Dear Joe,
I have been meaning to write you on the subject of my theophanies. They are few in number but significant, at least to me.
1.
The first happened in my childhood church. I’m not sure exactly how old I was (15 or so?), though I remember other details quite clearly. I know I was in one of the front pews. Bored during the sermon and with nothing better to do, I was studying the bulletin. You must remember that in Lutheran churches it is customary to sing a hymn after the sermon, as if the pastor’s words had moved faithful hearts to song (this being a church full of ethnic Scandinavians, the outpouring of the spirit needed a liturgical nudge). This week’s hymn, it turned out, was “Ode to Joy.”
“Ode to Joy.” Beethoven. I knew that one. Already a diligent little scholar, I looked up the title in the index and then flipped forward to the correct page. What I found there surprised me. This hymn, this thundering climax to possibly the greatest symphony ever written, on the page it looked…simple?
Yes, in fact, on closer inspection it was simple. The melody line just went up and down, and up and down again. The base line was monotony itself: half of it was just quarter-notes on D. Other hymns had great leaps in the melody and thick dissonant chords running underneath, but not this one. How could this supposed masterpiece be no different than any other hymn?
The sermon went on for a while. After it ended we all stood up, and then—at the moment the first chords sounded, I realized it was not like other hymns. It was not like them at all. At least not this time.
Joe, it sounded like the air around me was erupting. Like the four walls of the church couldn’t possibly contain whatever this was. “Hearts unfold like flowers before thee,” we sang, and that is exactly how it felt. We were unfolding into bloom, realizing some latent potential, possessed by something that had been circulating unseen in the air and was now shaking us to its exact vibration, a frequency we were made to find and echo back with grateful joy. Astonished as I was, I dimly perceived that the overwhelming music in my ears was only a grace note in some greater heavenly ringing. It was immanent in every atom. It transcended the totality of the universe too.
After the hymn was over, everyone else acted normally enough, though I was dazed and trying to work out exactly what had happened.
As I still am. I have thought often about that Sunday morning, and about why music is so important to religious life, Christian and otherwise. Historically, but perhaps even more so today. Music is one of the very few things that stubbornly resists reduction to its bare material components. The notes on the page were accurate. A decibel reading would have been accurate. If you had hooked me up to an MRI machine to measure the electricity in my head, it would have been accurate, too. But there remains a qualitative difference between those and the actual experience of Beethoven’s ninth.
Music shares this ineffable quality with classic accounts of religious experience. Rudolph Otto wrote that religious experience was a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, an encounter with an incomprehensible, wholly other force. In his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James defined religious experience by four criteria: passivity, transience, ineffability, and noetic quality, meaning it reveals an absolute reality. Poor William James. He studied first-hand accounts of religious experience because he wanted to have one but couldn’t (though he tried to induce one by huffing nitrous oxide). Lucky me, I checked every box.
I hasten to add that the very idea that my experience resisted quantification renders it, on other readings, seriously suspect. All that could be verified was an electrical disturbance inside my head? Then that’s all it was. Any further significance was the product of an overactive imagination, a mistaken inference suggested by the religious mise en scène.
Or perhaps it was a classic example of Emile Durkheim’s “collective effervescence,” in which a group’s emotional excitement leads its members to attribute their feeling of ebullience to a more-than-mortal cause.
That is quite possible. Though not easily moved to song, Lutherans can really sing. Additionally, our organ was an impressive instrument, and some Sundays the organ professor from a nearby college would make it snort and bellow like a monster out of Norse mythology. So instead of entering for a moment into the divine life, perhaps I was only overwhelmed by what we mortals, collectively, could do. And besides, Beethoven’s ninth is an empty envelope, ideologically speaking. Why assume it has religious significance when you can fill it with any meaning you like?
I will not be able to adjudicate these questions in the space of this letter, or probably ever, but I bring them up because they are a good example of the kind of double-mindedness I detect in myself and many peers. To wit, having my beliefs/experiences and their criticism in my head at the same time. It is an unsettling condition.
Another letter for another day, maybe. For now, I will tell you my second story.
2.
In 2009 I was interning at something called The Progressive Book Club, headquartered in lower Manhattan. It was attached to Air America, a liberal talk radio station, and like the radio station the book club was trying to match the influence (and profitability) of its rightwing counterparts, without success. I turned out listicles and the occasional Q&A, all to lure nice liberal people into signing up for 12 books a year at the low, low price of $25.99 apiece. It was stale and profitless work.
On the morning of June 25th there was a rain shower. After lunch I clocked out and stepped onto the Avenue of the Americas. Early summertime is secretly one of the city’s finest seasons. Half of the Manhattanites have fled to the country, but in late June the real summer hasn’t arrived, and that morning’s shower had driven away what little heat there was. Rain water still glazed the streets and sidewalks. The air felt light and cool. With a book under my arm I walked south to 14th street and then east until I arrived at Union Square Park.
I found an empty bench and settled down to read. My book was Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. It was not on the Progressive Book Club’s list of titles, but I was eager to get back to it. I had just reached the part where Prince Myshkin, the saintly titular character, is recovering from one of his massive seizures, which are always preceded by brief but intense visions. After each attack, he tells himself that his sudden glimpses into “a higher order of existence, were no more than illusions.” Still, he cannot dismiss them. I read, “In any event, what was one to do with this reality? It did exist; he himself had had the time in that one brief second to say to himself that, by the immeasurable euphoria he himself had experienced, that instant could possibly be worth all his life.”
I set down the book and looked up, and Joe, there it was. Before me was a vision. The sunlight was so brilliant it was as if I could see every one of the billion particles of light as they showered the park. The tree branches above me swayed as if they were surfing the light, rising and falling on its endless waves.
And the sunlight and the trees were nothing compared to the other people in the park.
It was more than their shining faces. Everything they did and even more everything they felt seemed dear to me, precious beyond measure. There were film students shooting a silly movie—a TV reporter being pulled this way and that by her interviewees. It looked like a masterpiece to me. A young man stepped in mud and lifted his foot, howling theatrically while the girl beside him laughed happily. My eyes filled with tears.
I wanted to stand up and walk out to them, tell them what I saw, tell them that every moment of their lives and every ephemeral feeling was more beautiful than I could bear, more precious than anyone could ever calculate, and though each moment was fleeting every one of them somehow also mattered infinitely, on a cosmic scale. Didn’t they see it too?
I kept my seat. They would have thought I was crazy, as perhaps I was. It may have been a trick of the light, after all. Another electrical storm between my ears, nothing more.
There are times when I hope it was. If my two theophanies were nothing more than momentary lapses of reason, then I have been self-deceived twice, and not for long. Otherwise, I am deceived constantly. If “the world is charged with the grandeur of God,” to quote Hopkins, or if Marilynne Robinson is right to say in her essay on Psalm 8, “with all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us,” then what I saw for an instant in the park is always right there before my eyes. It is right outside on the sunny streets of Los Angeles and it is here in my apartment as I write to you, only I never notice it. I miss it every day.
Usually, though, I am glad I touched eternity in the park. If it means living with the knowledge that I am blind to the glory all around me, so be it. It was an instant worth all my life.
You see, as I sat there on the bench, for the first and only time in my life, I was ready to die. Not that I wanted to die, of course, but I was reconciled to it. If death had entered the park that afternoon and settled down next to me on the bench and told me that my time was up, I would not have argued or fought.
“That’s alright,” I would have said. “That’s alright. I’ve seen what I came here to see.”