The Pano Hora Ensemble, which I founded, is not a religious organization and its members have a diverse set of religious views and affiliations. Although I am an Orthodox Christian, and some of our music has Christian themes, most of it does not, and some of the texts we perform are downright heretical. That is especially apparent in our just-released album, Evlogía (blessings).
The idea for the album came to me as the result of the intersection of two kinds of musical ideas that I find myself drawn to, which are illustrated by the works Blessed and Demasiados nombres, which were two of the earliest pieces I wrote for the album. Blessed is an instrumental version of a setting of Jesus’s Sermon on the Plain, which appears in Luke: 6, which discusses how people who suffer in this world and rewarded in the next. It is a foundational scriptural passage that captures the Christian vision of the worth and dignity of the individual, and the permanence and of each person’s identity when that person is united with God. Demasiados nombres (too many names) is a poem by the Chilean Marxist, Pablo Neruda, which I have read frequently and loved for over forty years. As its title suggests, the poem rejects individual identity, which it regards as an illusion. Instead it embraces a sort of chthonic vision of mankind as only dust and sand – quite the opposite of the Christian vision of us – but a dust and sand that is part of something beautiful (una integridad generosa, to use Neruda’s words). As I was writing the music for these two pieces, the contradiction between them was apparent. Nevertheless, it also seemed to me that they both are similarly pointing to a human yearning for being part of something beautiful.
Evlogía began to take shape in my mind as an exploration of human yearning for beauty, which is not separable from a yearning for God. After all, beauty, truth and goodness are embodiments of God in our physical world. They are reflections of His love, and models for us to imitate. The Orthodox Christian Philokalia, which means love of beauty/goodness, is a collection of texts written between the 4th and 15th centuries by spiritual leaders of the early Church. It celebrates how beauty connects us to God, recognizing the holiness of beauty in all its forms.
As Sarah Clarkson puts it: “What if, in the bent and twisted darkness of our broken world, beauty is God’s theodicy? What if God can speak in creation and song, story and vision the things words, in their frailty, cannot yet bear? What if God’s hand reaches out to us clothed in beauty, and by grasping and trusting it, we may learn to walk through the darkness in hope?”
Is this what theologians mean when they refer to the “hidden Christ”? Can we find God in the beauty of anything – from the poetry of a Marxist who revels in chthonic worship, to the dark ancient Greek portrayals of the fate of the shadows in Hades, or the playful portrayals of water sprites, or the yearning for forgiveness in King David’s psalms, or more recent Christian poems about confronting darkness or committing suicide?
I think so. And if God has been willing to participate (through the beauty of music) in all of human yearning, then it seems fitting that I try to do so too.
