"From Trash to Triumph": The Importance of Beauty and the Landfill Harmonic Orchestra

 In our Bible class, we are reading NT Wright's Surprised by Hope.  Last week we read chapter 13 where Wright begins to speak of reshaping the Church in terms of Hope. One of the most striking pillars of creating hope in our world is the pillar of beauty along with two others Wright describes, justice and evangelism. And yet, this pillar is one not all churches pay much attention to --- either to the destructive power of ugliness or to the uplifting power of beauty. In preparing for the class I asked folks to watch the second of the following videos and to see if they could explain how it tied into the week's reading. My own sense is that in these children and the larger community, we implicitly see the power of Jesus' resurrection, the power of hope at work shaping their world through the presence of beauty. In this way, we also see human beings coming more fully alive to and with the potential with which they are created and re-created, the realization of the potential that makes them the very image of God.

The second video is a TED Talk done in Amsterdam. Here you meet the teacher who started all this and a few of the players of the Landfillharmonic, including the 19-year-old cellist from the earlier video playing the Prelude from Bach Cello Suite #1 for unaccompanied cello.

One person spoke about this video and said, "Music is a human right." Another noted that she thought Ada (13-year-old violinist) is now studying veterinary medicine (she is likely finished by now)! I read an account of the community (Cateura) that noted before the introduction of music to the children (and to the work of making musical instruments out of garbage!!) parents would come to school and take their children out to work on the landfill. Schooling was clearly not important because the horizon of the community's life was the mountain of garbage everyone sent their way; that defined their lives and it was a narrow, deadly discouraging horizon. Now, however, given the fruits of the music program, it was said that taking kids out of school to work on the landfill never happens. It is said to be "unthinkable" or "inconceivable". These folks have been given a view of a much larger world and moved by beauty of all kinds and have come more fully alive as a result. They are capable now of dreaming in ways they were never capable of before.

In Surprised by Hope, Wright makes clear that the resurrection of Jesus (and his ascension presence) empowers us with a vision of a new heaven and new earth already present to us in a proleptic way. (I have sometimes remarked that in Jesus, the crucified and risen one, we find God in the unexpected and even the unacceptable place; the recycled orchestra in Cateura certainly reminds us of this truth!) Wright reminds us that we too should come alive and build for the Kingdom. We are capable of new dreams and freed to see and act in light of the beauty present here and now among us because God has revealed himself in the crucified One as Emmanuel. The bodily resurrection and ascension of Jesus has begun the definitive interpenetration and interlocking of heaven and earth. The horizon of our own vision is no longer just our sinful "temporal" world any more than the mountain of garbage is the sole horizon of the children in Cateura, Paraguay. We have been granted a different vision of a "reality made new" in Christ and are called to live in light of that!