What Moves You?

[If the above video doesn't open for you, it is Alison Kraus singing "Down in the River to Pray," from the film Oh Brother, and is available on YouTube.]

This morning I heard from a friend who has struggled for many years to reconcile reason and spiritual experience.  Or maybe the problem was that he wanted to reconcile reason and faith - what people believe about that which cannot be captured in a laboratory (which is most of everything).  He wrote about being tremendously moved by music sung in a foreign language.

I feel that too, but also thought of how I have been moved sometimes by the captured/expressed energy of visual art.  The scene above is a lovely marriage of visual art and music, the ethereal chorus moving slowly and in harmony toward baptism.  The river, a symbol that is universal wherever people have rivers.  I was also thinking of the time I walked around a corner in The Museum of Modern Art and found myself face to face with a small painting, "The Starry Night."  Layers and layers of paint.  It hit me in the solar plexus.  It is the most famous of van Gogh's many attempts to capture "It," the divine essence in everything. If you like, you can go here and scroll down for a brief experience of it.

Daniel Terragno once said to me mildly, "Zen is not for everyone."  In fact, Zen claims that the essence, reality, the sacred is everywhere in everything.  Where is it for you?  Is that in your life?

On Art

This morning I had the experience of hearing music the way I could hear it when I was young.  This was because it came directly to my ears via earphones, not coarsely filtered by tiny "hearing aid"radios, or fuzzy and indistinct as my unaided hearing is.  And the above is a really clean recording, unlike so much that's on YouTube.

And Alberta Hunter was a genuine singer.  She means the song.  As her patter shows, the song comes from her experience.  The song goes from her to the listener.

I recently discovered a book like this song, The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier - I've mentioned it before.  It is art, or Art, if you like.  The writer has shaped his vision and experience carefully, as if to present it to you as a gift.  I can't read this book slowly enough - there is such wealth in every paragraph.  I keep coming to sentences I want to hold out and share with someone.  Appreciating literature is really what I was trained to do as an English major.  Taking it, respecting it, going in to be with it.

From me to you - that is the essence of Art.  It ignores the outside roar of the crowd.  Shuts it out.  It does not try to win accolades, or promote itself.  It is not a commodity, not a toy or entertainment or a way of making money, but an authentic experience.  It is created with fidelity to the work itself.  It comes from the writer's private world, and is an opening into that world.  And because it is really human and intimate, and shaped with love, it is sacred, and can give our difficult lives green pastures in which we can rest for a while. 

(Van Gogh said he created The Starry Night out of "a terrible need for religion.")