Monday, February 24, 2014

I get by with a little help from my friends

"There are no ordinary people.  You have never talked to a mere mortal."  Thus wrote C.S. Lewis in his collection of sermons and essays The Weight of Glory.  What a beautiful thought.  We can live ordinary lives, have ordinary days full of ordinary occupations and ordinary family responsibilities.  But we cannot be ordinary people.  Our very natures preclude that idea.

I suspect Johann Sebastian Bach appeared to live a very ordinary life.  His parents died when he was nine.  An older, married brother took him in, raised him, educated him, a common enough occurrence in 18th. century Thuringia.  Like many boys his age he attended various church schools, studied Latin, Greek, theology, and music.  He showed a great talent for music, especially the organ.  Upon leaving school he began playing the organ for various churches, moving from one congregation to another as he sought better employment.  He married his cousin, Maria Barbara, who died while he was on a trip with his employer, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen.  He then married Anna Magdalena, sixteen years his junior.  These two wives bore him twenty children, ten of which lived into adulthood.  While tragic, this is nonetheless, a very ordinary attrition rate for Bach's day and time.

We remember Bach as a master composer.  By his contemporaries he was much better known and appreciated for his organ skills.  Despite his great talent, he still had to please the hierarchy, kowtow to the bosses (the minor aristocracy and church councils of Saxony and Thuringia), work under appalling conditions and deadlines, teach unappreciative music students, and apply for music jobs he deserved but did not receive.  He was often underpaid, under-appreciated, and overworked. Upon his death in 1750 his music was put away for being too old-fashioned and was very nearly lost to history.  It all sounds rather depressingly quotidian.

And yet Bach's music changed the world.  This man, who lived a most ordinary life, has influenced artists for two hundred years.  From Mozart to Mendelssohn, to George Crumb, Bach's genius has left a trail through time.  His deeply spiritual music has touched the souls of millions.  He is regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time, possibly the greatest.  Who among his peers in the dusty Baroque German towns in which he lived could have foreseen his impact, his lasting legacy?  When Bach was hired to be the Cantor of St. Thomas School after the committee's first choice declined the position, the mayor of Leipzig infamously said, "Since the best man could not be attained, mediocre ones would have to be accepted."  Mediocre, indeed.

I have many friends, none of them ordinary.  They may appear to be so to others, as they go about their lives of being husbands and wives, parents, single, divorced, students, teachers, writers, artists, businessmen, and unemployed hopefuls.  But each of them has touched me and made my life better.  Each has left their mark, an indelible print, and I will never be the same.  So don't see the ordinary in those around you .  Look for the great qualities of eternal significance in every human being.  C.S. Lewis wrote, "Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses."

Preach it, Clive!



Johann Sebastian Bach
Clive Staples Lewis

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