FAITH - MORE THAN BLIND TRUST
October 25th, 2008 by Syd
Most bloggers are commentators. They take a news story, add their own comments and post it. Brigid’s work is of a different order. She’s a writer, an original source. I love the way she puts words and thoughts together:
FAITH - MORE THAN BLIND TRUST
I was talking to a coworker about the election news that Obama is already planning his victory celebration and my friend said "Don’t worry, there’s a lot of us that haven’t been polled, that still will vote. Have faith." Yes I do. More importantly, it’s a faith that’s based on hope, but it’s also based on reality, experience and asking the right questions.
The subject of faith takes me back to a Spring evening at the symphony. The chance to hear the local city orchestra play Mozart was enough to make me dust off my little black dress and my lone pair of high heels and make an evening out of it. There is just something about Mozart. Perhaps what I find so heartrending in his music is the intensity of change from one mood to another. Other great composers have expressed the extremes of life: affirmation, despair, sensual pleasure, bleak emptiness, but only in Mozart can all these emotions co-exist in the space of a short song, making it fuller, richer. Mozart inhabits a landscape where beauty ebbs in and away, like the tide, where everything is contingent and nothing simple, where, as Henry James’s Madame Merle says, "an envelope of circumstances encloses every human life". It is a place where genres blend; where concertos become operatic and arias symphonic; where laughter and tragedy, the downtrodden and the sanctified, are one. As is life. One can not write music like that if one has not lived a life beyond the safe middle ground. Just as one can not lead without having been honed by the experience of the worst the world can throw your way…