Mystery is the thing that helped reestablish my faith. I lost it, more or less during the pandemic. The convenience of staying home Sunday mornings constituted the end of a slide towards spiritual apathy. That’s a story I shared in my first post; here you get the ending.
In the fall of 2021 I started seeing a therapist. He’s a former pastor, so after a handful of our monthly visits to get tools to work through my personal and professional troubles, I thought I might as well bring my spiritual troubles to him. “Religious activity is my favorite escape from God” he quoted someone saying. Too often, Christianity is burdened trying to be too sure of everything. On the one hand, fundamentalist legalism; the term speaks for itself. On the other hand, evangelicals focus on grace and the forgiveness of sins to get into Heaven, but that simplification of Christianity as self-healing is narrow and too certain of its own path. Justification, one moment in a spiritual journey, overshadows sanctification, the rest of the journey.
There are things we know for sure about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. But discovering how each entity of the Trinity interacts with our lives should be a long-term endeavor. Adopting measured agnosticism promotes discovery of God. I began treading water again, revisiting scripture that I’d long set aside, trying to pray, and slowly, visiting some churches, all while being cautious and skeptical. Rather than searching for immediate answers, I began training myself to be comfortable with guessing, with acknowledging difficult questions. I decided to trust that as long as I was asking questions about and of God, I was going to get closer to him.
I found Christianity again, or perhaps anew. I found that for as many doubts as I might have, as much cold water atheists and agnostics might lay on Christianity, there is something magical in its origin story.
Before the first century AD was up, a tiny sect of people, persecuted beyond comprehension, held firm to their faith in Jesus Christ as their Messiah. The only explanation for why Christianity survived and grew beyond Jesus’ disciples–otherwise having begun in obscurity–is that something mysterious, yet unequivocally true, happened: Jesus Christ rose from the dead and lived again amongst his disciples and other witnesses. There’s no other explanation for why the first Christians would have held so firmly to their traditions.
The epistles and the gospels written after the fact, are people’s attempts to explain that truth. I’m not sure they were certain about everything, so I don’t have to be. But they knew they could have faith in a resurrected messiah, and in his living spirit, thus, so could I. Perhaps the most important truth a Christian needs is that it survived, a fact that predates the entirety of the New Testament. Afterall, the early Christian church grew as it did without an intact gospel canon for many generations.
God knows there is mystery in our lives. Marriage represents Christ’s relationship to the church. Through therapy, I’ve realized that though my wife and I are very similar, and very complementary, we are also very different. We react to tension and anxiety with different emotions, we find satisfaction in life differently. My therapist tells me that 69% of disputes in a marriage are unresolvable. That’s incredible! Successful couples manage conflict instead of solving or avoiding it. It’s a mystery how any marriage survives.
I started connecting my faith to my music making. While the former has been intermittent in my life, the latter has been constant. I mentioned in previous posts about a legalistic way to approach musical interpretation: you look at the score, accept that individual signs mean specific sounds, and the work is done. The job of the performer is to solve the equation of musical notation and reproduce the result: a definitive interpretation. There are some pianists who seem to work this way, often to wonderful results; Alfred Brendel, Maurizio Pollini, and András Schiff come to mind as representatives of this school. There are stories of each of them spending hours on small, minute details, perfecting the exact way they wanted the music to sound.
That hasn’t worked for me as I’ve matured as an artist. Not that I’m the opposite; I don’t seek carefree playing at whim. There are musical truths, things that have to sound certain ways. (A technical example: dissonances must be stronger than the consonance it resolves to.) When I perform, I have outlines of the interpretation I want. But much of my work preparing for a performance is exploring the music, discovering its possibilities, literally playing with it. That way I have many options to draw upon and can deliver a mature, yet spontaneous performance.
In some ways I approach this out of necessity. As a perennially nervous performer, I needed to accept that nothing is certain. Nothing on stage will ever go as planned in the practice room. So, I prepare with foreknowledge that the sound of the final performance will be a mystery until it’s happened. Working this way, I’ve matured as a performer.
At the same time, I think it is true that there is no one musical interpretation, not in any sense I can recreate as a performer. If music is to speak like a spirit, it must act like the spirit; it is alive, it is mysterious.
I think about Luke 21:12-15:
12 “But before all this, they will seize you and persecute you. They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name. 13 And so you will bear testimony to me. 14 But make up your mind not to worry beforehand how you will defend yourselves. 15 For I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict.
We’ve come so far as a society that we likely won’t get imprisoned for our faith. Living in a culture equally free to abandon its faith as to keep it, our commitment to the faith will be tested time and time again. Perhaps to hold to this teaching from Luke, the least we can do is operate in the mystery. Strengthen our faith, but don’t plan it out in case one crack emerges and it all tumbles down. Our faith can easily disappear underneath the neutrality of science, but science does not have to be in opposition to faith. By embracing mystery, we can allow faith and secular society to live hand in hand.
Back to Bach, and following up on ornamentation from the last essay. Here’s how I approach ornamentation, historically informed performance practice, and interpretation. I read what the scholars say, I study the “correct” interpretation of ornaments through the ornamentation tables. That’s all one thing. Then I look at the music. I play without ornaments to hear how it can sing unadorned. Then I work them in, and allow my spirit, my musical intuition, to speak. If I can’t sing the phrase at the piano with ornaments, I try something different. Some ornaments I reinterpret, some I remove entirely. I prepare with awareness of the legalese, but I operate in mystery, listening and speaking by the spirit; I play, but I do not prepare a defense.