Contemplating Teens and Tchaikovsky

Helping teens navigate adolescence is not for the faint of heart. I teach teens. My husband and I are raising one, and soon, two, teens. The adolescent years are as tumultuous, as full of questioning and confusion, as the toddler years.

Sometimes, I find out things I would rather not know.

Sometimes, I have to remind myself that the Mystery is imbedded in all reality and that all of us, even teens who make poor decisions, are redeemable miracles.


I've been musing on this as I complete my first full week of high school teaching this year, and as our own sons complete their first full week of school too. And then, I discovered a clip on our older son's Facebook page, a snippet of a charity gig his chamber-music orchestra did last weekend in Princeton, New Jersey. It was Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave, composed in the 1870s for a fundraiser for wounded Serbian soldiers. The piece's minor strains touch our hearts today.

And then I remembered what I knew: because we are truly human, we are flawed. And yet, we are capable of great Beauty.

No expression of human feelings is bigger than the music. Who is not touched by a concert of string, how can you be insensitive to the colors of a piano sonata?

Monsignor Luigi Giussani