It's a good month for musical birthdays. A creature of Western Romanticism, Franz Schubert, who, tragically, died at the age of 31, wrote some of the most ethereal and moving melodies of all time. Listening to his music, we feel carried away, transported to another realm, lifted above what is earthly and material. It's an intimation of transcendence.
As we celebrate Schubert's birthday today, we can remind ourselves that if music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do. We do not need to be reminded of what is normal. We want to think about what is beyond normal, what breaks the apparent down, what splits the obvious apart. We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.
Descending into the darkest recesses of his soul, Schubert talks to us about the deepest mysteries of existence, how we walk in a wisp, a gossamer veil stretched out between us and the other side of time. He romanced eternity.
As do we all. Every day is a balance, an edge perched on the borders of presence and absence, a thin line of reality and ultimate destiny.
Thanks, Franz Schubert, even if you didn't intend to do so, for showing us that life is more than life itself. Happy birthday.
"I was a stranger, and you invited me in" (Matthew 25).
Richer words were never spoken. As he moved ever closer to the events that would result in his arrest and crucifixion, Jesus reminded his disciples of how he will know who really believes in him. Yes, believing in me is a matter of heart, he told them often, a sincere and heartfelt repentance, a decided turning away from sin, but if you do not love your neighbor, if you do not put your heart change into visible action, it's difficult for me, he continued, to see it. You're my beloved child, he frequently admonished them: act like it.
We who live in the affluence of the West have been singularly fortunate. Those of us who do not, long for such good fortune. When Jesus spoke these words, he was speaking to all of us who are able to "invite" the stranger in, to all of us who have the means to "invite" those who have not been as fortunate as us into our lands of plenty.
In truth, Jesus was affirming and deepening what his Jewish brethren had known for years: God, the Hebrew Bible constantly states, commands his people to help the foreigner, the stranger, the "ger" in their midst. And he made no exceptions to them doing so.
We of course wish to be safe. We of course desire peace. But God is a big God. He can ensure compassion, he can ensure security. And he can make them happen at the same time--without compromising either one.
As can we. We only need to trust, to really trust God.
Pray for the West, pray for the rest of the world. Pray for the affluent, and pray for the refugee. God loves them all.
And we can, too.
Today is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Around the world, people continue to be astonished by the immense creativity and wonder of this Austrian's music. Fluent in all genres of classical music, Mozart, though he sadly died at the tender age of 34, produced an array of musical expression that most musicologists agree is unmatched. As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again." Most of us can only stand mute and marvel at Mozart's immense ability. How could one person write works of such extraordinary beauty?
Indeed. How? Genesis tells us that God created people in his image, in his likeness. The God who created the universe with all its immense complexity and wonder is the same God who created, with equal wonder, every human being. For this reason, every person who has ever been born and walked through the history of this planet has the potential to duplicate and express, albeit in finite form, the creativity that birthed the cosmos.
Rightly do we weep and swoon at the beauty of Mozart's compositions; they are works of unsurpassed wonder. Yet rightly do we marvel equally at God, the personal infinite God who made and fashioned this artist--with all his prodigious talents--and enabled him to be and become who and what he is.
As he does for all of us, we who are gifted beyond measure, we who are made to create in unabashed wonder.
Enjoy and appreciate the people--all people--whom God has made.
Thanks, God, for giving us Mozart.
Thank you, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It's a rather ominious photograph, glowering and harsh, not a picture of someone with whom we might want to be best friends. Oddly, however, Sigmund Freud's ideas about the human being remain, in some form, with us even today. As we learn steadily more about how much our upbringing influences us throughout our life, even into our older years, we realize some truth in his observations.
For Freud, we consist of an id, ego, and superego. In essence, the id is "us," an "us" over which the ego and superego are doing constant battle. The ego represents our socialization, the superego our "conscience."
Why is this important? For Freud, who was a life long atheist (he died in 1939), who we are is the product of our influences. Because everything outside of us is always shaping us and "we" are therefore never the same, we may not even have a real "self."
Yet every one of us will acknowledge that we are a "self." We will say that we are a specific human being. In the absence of a God, however, maybe this isn't so straightforward. If we are simply a subjective and unplanned whim of the cosmos, then we are indeed where we live and nothing more.
On the other hand, in the presence of a God, we are the work of intentionality, subjective still, yet subjective in an objective framework, a framework of purpose and meaning. We are concrete points in a meaningful universe.
Sure, without a God we are concrete points, but we are like points on an infinite line: a self that never really happened: id, ego, and superego become no more than subjective responses to a subjective event. An event, we add, that had no reason to happen other than that it did. And if we insist that we can live this way, we fool ourselves: meaninglessness will never bequeath meaning.
We've all heard of Mt. Everest, the highest mountain in the world. Some of us may be familiar with K-2, the second highest mountain in the world. But most of us, I dare say, know little about the third highest mountain in the world, Kanchenjunga.
One winter, many decades ago, two mountaineers, Cherie Bremer-Kamp and Chris Chandler, took on Kanchenjunga at its coldest and most threatening. They didn't summit. To his surprise, as he had had much experience climbing in these elevations, Chris developed altitude sickness. It soon morphed into cerebral edema. A trained physician, Chris knew exactly what this meant: death.
And die he did, right before Cherie's eyes. Unable to carry his body down the mountain, Cherie left Chris on its northern slope, ice axe in hand, gazing endlessly over the vast valley out of which they had come many days earlier. Chris is probably still there, frozen for an earthly eternity.
Why do I tell such a depressing story? I tell it simply to invite us to ponder, once more, the astonishing mystery of existence. Here we are, free to roam wherever we (and our means allow) choose, intensely excited about the possibilities, feeling as if the world is before ever before us. It's truly grand.
One day, however, it ends. Eventually, all of us accept this; eventually, all of us realize it's true. Nonetheless, if we dig deeper, if we really come to grips with the stark and glorious enormity of existence, we do well, always and every day, to wonder: how did we get here to live it?
Apart from a meaningful and personally knowable starting point, our lives are like a mountain: ever there but, metaphorically speaking, ever not.
"His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long."
Spoken like the atheist she, Simone Beauvoir, author of the ground breaking feminist tract Second Sex, all her life purported to be. Thinking about her life long companion, extentialist Jean Paul Sartre, after he passed away in March of 1980, Beauvoir makes clear her feelings about the terminality of existence. If we put her words into the vernacular, along with a little paraphrasing, we might say, "It's been fun, but now it's over."
True enough. But if I am to insist that life has any meaning, any meaning at all, I find it difficult to face its end with equanimity. If life has meaning, how can it be so in an impersonal universe? How I, a personal being, claim to be so if my origins are impersonal?
And how can Beauvoir speak so strongly about her life with Sartre if they both agree that, in the end, life means nothing?
However we see God, it seems that, on balance, we are far wiser to consider that he is life's end and life is not, and that life is more than a disconnected subjective experience. Life's mystery, and wonder, is that it must be birth, yes, but it must be resurrection, too.
Otherwise, we're ultimately nothing at all.
If you believe in God, indeed, if you believe anything about the supernatural, consider this dilemma. You're an adherent, a fervent adherent and advocate for what (and/or who) you believe. One day, you're asked to renounce your conviction, your faith, to forswear that to which you've dedicated your life and being. Why? If you do, you're told, you will halt the torture and execution of many other like adherents. If you renounce, your captors will set you--and them--free.
This is the challenge presented in Martin Scorsese's film Silence. Based on a book of the same name, Silence tells the story of two priests who faced this agonizing choice. Both chose to renounce. One, however, went to his grave with a crucifix in his hand. This leaves us to wonder: what did he really believe?
True belief, it seems, is ultimately a matter of the head and heart. So does Paul affirm in In the tenth chapter of his letter to the church at Rome.
But this gets us no closer to understanding the fullness of this dilemma. All of us who believe, in head and heart, in God and, in this instance, his son Jesus (in whom, steady readers of this blog know, my loyalties center) will, if faced with this choice, need to decide: how much do I really believe what I believe?
And to this, until the moment arrives, no answer can be given.
