I used to assume, without thinking too much about it, that I understood the meaning of "harmony." My estimate of how much I knew has been revised. Maybe you too have tended to consider harmony more or less the absence of inharmony. Everything is going fine. Family, health, job—no major problems on the horizon.
This measure of well-being, of course, tells us something about the relative order of human events. And that's surely not to be ignored. Most people hope to bring a degree of health and happiness to their lives. But we haven't really discovered the true nature of harmony—its wholly divine essence—just by subduing the host of little (and large) disturbances that are inherent in a material sense of existence. After all, harmony can mean different things to different people. For instance, is harmony subdued or subserved by turning down the rock music? Maybe the answer depends on whether you are a rock music fan.
If we get in the habit of measuring how much harmony our lives have simply by assessing the presence or absence of conflicting or distressing material factors, we may be quite a distance yet from knowing the status of real concord. The issue is much like that of health. Normal functioning of the body isn't enough to tell us how well we really are. Health is an active, powerful, spiritual attribute of God. While the discernment of spiritual health, and the living of Christliness that underpins it, do give us freedom from illness, health has much broader significance. It describes the perfect status of true consciousness, the substance of man's spiritual selfhood. So it is with harmony. Only as we recognize this attribute to be purely spiritual will we experience it as something vastly more than concordant human circumstances.
