Fr. Lawrence Manolache: A life in harmony

Written by Fr. Lawrence Manolache.

I discovered the beauty and richness, the greatness and the tremendous logic and harmony of God with the help of sound and rhythm. The passion for music was for me like a transmission belt for the car, that set my soul in motion. This gift fascinated me,  scared me until the moment I noticed that my life is the car that I have to drive, but first of all I have to learn to master it, to conduct it.

In Romania, where I was born and I am coming from, primary education and active religious life beside the school of life provided me with some general insights of how to live my life, but the real adventure, the real progress of personal growth and life understanding began only from the moment I engaged myself,  with more or less courage, to commit driving alone this “car”,  this personal life.​

Life is about rules, exactly like traffic rules. We can get from one point to another in life, without suffering collisions or accidents and arrive somewhere if we respect those rules. Life conditions are like traffic conditions, combined with weather conditions.

We sometimes get upset that our progress in life is very slow or even stagnant. That happens mostly when all participants in life want to make the same progress at the same time on the same street of life and some of the participants resort to selfish methods and obstruct the flow, the progress of others. That was Communism for me. We are indignant until we reach the point where we see the cause of the congestion that those several individuals entered in collisions, because of their unfair way of getting advantages in life, because they wanted that progress of life in a much faster, exclusive way and they ended up creating some congestion of social progress.
 
Other times, we are the ones who neglect the maintenance of “this car”, this life of ours, and eventually get broken, stagnant, without fuel, without energy. When we find ourselves on the edge of the life road, someone will eventually stop and give us some help, but the wilderness very rarely has such opportunities, so I have learned to stick with the road and not go wild in life.
 
So, I understood that life has its rhythm, and if we want to play in the great orchestra of life, we must catch onto that rhythm and respect that. 

From a very young age I understood that sound is communication, creator of beauty, expression of life, LOGOS.
 
Thus, enchanted, fascinated by the beauty of sound, full of curiosity where the sound’s coming from, I began my analytical, almost philosophical studies, without much academic help, but in a very natural, organic way, with the props and examination of the sound-giving instruments created by God, through which my heart captured the sound waves of creation that resonate and vibrate in the soul of each of us mostly when we are synchronized, attuned and in harmony with God’s will. In the sounds made by the waves of the sea, as growing up in Constanța, a seashore city of Romania, by listening to the falling dried leaves in autumn, through the singing birds, in everything that moves, there is a sound of creation, that I could recognize and attribute to God's will.
 
Acceptance of this creative message of nature and harmonizing my life to that, gave me the sense of immense peace that at the age of nine I already felt urged to share with everyone, to make others aware of that beauty. That was the point of understanding my calling.

I understood that the Great Symphony of the entire Universe, whose composer is God Himself, is sung by everything that is set in motion. We are all participants in this great symphony as musicians, and particularly, we human beings are gifted to learn and understand, to read, so we are all called to respect the musical charts, to play by its rules and to be very attentive to the Conductor of this Great Universal Orchestra, who is the Holy Spirit.

I am now training and working hard to be selected to play and sing in the Heaven’s Choir, where the traffic conditions are perfect and smooth, for everyone in Heaven is on auto-pilot mode, driven by God’s nature.That is the PERFECT LOVE.