Sunday Morning

~ Live & Learn

HE: I believe in God in every respect, but I don’t expect to understand His will. God is in music. I believe that the great composers speak to us about their experience of God. This is not nonsense. For me, Bach is a constant.

SHE: But you used to have doubts?

HE: Not about Bach.

~ Linn Ullmann, ”Unquiet: A Novel”

25 thoughts on “Sunday Morning”

  7. No doubt in Bach; or Brahms or Mozart. God is in the amazing way Copeland’s open sound captures the prairie though he grew up in the city; Tallis, Hildegaard, Elgar, Vaughn Williams, – it doesn’t have to be thunderous to be divine to me. I’m always perplexed when Bach is described as “mathmatical;” no one could listen to the cello suites or the cantatas and not hear the yearning soul. God breathes in music.

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    1. Beautiful Anne.

      HE: And I open the door and there are one hundred and fifty musicians and I know that a great and unanalyzable … non-analyzable … indescribable experience awaits me now. A Beethoven symphony. Or the St. Matthew Passion with full choir and orchestra. It is overwhelming. Impossible to describe. This is the best life has to offer.

      SHE: ​Is that the best life has to offer?

      HE: ​That’s it. Yes. It’s the best there is.

      ~ Linn Ullmann, ”Unquiet: A Novel” (W. W. Norton & Company, January 15, 2019)

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  11. Reading this on a hot, hot, glorious Monday morning. Saturday eve a lovely, lovely concert, Sunday a church service where we listened, sang, made music, met wonderful people, then a quick lunch and a 7hrs drive back to work for Hero Husband and me as his companion…. Bach, to me and many, is as close to heaven you can get. He’s never ever dull, always pure, and yet as complex as it gets. His music can look deceptively easy, but always has great depth. As a Church Musician, he certainly wasn’t a ‘laugh a minute’, but a very serious man which is quickly surfacing when you play or sing his works.
    Now GOD. I’m happy for everyone who HAS a belief, a faith, and is happy to have that. Whether you believe, as we Christians do, in ‘our’ God, or in any other Greater Being, if ‘it’ makes you happy and gives you stability in life, go for it. I have grown up with the faith of my parents and I would never give it up. It has sustained me in very difficult times, and I DO have questions and queries HE (or SHE) hasn’t answered (yet). It’s the fanatical I can’t abide. Everything that’s being done with fanatism, is bad and has got nothing to do with faith and everything with power, suppression, egoism, warfare.
    Therefore, Linn Ullmann is right. A combination of God and J.S. Bach is surely as close to heaven as it gets. This is a book I seriously would love to read, digest, re-read and take in hand in wonder, over and over again.

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