Articles

The Great Music: Finding Harmony in the Discord 

A riff on Spencer Thompson’s 2025 Kenarchy Journal essay

My own life, probably like yours, mirrors the vexing issue of finding some bliss between order and chaos. This fall I'm doing a two-week pilgrimage and peace studies study in Northern Ireland, Scotland, ending in St Cuthbert's on the holy island in Lindisfarne Northumbria.  I can relax and find the flow then.... except.. our professor was adamant that "the pilgrimage starts now!" And as things do, this article from Kenarchy journal found its way to me and challenged me to have a look at my own life, my own chaos, and work towards reconciling some flow. Not then, not in some distant future, but here and now in the tension of this chaotic lead-up.

The Corporate Hustle Meets Vacation Time

You work your corporate job all year, powering through spreadsheets, strategy decks, and passive-aggressive email threads, all for that one promised week: the vacation.

It’s curated with Virgoan precision—
Flights timed to the minute.
Hotel booked six months in advance.
Dinner reservations locked in with Yelp-based zeal.

This time, you think, nothing will go wrong.

And then it rains.
Your Uber doesn’t show.
The "quiet" Airbnb is above a jazz club.

Now what? Is this chaos? A cosmic joke? Or—more scandalously—is it exactly what you needed?

Spencer Thompson’s “The Great Music” begins with that same tension.
Modern life has become a grand, meticulous system trying to eliminate chaos—yet ironically, it feels more chaotic than ever. The harder we grip for control, the more meaning slips through our fingers.

We mistake order for harmony and chaos for discord, but Thompson argues it’s not that simple. In truth, harmony only exists where order and chaos meet. It’s not a matter of eliminating the mess—it’s about learning to live with it, even love it.

That’s what the Genesis story actually tells us (once you peel it back from its empire-friendly packaging): before God ever says “Let there be light,” the Spirit hovers over the deep—the ancient symbol of chaos. Not to destroy it. To create with it. How Pisces/Virgo axis.

Enter Tolkien.

In The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s divine beings create the world through collaborative music. But one of them—Melkor—tries to hijack the melody. His discord threatens the whole composition… until the Divine doesn’t strike him down, but instead folds the dissonance into an even deeper harmony.

That’s the big reveal:
Love—not control—is what redeems the music.

And this isn’t just fantasy. It’s the beating heart of the gospel, and it's the beating heart of psychosynthesis coaching.

Agapē, the New Testament’s word for self-giving love, is the force that binds all things together in perfect harmony (Colossians 3:14). It doesn’t run from mess—it embraces it, transforms it, includes it.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said:

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”

So when your trip—or your life—falls apart, maybe it’s not failure.
Maybe it’s the invitation to a richer song.

The goal isn’t perfect conditions. It’s music.
And music needs wild notes, too.

Mark Douglas, June 2025