Consolation

Consoling the sorrowful and broken-hearted looms as a daunting task for a true friend. The philosopher Iris Murdoch once wrote: “Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.” It is an aptitude, an art, and a challenge, then, to accompany and console the bereft. It is not for the unmoved, the self-absorbed, or the apathetic; it is heroic work to search and help rescue a grief-stricken friend in the churning seas that have sundered their little boat.

Johannes Brahms was such an exceptional friend. Born in Hamburg, he is known to the world as an accomplished 19th-century pianist and master composer of symphony orchestras, piano and organ music, and chamber ensembles. His works, like those of Beethoven, Bach, and Haydn, influenced the 20th-century composers Schoenberg, Elgar, and Stravinsky. Unknown to most was his other role, as a life raft of sorts for the extraordinarily talented pianist Clara Schumann, wife of Robert Schumann.

Robert Schumann suffered from bouts of depression and delusions of persecution most of his adult life, culminating in a complete mental breakdown. After attempting suicide, he was committed to an insane asylum near Bonn in 1854, where he would die two years later from pneumonia, never having regained his mental abilities. Within this circle of despair, Brahms, a friend of both Robert and Clara, offered his steadfast support. He visited Robert in the asylum and helped Clara to recover and support her seven children.

On her own, Clara was an accomplished composer and piano virtuoso and continued to tour throughout Europe after Robert’s death. One can gain a glimpse of the profound importance of the relationship between Clara and Johannes through a letter she wrote to her children as adults: “You hardly knew your dear Father, you were still too young to feel deep grief, and thus in those terrible years you could give me no comfort. Hope, indeed, you could bring me, but it was not enough to support me through such agony. Then came Johannes Brahms. Your Father loved and admired him, as he did no man except Joachim,” the father of Mary, Jesus’s mother. “He came, like a true friend, to share all my sorrow; he strengthened the heart that threatened to break, he uplifted my mind, he cheered my spirit when- and where-ever he could; in short he was my friend in the fullest sense of the word.”

She later wrote of Brahms: “I can truly say, my children, that I never loved any friend as I did him – it is an exquisite harmony of soul. I love his freshness of mind, his wonderfully gifted nature, his noble heart, which I have learned to know in the course of years, as others cannot.” Clara and Johannes remained close friends for the rest of their lives. They never married, nor did they marry other people. They died nine months apart, Clara in 1896 and Johannes in 1897.

In their relationship, one sees the illustration of an essential theme: that friendships are critical to human happiness, to creative and psychological flourishing, and in some cases to human survival.  No human life is without loss or suffering. We do not get to pick what poisons our daily existence, but we do get to choose the medicine. Friendship is a divinely inspired inoculation against loneliness and sadness.  It can bring candor, wonder, patience, clarity, love, communion, affirmation, virtue, enchantment, mercy, and forgiveness to the fore. Greek philosophers were sophisticated in their understanding of love and taught about the rarity of the deepest kind of friendship, which they called philia. It was not defined by sexual or romantic passion, but by a quite different distinguishing characteristic. Philia would be analogous to two people walking side-by-side on life’s journey, not possessive of the other, but in communion, souls made out of the same cloth.  

Countless brilliant writers, playwrights, and poets have commented on the nature and necessity of deep friendships, of philia, such as that of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. The Bard, Shakespeare himself in Hamlet, commanded: “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.” Though he may have intended to indicate a cliché, he nonetheless describes with brilliance the strong friendship so many hold dear. The philosopher, scientist, and statesman Francis Bacon wrote that friendship “makes daylight in the understanding, out of darkness, and confusion of thoughts.” The 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson lamented: “Till the first friend dies, we think our ecstasy impersonal, but then discover he was the cup from which we drank it ...”

Friendships like that of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms are unusual in their intensity; they were given a special gift. The world can seem insubstantial, pitiless, or hollow when we suffer grief or loss, and deep friendships are a welcome lifeline helping one to gain calm, bearings, and perspective. They help to reinforce or awaken the best version of ourselves, even when all seems confused and chaotic. These relationships are intellectually transformative and spiritually illuminating, and, in the end, make our hearts sing – which is a rare thing indeed.

Fire Watch

For a time, Thomas Merton was of the world. He was funny, brilliant, passionate, faithless, contemporary in his thinking, fluent in French, athletic, shallow, drank too much, smoked too much, dabbled in communism, loved jazz, and loved women. He unexpectedly converted to Catholicism in 1938 while attending Columbia University for his master’s degree, then inexplicably and quietly left the world behind forever when he joined the cloistered Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani  in Kentucky at age 26 in 1941. Merton left New York  a different man.

He wanted to gather up his disjointed existence and weave it into something less chaotic, more coherent, and more meaningful. He no longer wanted to live with “the abyss that walked around in front of [his] feet … ” He chose a life of deprivation and silence, entirely consecrating his life to God in order to settle his restless heart. It was, for him, a quiet rebuke to the modern world with its constant noise and distraction, emptiness, fake rebellion, and self-satisfied conceit.

Life in the monastery in the farmlands of Kentucky was the polar opposite of his bohemian lifestyle in New York. Merton now lived on the edge of civilization. He had only two sets of garments, slept on straw for a mattress and a pallet for a bed frame, ate bland food, shaved once a week, lived with 70 to 80 other monks (which swelled to more than 270 after World War II). He prayed every four hours, worked outside even in the winter, did hard manual labor, studied philosophy and theology, and did not speak to anyone except “spiritual directors” or the “superiors” in charge of the monastery. It was a difficult life with a myriad of deprivations. Merton took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and lived in silence as demanded by the austerity of his order. And he wrote. He wrote movingly, candidly, and beautifully about the spiritual life for the world to read and appreciate.

Merton became one of the most widely read spiritual writers of the 20th century. His first book, The Seven Storey Mountain published in 1948, was an autobiography of sorts. It was the story of his early life in France, England, and then America and his conversion to Catholicism.  He did not flinch from writing about the broken parts of his life before his conversion. It was engaging, humorous, eloquent, venturesome, moving, and spiritually insightful. He pointed to something lost in the culture. It was a runaway bestseller, selling millions of copies over the years. It has been translated into at least 20 languages. He went on to write more than 70 books, along with countless essays, journals, letters, and reviews.

Many readers believe his most beautiful and deeply personal writing came from the journals he wrote leading up to his ordination to the priesthood. Some of his journals over this five-year period were compiled for his book The Sign of Jonas, published in 1953. The final chapter was titled “Epilogue: Fire Watch, July 4, 1952” and discussed his role as a temporary watchman in the monastery. He walked the levels of it that summer night, while everyone was asleep, to ensure there were no fires – one could engulf the building in minutes – from the many candles used, or a defective furnace, a faulty fuse box, or an electrical glitch. He described his solemn, silent journey – the sights, the people, the sounds, the history of the place, and even the smells – from the bottom of the monastery all the way up to the bell tower.

For Merton, it was not just a physical journey but a spiritual one as well, from descent to ascent to the mountaintop. His insights were haunting and poetic. To be a watchman was to be the monastery’s early warning system to alert the community to danger. To be a watchman also meant to be an intermediary, an advocate, perched on the rooftop between heaven and earth, leaning outward in order to best communicate with God. It was a powerful image and meditation on the monastic life. This experience, as you can read in the journal, brought him to a deeper relationship with God and a better understanding of his vocation and his place within his community.

One cannot read “Fire Watch” without being inspired by the poetry and imagery of Merton’s language: “Will You open a door upon the great forest and set my feet upon a ladder under the moon, and take me out among the stars?” But to see his work in that context alone is a disservice to the breadth and range of his talent and teaching.

The writing of Thomas Merton was and is relevant because he asked his readers, in “Fire Watch” and elsewhere, to be alert, to pay attention to the small details, to contemplate God even in the persistent darkness, and to not fail to recognize the potential for ordinary human experiences to be theophanies or signs of grace, “life within life and of wisdom within wisdom.”

Messiaen’s Quartet

About 300 prisoners—and several Nazi officers and guards--in prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIII A, near the Polish border, were the first to hear one of the most beautiful and haunting musical works of the 20th century, on a winter’s night in 1941. Before the event, a prisoner drew up an artistic poster with the imprint of a camp-sanctioned seal. On the evening of the performance, officers and guards seated themselves in the front row, placing prisoners behind them— half-frozen in an unheated barracks.

Stalag VIII A (or Prisoner-of-War Camp 8A) in Goerlitz, Germany was not unlike other camps of the Third Reich. Subject to brutal conditions, prisoners were often treated as less than human. This particular camp, however, was unique in three distinct ways. Inside, there inhabited: three gifted musicians, a sympathetic officer, and a renowned 31-year-old French composer named Olivier Messiaen. This famous composer, captured at the (World War II) Battle of Verdun in 1940 while his wife and two-year-old son were back in Paris, wrote and premiered one of his greatest masterpieces, the Quartet for the End of Time, in this German camp. 

Messiaen wrote the whole Quartet for piano, cello, clarinet, and violin while imprisoned. Unquestionably, this complex and religiously inspired musical piece about the end of days in the Book of Revelation would never have come to fruition without a little serendipity. The combination of a surprisingly civilized Nazi officer encouraging Messiaen to write and a few musically gifted prisoners spurred his composition. The Nazi officer fortunately loved classical music, and Messiaen’s mere presence at the camp thrilled him. He went out of his way to supply the composer with the necessary writing materials and instruments. There were three prisoners who were brilliant musicians — one could even say virtuosos. They were willing to learn Messiaen’s demanding and textured composition, with its eight movements, using inferior instruments under appalling circumstances. Étienne Pasquier was the cellist, Henri Akoka was the clarinetist, and Jean Le Boulaire was the violinist. Messiaen himself debuted as the pianist.

The reaction to the performance of these beleaguered, emaciated musicians and to the composer’s music on that January evening in 1941 was one of astonishment. Even the cynical, hardened Nazis at the camp and the demoralized prisoners were made speechless by its grace, exquisite construction, serenity, and passion. The cellist, Pasquier, described what he saw afterward: “These people … sensed that this was something exceptional. They sat perfectly still, in awe. Not one person stirred.”

For Messiaen, the Quartet for the End of Time was not really about a dramatic and awful end, nor was it about the war, or prison life. Instead he saw it as a song without words, written to God. It recounted, in quiet and dramatic ways, the triumph of beauty and truth – what was eternal and outside of time - with the help of the ordinary, powerless prisoners trapped in a quagmire of extraordinarily terrible circumstances. The piece was not only difficult to play and impressive in scope; it was also thought- provoking and a compelling spiritual response to the ugliness, destruction, and evil that pervaded the camp. It was a window into eternity, “the harmonious silence of heaven.” It was not a window into bitterness, anger, or resignation to the darkness.

The Quartet was an unexpected gift, a beautiful bird in flight. Given all that Messiaen suffered through and saw in the war and the camp, one senses from his music that he did not lament his lot in life, or ask God why he was stuck in such a desolate hellhole. He instead whispered to God: “At the end of all days, I want to be with you, you whom I love. I am not able to walk this difficult path alone.” Messiaen presented a wellspring of hope, faith, and love when he could have composed something utterly different. He created something so thoughtful, delicate, and lovely - almost the opposite of a response to catastrophe. After listening to the eight movements, one cannot help but shed tears. One can easily see how the piece left prisoners and guards at a loss for words. 

January 15 is the anniversary of the Quartet for the End of Time performance in Stalag VIII A. For many years, to mark that event, Germans and Poles have descended into a museum and concert hall, next to the remains of the old prisoner-of-war camp, to quietly listen to a performance of this remarkable, moving piece of music by a deeply religious Catholic French composer and former prisoner of war, Olivier Messiaen.

After his release from the camp, Messiaen returned to Paris. He died in 1992. 

Go to the Opera

Opera is a break from the daily slog; it is like the gift of seeing fireflies or hearing raindrops from a windowsill on a summer’s night. There is no material benefit, just the joy of seeing and listening.

Opera is unique. It is composed of many parts – singers, orchestra, and sets, elaborate details and moving pieces. The characters are never one-dimensional, and they emote passionately and dramatically through their solos, duets, and extravagant gestures. There is never a dull moment: mysterious spells, dreaded illnesses, dancing fairies, ill-advised marriages, magical forests, ice queens, unrealistic fathers, manipulative siblings, overbearing mothers, unexpected deaths, star-crossed lovers.

The costumes and sets are usually over-the-top as well – like eating a sprinkled or chocolate-covered doughnut. But who doesn’t love those? And the orchestras, they are magnificent -- always boisterous and raucous, constantly striving to not be overlooked.

There are so many favorite characters and choruses. To name just a few: Violetta in Verdi's opera La Traviata, the unknown prince in Puccini’s Turandot, and the chorus in Verdi’s Nabucco when they sing “Va, Pensiero,” a haunting and captivating melody that one could also call a popular tune. Italians from all walks of life, as part of Verdi’s funeral procession, spontaneously sang it through the streets of Milan. They adored him, wanted to lament his passing, loved the politics the song represented (Italian unification), and knew great music when they heard it.

When Luciano Pavarotti played the unknown prince in Turandot and sang “Nessun Dorma” at the summit of his powers, there was no one his equal. After listening to him on iTunes, one understands how the audience reacted: Swoon! Bravo! None of the YouTube videos of “Nessun Dorma” sung by the most famous tenors in the last 50 years match Luciano; he was the master.

But iTunes, YouTube, or an iPad do not suffice; the revelation indeed happens when one attends an opera, even in the cheap seats. That visual and auditory experience can only be described as magical, a feast for the senses. It all comes together to cast an enchanting spell, like a fairy tale where the princess goes to the ball. It’s exciting to dress up, drink champagne, people-watch, take your seat in anticipation, and watch the thrilling scenes progress.

Do not listen to opera because it is viewed as sophisticated or for “keeping up appearances.” Listen to opera because it truly has a range, complexity, drama, and beauty that cannot be found anywhere else; it’s kismet! Sure, there is exceptional folk, pop, hip hop, jazz, rap, classical, rock n’ roll, blues, and swing music – all laudable -- but who can pass up a riotous thunderstorm? Plays are amusing; Shakespearean plays, such as Taming of the Shrew, are fantastic. Musicals, besides Phantom of the Opera, can be boring. But opera is the apex. It consists of incredible stories, lots of passionate singing throughout, expansive arm-waving, extravagant costumes, instances of over-acting, and a boisterous orchestra – the whole delicious éclair.

Opera is always surprising and vital, even when it was written two hundred years ago. It is a means of expressing in an exaggerated and intense way what it means to be human – in all its joy, despair, confusion, humor, sweetness, and power. Opera covers the spectrum of emotions in four hours; it can make you sigh, shiver, smile, laugh, guffaw, or weep.  One cannot listen to, or see, an opera and not be engaged and transfixed by its sublime nature. To appreciate opera is to see what waits just below the surface of things: truth, understanding, courage, love, sacrifice, anger, perhaps forgiveness – everything that makes life beautiful, all-too-human, and worth living. Don’t miss out on the spectacle.
 

Flannery O’Connor Takes Us For A Ride

The percentage of people who say they believe in God, pray, go to religious services, embrace religious practices or find their faith meaningful has declined over the last 50 years. A growing group of Americans do not believe in God or any organized faith whatsoever. In many communities, unbelief is even considered smart: religious conviction is perceived as strange, burdensome and outdated.

This is the context in which American Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor penned her fictional books and short stories, many of which are set in the 1950s and 1960s rural South. O’Connor wrote about the human condition and the state of the weak and the faithless. She wrote about unbelievers, lukewarm souls, narcissists and the spiritually illiterate. She wrote about racists, white trash, busybodies, snobs, fake intellectuals, poor folks, and beaten down and marginalized African Americans. Above all, O’Connor wrote about the unraveling of faith in America.  

O’Connor’s works reveal that she believed America, particularly the South, was haunted by religion, but that its people were experiencing spiritual mediocrity, cynicism and emptiness – a rough-and-tumble nihilism. She argues that people might attend services or preach that their faith matters, but that many are just lying to their neighbors and to themselves. To her, they are just checking the box with a faith bordering on the tepid or the pathetic. God is deemed irrelevant. She suspects that many people would not recognize a theophany, or sign from God, if it slapped them in the face, and that countless souls are existentially lost and fumbling in the dark.

Through her works, O’Connor tries to show people what the world would look like without faith and religion. Nothing would be of real consequence – beauty, truth, sacrifice, love, history, death, honor and sex wouldn’t matter in the least. O’Connor was also determined to show the results of that prevailing attitude in the faces of the despairing, the fallen, the pretenders, the depraved and the lost.

Flannery O’Connor’s method of accomplishing this is not subtle; she knocks her readers over the head and tries to open them up to the frozen depths of their lethargy through comedy, tragedy and sometimes even violence. She writes: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you have to draw large and startling figures.” Throughout her life, O’Connor was bent on making her readers understand the importance of faith by shocking them with outlandish characters, striking scenes and painful revelations, as in her book Wise Blood.

She populates this work with an over-the-top cast of characters: peculiar loners, false preachers, rudderless souls, unabashed skeptics, spiritual zombies, men in gorilla suits, killers, zookeepers, sex addicts, mummified dwarfs, prostitutes and con men – the grotesque, the ignorant, the humorous, the marginalized and the saved, sometimes one and the same. Reading Wise Blood is akin to watching a Mad Hatter with Southern, fundamentalist tendencies hold a revival, or an Alice stand-in slither down the rabbit hole while running an illegal moonshine operation. Her characters are bigger than life, sometimes amusing, sometimes violent, and downright biblical in their ability to fail over and over again in a multitude of ways. Her characters are more than memorable; they are unforgettable.

In Wise Blood, as in all her writing, O’Connor asks her readers to pay attention to their intentions. At the time, religious understanding and conviction were already on the decline and indifference abounded. But O’Connor was staunch in her belief that apathy and nihilism wouldn’t give a person any hope, just a bucket of despair. Wise Blood and the rest of her works were her literary offering to those who found themselves like Dante: “In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost sight of” (Dante’s Inferno).

Not much has changed since O’Connor passed away in 1964. Religious practices and church attendance are still on the decline. Perhaps there is also now a more virulent strain of atheism or disdain for the demands of belief flowing through American culture. Reading Flannery O’Connor, however, is still wildly popular. She tapped into something, then and now, of the American dissatisfaction with what the culture and the cultural elites have failed to offer – the mysteries and revelation of faith. She remains the “voice crying out in the wilderness.”