Tuning

(originally posted February 18, 2009)

It was two days before the Christmas concert that the piano tuner came in. Just in time. The piano needed it, badly. He pulled his tools from his workbag, set them on the side. Then he pulled out an occilloscope, set the frequency, reached over the keyboard and played a first note. All he said was, "Oh my!" With that, string by string, he began his painstaking but needful labor.

Human beings have been designed with the capacity to feel, think, appreciate, express, examine, resolve and a myriad of other qualities. It is too often the case that these capacities are allowed to develop willy-nilly so that, like the strings of a neglected piano, each one takes on its own frequency without much reference to the others. Our culture is awash in sounds, so the soul needs to be tuned to discern order, harmony, beauty and purpose. Our culture is awash in images, so the soul needs to be tuned to recognize balance, movement, perspective, expression and excellent execution. Our culture is awash in information, so the soul needs to be tuned to hear truth, validity and transcendence of ideas, as well as eloquence and conviction. Our culture is awash in highly visible personalities, so the soul needs to be tuned to recognize courage, fortitude, steadfastness, mercy, compassion and the qualities of real heroes.

But even more, we humans are spiritual beings, and our spirits need ever to be tuned to eternal things. This requires so much more than weekly worship. It requires the daily application of the occilloscope of Scripture to the matters of life, which, not surprisingly, also requires faithful working in lives at a time when the tuning is most critical.

A good high school education takes up the task of tuning those distinctly human capacities in the souls of students at a time when it is most effective. (Tragically, many hardly believe teens have souls, let alone that they need tuning.) A liberal arts education is most effective in accomplishing this, because it takes humans seriously as humans. "The end of a liberal arts education is the man himself," says Robert Maynard Hutchins.

This, I think, is what we do at Wildwood Christian School. We tune souls. It is long, painstaking and needful work, but the outcome is in the direction of a whole and wholesome human being.