A few years ago the Washington Post arranged for Joshua Bell, a world renowned musician, but dressed in jeans, T shirt and a baseball cap, to play a Stradivarius violin worth more than three million dollars outside the subway. Hundreds of people streamed by and took no notice. The interesting thing is that three days earlier he’d played the same violin and music to a capacity crowd in Boston, where the cheapest seat cost a hundred dollars. But on the street he got thirty two dollars from twenty seven people, none of whom actually stopped long enough to listen.
It reminds me of how God, in the Bible, laments our indifference to him. ‘Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?’ He says. God offers us unutterable spiritual beauty, but we just don’t stop long enough to see it.