As I was traveling last week, I didn't get opportunity to take note of April 1 which, in addition to being, in many parts of the world, April Fools Day, is the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia, eventually emigrating to America and, shortly before his death in 1943, becoming an American citizen, Rachmaninoff composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano. His work expresses a blending of intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, aptly 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.  It takes us to the peaks of ecstasy, and drags us through the darkest 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 as real as anything can possibly be.
     One of Rachmaninoff's closest associates was another Russian pianist, the incomparable Vladimir Horowitz.  In 1987, at the age of 82, Horowitz returned to Soviet Russia to perform, the first time he had been back since he had emigrated many years before.  He, too, made his audience swoon with the force and potency of his piano, demonstrating to us once more that however intellectual we may suppose ourselves to be, we are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.
     So it is as we, romantic and emotional creatures that we are, we who delight in the poignant melodies of the Romantics, we who today bask in the light of Easter, we realize that although reason is an essential part of who we are, we ultimately make our biggest decisions with our heart.  As Paul says in Romans 10, we believe, as a matter of intellectual assent, that Jesus died and rose, but we trust it with our heart.
     Long live the Romantics.