"The heavens are telling the glory of God," says the psalmist, "day by day and night by night."  But, it adds, "there is no speech."
     It is this enigmatic passage that Austrian musician Joseph Haydn set to music.  Earlier this week, March 31st, was Haydn's birthday.  Now that I am back from some traveling, I write of him.  Astonishingly versatile and capable of composing some extraordinary melodies, Haydn expressed, with great beauty, the spirit of his age, the Enlightenment.  Undergirding Haydn's Enlightenment sensibilities of freedom, liberality, and discovery,  however, was his unyielding commitment to the presence of a transcendent God.  Haydn wrote of God, and he found comfort in God.
     But this isn't my main point.  It is rather to say that those who believe in God frequently find the richest way to express their beliefs in what Matthew Arnold called the "perfections" of culture.  That in the greatness of humanness, divinity often finds its most profound manifestation.
     After all, did not the Word become flesh?