Last week, Dave and I went and stayed in the city overnight to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. We had originally planned to go to 'Symphony in the Domain' for the evening and get there early with a picnic. But the day was a scorcher, and we decided it wouldn't be much fun sitting in the sun all afternoon. So, we gave up on that idea, and went to the movies instead, planning on getting to the concert for the second half.
We saw Revolutionary Road (you can read a review here), starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. It was a great movie, but even though I knew a little of the plot, I was surprised by how depressed I felt at the end. In particular, the main characters' (particularly Kate Winslet's character, April's) view of children was disturbing. As a young mother who's given up on her dreams of becoming an actress and settled down with her husband in suburbia, she feels a deep resentment against the way in which (as she sees it) 
having children has meant "resigning from life." And then, as the plot unfolds (without wanting to give away too much of the story line) you see her live that resentment out, with horrible, haunting consequences. (There's more to the story than that, of course - another whole storyline involving her husband, the DiCaprio character, a complicated relationship with the next door neighbours and the family of a local real estate agent, and then the whole, stultifying social context of suburban Connecticut in which the movie takes place, but there's no room for all that here, and I wasn't planning on doing a whole movie review!).
At the end of the movie, we walked up Macquarie Street, enjoying the cool southerly that had blown through while we were shut up inside the cinema, and arrived just in time for the second half of Symphony Under the Stars. It was beautiful. The music blew through the air with the breeze, Dave and I sat close together (in the dirt!), and enjoyed every note. (For the classical music purists, of course, it was hardly concert-hall conditions and some of the music was pretty middle-brow, but all that is part of the deal at an event like that!)
But as beautiful as the music was, it was an ordinary, everyday moment at the end the concert that spoke most powerfully to me. It was during the last piece, which was the one that always concludes this particular event - the 1812 overture - complete with the traditional cannons and fireworks. As it was being played, I watched with growing interest a family near us with four young kids. I was curious because it was very late by this stage and it was mainly an adult crowd.
What I observed was a resplendently happy family, with no less than four children, who had clearly not 'resigned from life'. I noticed the way the mother's and father's faces lit up when they were reunited after various trips with kids to the toilets, etc. I observed the little girls holding hands and jumping up and down as the fireworks exploded at the end of the overture. I watched the way the boys tied the blankets around their necks and ran around at the edge of the crowd, pretending the blankets were capes. And then I saw them all, as the music reached its climax, gazing spellbound at the stage and up at the fireworks, transfixed by the beauty and the spectacle of it all.
I went away not only touched by what I had observed, but also encouraged by the way their presence and example in a crowd of thousands had carried a message that (for me) was even louder than the 1812 overture playing in the background. Their actions screamed that in their eyes, their children were not a burden but a blessing, that their presence was not just tolerated but delighted in, that their children were not leeches sucking the life out of them, but precious, life-enriching gifts.
Of course, I didn't get to be a fly on the wall at their house the following morning, sitting down to breakfast with four catastrophically overtired children. Nor did I have a window on their hearts, to know all the complexities of their beliefs and ideas and attitudes. But I did see in their actions that night at the symphony a beautiful, powerful picture of something profoundly true about children and life in God's world. I'll never be able to listen to the 1812 Overture again without remembering it!!
Photos: a pic from Revolutionary Road, and Symphony in the Domain (from Wikipedia)
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Jacob has recently been reading through 'Ten Boys Who Changed The World', by Irene Howat, and has been loving it. It's a book of short biographies of men who lived faithful lives for Jesus, including men like John Newton, George Mueller and Adoniram Judson (you can read the full list here). It is one of the 'Lightkeepers' series, which is a collection of Christian biographies written for children (I'm going to buy Rebecca one from the 'ten girls' series for Easter, so we can get stuck into some biography together).
