Daily Reading for August 5
Music can change everything. It can take over a room, leaving no one uninvolved or untouched. Even when it is scripted, paired with text, it ultimately leaves words behind and with them, thought. It takes us to resonant places inside our bodies—lungs, diaphragm, throat, skull—but also to “states of experience” that are, strictly speaking, no place at all. And there is an additional comfort: you do not have to be “good” at music to be transported by it, most especially if you experience it with others. Beatitude loves company.
I remember thinking of all of this at a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. At first it struck me that each of us was listening on our own. Some were riveted throughout; others came and went with the recitatives; still others paid attention fully only during the chorales. Every audience is a motley crew. Yet at the end when it came time for applause I realized that, wherever I had been taken individually by the music, I did not go there alone. All of us were transported.
Many of the things that otherwise seem so important fade from view in such beatific moments. That evening I entered a dimension of meaning and beauty that I know very little about, but which I have been graced to discover, willy-nilly, from time to time. Trying to keep my believing nimble, I go back and forth, consider such surges of well-being to be a once-in-a-blue-moon high tide of serotonin and a foretaste of the world to come—or a taste of the world existing right here and now that shows itself whenever we are able to notice it.
From Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come by Peter S. Hawkins. Copyright © 2009. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org