Jacques Ellul wrote,

                            "When stability (uniformity) is acheived, there is no more harmony."

It is sort of funny, but the week after I posted this Ellul quote, there were two school events involving my two younger children, one an Elementary Band concert, and the other a High School vocal ensemble.  Many of the students in the band had just completed their very first year with an instrument, and while their improvement was evident, their skill was still rather distressing.  The vocal ensemble was another story, with beautiful harmonies and tones that drifted between soft and strong.  The first, it seemed to me, was the stuttering steps toward community (common unity), the other was significantly further down the road, but both were like human beings learning to live with each other, and there was joy in both, but greater freedom and versatility in the more mature.  There are lessons here somewhere.

Ellul’s quote is first a statement of fact.  If the music is uniform (to keep to the analogy) everyone is playing or singing the same note at the same time, thus there is no harmony.  The context of Ellul’s quote is a discussion of how the world systems, be they religious, economic, social, political, educational etc, are coercive with a goal of uniformity.  Uniformity is much easier to control, or at least to identify the troublemakers, the outcasts, the losers etc.  The Law is all about uniformity, the absorption of individuality into the machine, the focus on performance expectations and standards.  And while there is a certain symmetry to uniformity, after a time it is all rather life-less and predictable, both values within systems.

But harmony?  That is something else altogether.  It requires diversity and uniqueness.  The beauty of the art is diminished by the reduction of the individual offering of each person.  We as believers see the grand design and are the most free to celebrate the already established worth, value and significance of each human being.  The movement toward uniformity is toward law; the movement of harmony is grace and truth.

The band is at the same time a little laughable (and my hope is that we are free to laugh at ourselves often and long), but always hopeful, especially as we, for seconds and sometimes even longer, hear harmony.  At least, when we are moving toward harmony, we have the ability to sense what is out of tune and corrections can be made, not toward uniformity but the strengthening of harmony by the building up of that individual participation.  Uniformity only requires the simplicity of sameness.  Our unity in the family is an expression of our harmony not our uniformity, but those systems that would seek control, fear the uniqueness and diversity within which God is so fully displayed.