waters, a professor of social ethics, has pointed out that the ethos of our current tech-dependent culture tends to make it even harder for people to exercise the patience required for pursuing mundane activities with diligence. We are constantly told that the ordinary is to be eschewed and even rejected; only the extraordinary will do. And so we tend to deride the sorts of mundane activities that comprise faithful care for others, and deride the sorts of people who get paid to do those things for others. If it was hard for the Greeks, who didn’t have Facebook competing with loading the dishes, how much harder is it for those of us who do. Yet over two millennia ago, humans still needed reminding that the nature of love is that it is first of all patient and last of all persevering.
The solution for all of us, it seems, is to assume that justice is to be faithfully, diligently, and expectantly pursued at all moments, because when God brings about change, it is those who have acted thus who will have been his instruments…and the timing will always be just right, regardless of how it seemed to the rock-pushers. Because the way to Carnegie Hall is practice, practice, practice; that’s what you can do. But when you arrive there, on the stage, at “your moment” to shine, it’s because someone else decided it was your time.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RmuTuVWXy4 This piano piece is listed on the program for the first performance of a Black person at Carnegie Hall.
