Symphony

I recall first understanding the visceral power of music as a little kid.

My parents would occasionally buy these inexpensive Time/Life LPs at of all places the grocery store, the “greatest hits” from composers like Gershwin, Bernstein, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart. They were all beautiful, but my favorite by far was Copeland’s Greatest Hits. I was particularly moved by one instrumental moment in Appalachian Spring…the already passionate music quickening and swelling to the point that I would just be overcome by the beauty of it. Every. Single. Time. Sometimes I’d listen—through my ginormous headphones (it was the 60s)—to that one brief passage over and over and over again, the accelerando and crescendo expressing something for which words don’t do the trick. It’s something you have to feel.

Another advantage of having spent hundreds of hours wearing out those albums is that I learned—again, by feel—the power of symphonic form to craft a story.

The readings from Romans over the past several weeks strike me as a kind of theological “symphony”. If you know anything about symphonic form, you know that in order to truly grasp a particular movement, it’s essential to hear it in the context of the entire masterpiece. In a similar way, the fourth movement of this “symphony”—this week’s Epistle reading from Romans 6—only makes sense if you hear it in the context of the entire masterpiece, particularly the dramatic, if not overwhelming crescendo of grace that precedes it.