A major part of life is spent looking for community. The fact that people can reach the extraordinary intellectual precocity of great music, and experience its beauty and ethical integrity by singing together with 50 or 100 other people, that's an extraordinary thing....
Composers know how to use harmony and melody like a net to catch beauty's colors and radiance. And when we like what we hear, we open our pores to take in more--just as we close them against what seems ugly or offensive. Isn't that why we remember so vividly the hours...
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were...
Think about your greatest fear. Consider how you would feel if your life required you to face what you fear the most every day. Ultimately, if you survived the test, you would discover that what you feared actually had no power over you, no power to harm you at all....
Whoever questioned the beauty of the sunset? But who can define it? The astronomer can give us the mathematics of it. There doubtless is mathematics in the sunset; but there is no sunset glory in the mathematics. There is chemistry of colours; but there is no wistful,...
I wept at the beauty of your hymns and canticles, and was powerfully moved at the sweet sound of your Church singing. These sounds flowed into my ears, and the truth streamed into my heart. from Confessions, IX
I am not much of a singer. I find it difficult to stay in tune. But when I stand next to someone with a fine voice I find it much easier. The voice I hear in my ear helps to keep my voice on line and I like to think of my voice merging with that voice so that the...
All the above can be boiled down into a three-part artistic dilemma that has faced the church for centuries. First, if art is beautiful, it has to be used whether it is effective or not. This is the idol of quality. Second, if art is effective, it must be used,...