It's been a big week for musician birthdays.  Last week, we remembered Mozart and Schubert.  Today, although his actual birthday was yesterday, February 3, we think about Felix Mendelssohn.  Though born in Germany into a Jewish family, Mendelssohn was eventually baptized as a Christian. Sadly, like Mozart and Schubert, Mendelssohn died before he was forty.  A musician of Romanticism--like Schubert--he wrote music that, when we listen to it today, sounds like poetry, its melodies lithely carrying us along, transporting us to new levels of emotional experience, pushing us into thoughts of the ethereal and divine.  We walk away enraptured, enraptured with time, space, and destiny:  life seems newly wonderful, wonderful beyond belief.

     What more is there to say?  We rejoice in such music; we delight that it speaks to us; we love that it lets us soar beyond the immediate and touch the eternal that encompasses us all.
     Thanks, Felix Mendelssohn.  Thanks for reminding us that if we open our eyes, if we really open our eyes, we see that life exceeds our wildest imaginations.
     As one writer put it, it's an adventure with God.