An Audio Candle in the Darkness
O Lover,
These winter days both cry out for, and repeatedly fail to provide adequate expressions of, lamentation. The leadened darkness leaves my spirit torn, my agency on the edge of paralysis: on the one hand, I am “Rachel keening for her children” (Jer 31:15; Mt 2:18); on the other, my verbal poverty has me, in the words of the poet Job, “lay[ing] my hand on my mouth” (40:4). A professed wordsmith, albeit one likely addicted to his alleged art, I find myself strangely speechless. Furthermore, rounding out my attempt at truth-in-packaging, evidences of Your Self-disclosing Lógos spermátikos (“disseminated Word”) these days, professed to be broadcasted throughout the cosmos, can seem conjectural. In short, amid my paucity of words I am indeed in straits.
In his consummate setting of the text of John Henry Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius Edward Elgar musters poetic, choral, and orchestral resources to depict the interior of an “old one” in the final hours of his mortal journey to You. From “inside” his terminal abandoning of all that is familiar Gerontius manages these words: “ . . . for now it comes again, / That sense of ruin, which is worse than pain, / That masterful negation and collapse. . . .” Somehow those lines, especially “That sense of ruin,” have come to be identified with this winter of discontent for myself and my pátria. Such is the profound power—aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual—of art, of music in particular.
O Lover, I am living these days amid a volley of questions, some rageful, most rhetorical: Who under the banner of meritocracy would heartlessly decimate the nation of its chief natural resource: the variegated genius of its people? Who would tastelessly pedestal as the new superheroes billionaire oligarchs famous for monetizing all things? Who would under the guise of frugality and corruption-busting eviscerate and then repopulate the government with ideological stooges? Who with a straight face would meld a bureaucratic task force for the eradication of anti-Christian bias with a plethora of policies bastardizing that very faith tradition? Who would propose to address arguably the planet’s greatest current human rights tragedy by appropriating its victims’ homeland so as to huckster a real estate project? Who would finesse nativist exclusivism by threatening to pillage or absorb foreign regions, by colluding with various bloody-handed autocrats and totalitarians, and by alienating historic alliances? Who would seek to increase exports by populating the prisons of small country allies with asylum seekers coming to our borders? Finally, who would hoist “shamelessness” to historically unprecedented heights in our country?
Last weekend my spouse and I attended a concert of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra with the program consisting of Brahms’ Symphony #3 and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. During that evening I was simply awash in music, that entanglement of the terrestrial and celestial, that playground of St. Cecilia, that love-child of mathematics and mirábilis. For ninety minutes a torn and angst-drenched planet, indeed the immeasurable cósmos, was fleetingly glimpsed as bright, sparkling, and pristine. Yes, amid the plenitude of Your Self-embodying gifts, music for this devotee was, yet again, source and summit, an audio sacrament of Your Real Presence.
O Lover, the evening’s experiencing of the music was a candle, one somehow expressive of Your “Light Inextinguishable” (Jn 1:5) in our present dark night. Somehow, whatever transpires, the music plays on, and I am ever invited to be attentive to Your Shining to which it points.
