A piano looks ominous to...
Illustration
A piano looks ominous to us when we first sit down at the keyboard. White keys, black keys. And they're not in a simple pattern. Let's see, here's a white key and a black one to the right of it. Another white key and another black one. Then two white keys in succession. What's going on?
We start taking piano lessons and a kindly teacher explains the keys to us. She assigns us a simple melody, and we delight in learning to play it just right.
The selections get more difficult, of course, but we continue to play on the very same keys. With those keys, we make beautiful music.
The basic unit of the keyboard is the octave: eight keys, from middle C up to high C. Or, as Julie Andrews explains to the children in The Sound of Music, we begin with do and move right up the scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. An octave spans the spread from one note to the same note above or below on the keyboard.
Jesus gave us a "heavenly octave" in the eight Beatitudes (vv. 10 and 11 are usually counted as a single Beatitude). Much of the truth and glory of his being and his teachings are caught up in those eight notes he struck at the beginning of his ministry.
We start taking piano lessons and a kindly teacher explains the keys to us. She assigns us a simple melody, and we delight in learning to play it just right.
The selections get more difficult, of course, but we continue to play on the very same keys. With those keys, we make beautiful music.
The basic unit of the keyboard is the octave: eight keys, from middle C up to high C. Or, as Julie Andrews explains to the children in The Sound of Music, we begin with do and move right up the scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. An octave spans the spread from one note to the same note above or below on the keyboard.
Jesus gave us a "heavenly octave" in the eight Beatitudes (vv. 10 and 11 are usually counted as a single Beatitude). Much of the truth and glory of his being and his teachings are caught up in those eight notes he struck at the beginning of his ministry.
