It's Beethoven's birthday.  What can we say about Ludwig van Beethoven?  The famous portrait of him below captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, brilliant composer. When we think about Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart, we think of the Enlightenment and how it liberated the human mind and imagination from the constraints of a Church struggling with its response to impending modernity.  We see Mozart's music as poetry, lilting and dancing its way across our lives.

     Not so with Beethoven.  His music strikes us very differently.  It overwhelms us with its passion.  Beethoven's music comes to us as something akin to a force of nature, barreling and twisting its way into our hearts, breaking our souls apart, forcing us to grapple with and contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over the viscerality of Beethoven's melodies, we wonder about the power of the universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of other worlds and things, of things unknown, of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.

     I thank God for Beethoven.  I thank him for giving him to us, for giving him to show us as we are, beings of mind as much as creatures of heart, living, personal, dynamic entities made to step bravely and meaningfully into the weighty contingencies of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.  Given the many stories and legends that surround his life, we may never know exactly what Beethoven thought about God.  Regardless, he makes us think of him.  Beethoven makes us think about our deeper meaning, our deeper experience.  He drives us to wonder about the mystery of life and the mind of its creator.

     I thank God for using Beethoven to open and unfold for us glimpses of what we, life, and God, can be.