The life of faith requires muscle memory
We need to learn to adjust our posture so our theology rings true.
When my daughter took violin lessons as a little girl, I studied her teacher. She would make modest suggestions like, “Move your elbow forward an inch.” My daughter would make this small adjustment and, miraculously, the tone of her violin would deepen. “Bend your thumb, and relax your arm,” the teacher would say, and the bow would sound less raspy on the strings.
I used to wonder: What would this kind of teaching look like in my classroom? What modifications would make the music of theology ring out more clearly in my students’ work and in my own?
As a new school year gets under way, I’ve been thinking again of that violin teacher and her firm, effective adjustments. When a note was flat or sharp, she would sometimes lift up my daughter’s small fingers and press their tips firmly down in the correct place so she would learn what the right note felt like. The teacher was trying to train my daughter’s body to remember how to make a beautiful sound—to develop a muscle memory. She wanted her to be able to make her fingers land on the right note without even having to look.
