Disclosure II

Brahms: A German Requiem

I am sitting on a chair. I am not comfortable. My bottom is sore. I am unsure of this selection of music. It is one person’s choice of their favourite pieces and performances, much of it firmly within the core canon of the Western classical tradition: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and the rest of the gang. Each piece tells a story, a narrative. The sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation: the blueprint of Western classical music. It exerts its particular influence upon this experience.

Nevertheless, I love this music, especially this Requiem. I performed it as a student at university 45 years ago. I still remember the tenor line. It is carved into my bones. I want to sing along. The music is in my aching heart. I long to join this angelic choir, to belong here, to sing forever, as shall this music, in eternity.

But I don’t want this now. I don’t want to sing about You. I want to be with You. I put aside my longing to collapse into the notes and come to my centre, deep in my belly, rooted down through my sacrum and pelvic floor.

Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen. Das Gras ist verdorret und die Blume abgefallen. … Aber des Herrn Wort bleibet in Ewigkeit. (1 Peter 1.24–25)

The music builds with a terrifying intensity. An emptiness opens up beneath me. The ground gives way and there is nothing underneath.

Bach: Mass in B minor: Kyrie

I love a good fugue and Bach’s generosity overflows into these two Kyries. I have sung this music, too. Again, it is tempting to join in with the tenors. I hold myself back and head for the centre.

Kyrie eleison: Lord, have mercy.

I have a vision. I say ’vision’ but it is more than sight. There is an image of sorts, but it is an admixture of sight, sound, and bodily sensation. At the base of my spine I ‘see’ the emptiness beneath me, the music, and all created reality.

These fugues are the essence of the created: the notes emanate from emptiness; they are an elaboration upon emptiness; they return to emptiness. We are the notes. I am surrounded by fugue. I am a fugue – “tending,” says Mary Oliver, “as all music does, toward silence.”

My still-rational mind quotes the Heart Sutra:

Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.

I don’t know what that means but I feel it in my sacrum. God is that reality about which I can know nothing. God is emptiness.

William Johnston wrote this in The Inner Eye of Love (p. 121):

St John of the Cross will affirm that God is everything. He is light; He is fullness; He is all: He is the source of being and beauty. … But (and here again, we come against great paradox) while God is light in Himself, He is darkness to us; while He is all in Himself, He is nothing to us; while He is fullness in Himself, He is emptiness to us; St John of the Cross does not say that God is darkness and emptiness and nothingness; but he does say that the human experience of God is darkness and emptiness and nothingness. For God is like night to the soul. … If one waits in emptiness one comes to realise that the void is God: it is not a preparatory stage but the experience of God Himself.

I bring all my years of prayer and meditation to this moment. I sit still, ground, breathe, centre, and be present. I allow the music to continue within me and without me. I let the emptiness be.

I have a stake in two realities: the everyday reality of these notes, which are the apotheosis of everything I hold beautiful and true, and which I ache to join; and the reality of emptiness on which every thing subsists. It is the antechamber of the Holy, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, where the heavenly choir sings eternally. I ache for this, too.

Listening to this music again, I weep as I write. What are these tears for? I do not know. I am not sad. I am overwhelmed. I am torn. Is it the ache for home – a place I can never inhabit?

Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 “Emperor”: II | Mozart Clarinet Concerto: II

Hours later, when Beethoven and Mozart played, I wailed a silent grief. I cannot give a completely satisfying account of what it is about this music that makes me weep.

They are perfect. In them, the human spirit brings forth music of sublime perfection. And yet they are written from deep within the human condition, dug out from the earth, distilled into a quintessence. All of the pain and precariousness of human life is here expressed in beauty. It is hard to bear.

This is what makes great art great: music that rises to God, to the sublime, that is composed out of the suffering, pain, and sadness inherent in creaturehood.

How can it be that this music, in which humanity utters its deepest truth, should have such a fleeting existence? Beethoven has been dead for nearly 200 years, Mozart just over 230. Thank God their music is still played. But for billions of years, there was no music like this. In a little while, this music will be lost to billions of years more. This music exists for this sliver of time, in this fragment of the Cosmos. One day, not long from now, it will be gone forever.

This grieving is also for the essence of who we are that is misplaced when we are born. This music is a trace of that existence. I hope that when, upon death, I enter that antechamber of the Holy, it will be playing to welcome me home.

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