Things that move you
….well, me, anyway.
My car radio might at any given time be set to one of several different news or talk radio shows, one of a few different sports stations, classical music or classic rock (especially when my younger son is around). So I got in the car on Sunday afternoon to run somewhere quickly, the radio was left on Chicago’s classical WFMT, and I instantly heard it…the captivating Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus by Vaughan Williams. It was deep into the long piece and my trip was short, and…..I couldn’t leave the car.
We need times that are positively sublime.
Funny, but the hymn that I think is known by some as the ‘Hymn of the Turning’ was sung at Mass earlier, and it has the same basic Irish folk tune (‘The World is About to Turn’) running as a current, so it was the song of the day. But the Vaughan Williams is music that stirs the soul. At least mine…
I’m moved by a wide range of music, for different reasons. Ballads are great, even pieces from rock operas. Got in the car the other day and heard Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ coming from it – my son had been there (in the car). But I recalled when the concert was held in Germany to celebrate the demolition of the Berlin wall, and the euphoria of the people when that wall came down. I was in Germany for a long time while it was still up, and was moved again in this moment in my car recalling the eruption of freedom celebrated where the wall had been, just listening to a few strains of the song, before changing the station…
A friend told me recently to listen sometime to Nickelback’s ‘If Everyone Cared’, which he’d just seen in a music video, so I found it and listened. Great lyrics, I thought. The idealism of art.
Speaking of idealism, there’s a particularly moving television commercial running right now (yes, a tv commercial) for an insurance company. Set to a nice tune, the spot runs with different scnarios in which people step up and help others in need or in danger, and in each case a bystander is noticing this good samaritan gesture. In the next scene, that bystander becomes the one doing the kind favor to help someone out as someone else watches, and then continues this act of kindness in succession. At the end of this commercial, a voice says “Responsibility. What’s your policy?”
They hit on one of mine….the one I call “Pay it forward.”
Speaking of TV, I was moved the other night by a special Anderson Cooper did on CNN about the Sago mine disaster in West Virginia last year. The feature was compelling. It personalized that tragedy, and the crisis over the current Utah mine collapse. I was born in West Virginia and had a cousin who worked briefly in the mines to pick up extra money. I worried about him then. While all the blanket news coverage focuses on the machinery and diagrams and bore holes and press conferences…all those families and townspeople are suffering, and praying. They’re good folks.
Speaking of suffering, and praying, art and things that move me….
Michelangelo’s Pieta
There is nothing more sublime. I tend to lose the sense of time and space standing in front of it, contemplating it from every angle. Contemplating them…