Yoicks!

 Yesterday, 86 degrees.

Today, SNOW!

"Bach is God"

 I was listening to music this afternoon and decided to talk to Claude about it.  After we took turns marveling how great the Chaconne, I said:

A character in a TV show is fond of saying "Bach is God." I think an important part of what he means is that Bach brings order out of chaos.

To which Claude responded:

That's a lovely way to put it, and I think you're onto something genuinely profound — though I'd push the idea a little further.

Bach doesn't quite bring order out of chaos so much as he reveals that what appeared to be chaos was secretly ordered all along. The complexity in something like the Chaconne, or the fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier, or the Goldberg Variations — it never feels imposed or forced. It feels discovered, like he's lifting a veil rather than building a wall.

That's part of what makes him feel theological to so many people, religious or not. The experience of listening is one of increasing revelation — you keep hearing how the parts fit, how a theme from eight minutes ago is now being answered, how a harmonic tension is resolving into something inevitable. It produces a feeling that resembles what people describe as religious experience: the sense that underneath apparent randomness there is meaning, structure, intention.

The Chaconne is a perfect example. That repeating bass pattern is the hidden skeleton — it's always there, governing everything, even when the surface is wild and stormy and grieving. The chaos of human emotion is held within an unchanging frame. That's practically a theological statement about the relationship between suffering and providence.

There's also something worth noting: Bach's order is never cold or mechanical. It's order that contains feeling rather than suppressing it. That combination — rigor and passion coexisting completely — is extraordinarily rare, and maybe that's the deepest reason the "Bach is God" feeling resonates. Most human things have to choose one or the other.

What show is the character from, out of curiosity?

Professor T (the original foreign version — Belgian?)

What a fitting show for that sentiment. Professor T is himself a character built around that same tension — a mind that imposes fierce, almost compulsive order on everything, as a way of managing a inner world that is deeply chaotic and painful. So his devotion to Bach isn't incidental character color; it's a window into his whole psychology.

The "Bach is God" line lands differently knowing it comes from someone like him. It's not just aesthetic admiration — it's something closer to identification or even longing. Bach represents what Professor T aspires to: a way of being in which the disorder underneath is perfectly contained and transformed by an overarching structure. His rituals, his rigidity, his obsessive need for control — they're his own failed attempts at what Bach achieves effortlessly.

There's also something poignant in the fact that Bach's order, as we were just discussing, is never sterile — it's full of grief and passion and humanity. And Professor T, for all his emotional armor, is plainly a person of enormous feeling that he can barely manage. So when he listens to the Chaconne, he may be hearing something he recognizes but cannot himself achieve: suffering beautifully and perfectly held.

It's the kind of character detail that separates genuinely intelligent writing from the merely clever. The showrunners didn't just give him an eccentric habit — they gave him a mirror.

Have you seen the British remake? It handles the Bach devotion differently, and the two versions make for an interesting comparison in how the same character concept gets culturally translated.

Most texts …

 … aren't worth saving for any longer than it takes to read them.  Once in a great while, however, …

Wisdom, Hebrews, Needle’s eye

Notes on the readings for the 28^th Sunday of Ordinary Times (Cycle B)

Wis: 7:7-11

I was surprised to learn that the book of Wisdom dates only back to about 50 years before Christ.  I usually assume that the OT reading is centuries older.

 

I’ve long known that Wisdom is personified as feminine.  Sounds right to me!  About 25 years(?) ago, She Who Is, by Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, drove that point home.  Masculine or feminine, I don’t care.  Calling God Wisdom doesn’t do anything for me.

 

Hebrews: 4:12-13

I was surprised to learn that the book of Hebrews dates only to about 30 or 40 years after Christ’s death, but, of course, I shouldn’t have been.  It’s attributed to Paul, and I do have a decent idea of when Paul was writing.  Turns out that Paul probably didn’t write it — though I had assumed that he had.  I was also surprised to learn that it might not have originally been a letter; it may have been a sermon or some other kind of public address.

 

Mark 10:17-30

Well, now.  That’s a scary one, isn’t it?  I think it shocks us because we are rich.  (It would have also shocked Jesus’s listeners if they assumed that riches were a sign of God’s favor.)

Us, rich?  Yep.  Even the poorest of us have comforts that Alexander and Augustus and Kubla Khan and the tsars of Russia would have envied.  Running water.  Indoor plumbing.  Heating and air conditioning.  Medical care.  Television, for goodness sake!  So, what do we do with this reading?  We try to reason our way around it, naturally!

• ·       Surely this is simply Middle Eastern hyperbole, like saying take the 4x4x8 out of you own eye before worrying about the dust mote in mine
• ·       Maybe the “eye of the needle” is a reference to a narrow gate in the walled city of Jerusalem.  impossible for a loaded-down camel to get through, but doable if you take the cargo off its back.
• ·       Or maybe the eye of the needle is, you know, the eye of the needle, but that the “camel” is a thick rope of camel hair.
•      Our maybe it's just a counsel of perfection.

·        Well, OK, I do buy the hyperbole idea, but not the others.  

Recall last week’s gospel: Children, who depend on others for everything, get into heaven.  The rich young man — who, we can assume, depends on his wealth and power and his own good works (“all these things I have done since my youth”) — is out of luck.  I think the message is pretty clear.  Regardless of our material prosperity or poverty, we are to rely on the tender mercies of God for our salvation. 

World health

 A few days ago, the World Health Organization approved the world's first malaria vaccine; it is projected to save tens of thousands of children from death each year.  If only my old friend John K, who spent his career studying mosquitoes, had lived to see the day!

animals, divorce, children

Notes on the readings for the 27^th Sunday of Ordinary Times (Cycle B)

 

Old Testament: Gn :2:18-24

 

“… he brought [the animals] to the man to see what he would call them”

 

I love the way Anthony Hecht imagines the scene:

 

Naming the Animals

By Anthony Hecht

 

Having commanded Adam to bestow

Names upon all the creatures, God withdrew

To empyrean palaces of blue

That warm and windless morning long ago,

And seemed to take no notice of the vexed

Look on the young man's face as he took thought

Of all the miracles the Lord had wrought,

Now to be labelled, dubbed, yclept, indexed.

 

Before an addled mind and puddled brow,

The feathered nation and the finny prey

Passed by; there went biped and quadruped.

Adam looked forth with bottomless dismay

Into the tragic eyes of his first cow,

And shyly ventured, "Thou shalt be called 'Fred.' "

 

Epistle: Hebrews (Heb 2:9-11)

 

“it was fitting that he … should make [Jesus] perfect through suffering”

Why in the world was that fitting?

The whole idea of what’s “fitting” has, I suspect, led to all sorts of mischief throughout history.  It’s “fitting” that Mary be a perpetual virgin, for example, because Augustine didn’t want to imagine her under the covers with Joseph or, later, screaming in pain during childbirth.  The fact that our savior was born “a marginal jew” shows that what’s “fitting” is a bad guide to what’s true. 

                                                                      

Gospe: (Mk 10:2-16)

 

Two unrelated pericopes. The first concerns marriage:

 

“Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife”

The pharisees were “testing” Jesus, which I would typically interpret as meaning they’re trying to trick him into something.  If so, he walks right into the trap.  He says Moses’s law is wrong in allowing divorce.  I’m surprised the pharisees didn’t arrest him right then. 

 

Some modern (liberal) interpretations suggest that Jesus wasn’t really talking about divorce, but rather about abandoning someone poor and weak.  Maybe.  But I’m curious what criteria should be applied to decide which of Jesus’s injunctions are universal and which are conditioned by the time and place he lived.

 

I’m actually fine with the liberal interpretation.  Catholics should be able to divorce, but I’d like to see us admit that, rather than futz around with this annulment sham.

 

“the two shall become one flesh”

When unmarried priests use this gospel to preach on marital love, it grates on my ears.  At the very least, a priest needs to start with a humble disclaimer: “OK, so I haven’t been married, but I’ve observed a lot of marriages, so allow me to share this outsider’s view of the institution; take it for what it’s worth.”

 

The second pericope talks about kids:

 “the kingdom of God belongs to such as these”

 

We frequently think of children as innocent, pure.  Here, I prefer to see them as weak, aware of their total dependence, uninhibited, and asking for what they need — recognizing, as Bernanos’s country priest does, that “all is gift.”

Taking precautions

 For the record, Covid vaccinations:

• Pfizer EL9262 01/26/21 at FCHD
• Pfizer EN6200 o2/17/21 at FCHD
• Pfizer FF2589 10/14/21 at CVS

Also, 

• Shingrix 9/29/21  first of two shingles shots
• Flu shot 9/21/21

Still to come,

• a second shingles shot
• pneumonia vaccine

I'm not a fan of Tyne Daly

But I've long been in the tank for Edna St. Vincent Millay.
And truth to tell, Ms. Daly is pretty darned good here.
And here.