April 1.  In many parts of the world, it's April's Fools Day.  But it's also the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia later emigrating to America, and becoming an American citizen shortly before his death in 1943, Rachmaninoff composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano, blending intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, capturing and expressing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  His playing took his audiences into the fullness of their emotional imaginations; they left amazed.
     Romanticism speaks of emotion, sense, and imagination; the heights, and the depths of the full gamut of humanness, taking us to the peaks of ecstasy, dragging us through the nadirs of tragedy.  It is life.  Rachmaninoff gave us a glimpse of a human being struggling with what it is to be alive on this planet, what it is to experience, what it is to know, what it is to be a personal being, alive, emoting, and real as anything can possibly be.  His piano touched us all, for we all are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.
     So it is that we, people who delight in the poignant melodies of the Romantics, we today bask in the light of life, realizing that regardless of what we believe about its origins or meaning, we can surely believe in it as a fundamental miracle of being.  And though we struggle with our presence, we marvel at what it yields.  Like Rachmaninoff, we wrestle with as well rejoice in being alive.   We daily tangle with the weight, and hope, of existence.
     As we should.  That we are here is its weight, that we will one day be beyond it, real and true, is its hope.  The rhythm of God's universe, from fading tree to dying star, is this:  life, and death, are the beginning of life again.