Hallelujah!
For the Easter service in church today, they sang the "Hallelujah Chorus"--very well. I was surprised, given that completely unrehearsed people from the congregation were invited to come sing with the choir. It sounded almost professional.
It also resonated with the Easter theme for the continuing, timeless presence of Christ. I don't mean the words. The words are not brilliant; they basically boil down to, well, "hallelujah!" But that's the thing: the song is pure adulation; it is musically perhaps the best encapsulation I ever encountered of unbridled rejoicing.
It helped me understand Easter better, a holiday that has always bemused me. The death of Christ I understand, in the sense that its power has always spoken to me. The resurrection of Christ has always made me scratch my head; if anything, it's seemed to knock the force out of the sacrifice story. But today, I felt caught up in the rejoicing.
The song itself spoke to me of the persistence of joy in the world. It was written c. 1750 and has well passed its 250th birthday. Handel is long dead, but his expression of rejoicing remains. If he had done nothing else in his career, he would be well vindicated by this song. Generation after generation rejoices to it: it keeps uplifting hearts, as the idea of the resurrected Jesus does. It reminds us that in a world that seems bound to the endless repetitions of sorrow, there is an equally endless return to joy.
The moment in my life when I felt most inspired to sing this song (well, in my head) was when I heard that Obama had won the presidential election--not that I wanted him to be king of kings forever but because I felt a need to express rejoicing. For the first time in over 30 years of life, I felt like integrity had won over corruption.
I was proved wrong within about 6 months, and while I still personally like Obama, his near incapability to enact any meaningful reform has shaken my faith in the capacity of the American government to be reformed far more than Bush's presidency ever did. In the Bush years, we could blame Bush. But Obama is smart and fundamentally moral, and there's nothing to blame but the system. The smart and moral apparently can't win.
And yet, my memory of that evening miraculously remains unsullied. I don't feel betrayed that my brain sang several choruses of "Hallelujah," because the feeling itself was as precious as it was unprecedented, and the feeling had value, even if it presaged little practical good.
(P.S. Sorry, Ivan icon. I mock you, but I love you.)
It also resonated with the Easter theme for the continuing, timeless presence of Christ. I don't mean the words. The words are not brilliant; they basically boil down to, well, "hallelujah!" But that's the thing: the song is pure adulation; it is musically perhaps the best encapsulation I ever encountered of unbridled rejoicing.
It helped me understand Easter better, a holiday that has always bemused me. The death of Christ I understand, in the sense that its power has always spoken to me. The resurrection of Christ has always made me scratch my head; if anything, it's seemed to knock the force out of the sacrifice story. But today, I felt caught up in the rejoicing.
The song itself spoke to me of the persistence of joy in the world. It was written c. 1750 and has well passed its 250th birthday. Handel is long dead, but his expression of rejoicing remains. If he had done nothing else in his career, he would be well vindicated by this song. Generation after generation rejoices to it: it keeps uplifting hearts, as the idea of the resurrected Jesus does. It reminds us that in a world that seems bound to the endless repetitions of sorrow, there is an equally endless return to joy.
The moment in my life when I felt most inspired to sing this song (well, in my head) was when I heard that Obama had won the presidential election--not that I wanted him to be king of kings forever but because I felt a need to express rejoicing. For the first time in over 30 years of life, I felt like integrity had won over corruption.
I was proved wrong within about 6 months, and while I still personally like Obama, his near incapability to enact any meaningful reform has shaken my faith in the capacity of the American government to be reformed far more than Bush's presidency ever did. In the Bush years, we could blame Bush. But Obama is smart and fundamentally moral, and there's nothing to blame but the system. The smart and moral apparently can't win.
And yet, my memory of that evening miraculously remains unsullied. I don't feel betrayed that my brain sang several choruses of "Hallelujah," because the feeling itself was as precious as it was unprecedented, and the feeling had value, even if it presaged little practical good.
(P.S. Sorry, Ivan icon. I mock you, but I love you.)