Gratuitous Toe-In-The-Tiber Posting

Well, I'm off to my first RCIA class in a bit. Wish me luck. This morning as I set off, the Missus said, "Go and be inspired." Considering what a reach all of this is for her, I appreciate her support all the more.

Due to the rayther amazing outpouring of support and encouragement I seem to have got, I'll keep putting up posts about my experience as I go along.

Incidentally, I met with the RCIA guy over the weekend and we got on the topic of various translations of the Bible. It turns out that he is a real shark (as is the senior priest) for olde tymme English versions, as much for the beauty of the language as anything else. "Oh, good," I said. "So that means I don't have to bring my KJV in with me for incineration, right?" He laughed heartily, but I couldn't quite tell if he scribbled "potential trouble-maker" at the bottom of his sheet of notes.

Also on the subject of Things Tiberish, Llama reader Monica just sent me a link to a post over at Whispers in the Loggia on B16's thoughts on Mozart:

“When in our home parish of Traunstein on feast days a Mass by Mozart resounded, for me, a little country boy, it seemed as if heaven stood open. In the front, in the sanctuary, columns of incense had formed in which the sunlight was broken; at the altar the sacred action took place of which we knew that heaven opened for us. And from the choir sounded music that could only come from heaven; music in which was revealed to us the jubilation of the angels over the beauty of God. …

“I have to say that something like this happens to me still when I listen to Mozart. Mozart is pure inspiration — or at least I feel it so. Each tone is correct and could not be different. The message is simply present. …

“The joy that Mozart gives us, and I feel this anew in every encounter with him, is not due to the omission of a part of reality; it is an expression of a higher perception of the whole, something I can only call inspiration out of which his compositions seem to flow naturally.”

Music for the Pope is much more than mere entertainment.... “The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments,” he wrote in August 2002 in a remarkable message, dedicated to the “contemplation of beauty” and directed to a meeting of the Communion and Liberation Movement in Rimini, Italy.

In the same text, he recalls an experience he had after listening to a Bach concert conducted in Munich by Leonard Bernstein.

After the last tone had faded away, he looked spontaneously at the person next to him “and right then we said: ‘Anyone who has heard this knows that the faith is true.’ The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer’s inspiration.”

[Waves finger at post, spluttering out "Exactly!" as best he can - except that he can think of an awful lot of other people he'd rayther hear conduct Bach than Berstein.]

As I go through this process, I shall probably have a good deal more to say on the interrelationship between Faith and musick, given how I've always felt closest to the Spirit through that medium.