[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Think with me, please, on the organ and the organist. There\u2019s something to learn.<\/p>\n

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Doubtless an obscure meditation, it\u2019s come to me by accident. On Feb. 23, Olivier Latry, titular organist of Notre Dame in Paris, comes to my church to play a concert, which will certainly be beautiful. Ours is a French organ, and in the music of our worship we borrow often heavily from French traditions and treasures, and so it seemed fitting to invite him, fitting for him to accept.<\/p>\n

Yet, I\u2019ve been wondering what\u2019s the point ever since.<\/p>\n

An evening of fine art and culture, of course; the Dallas Symphony Orchestra did something similar last November, though in a more secular key, raising money for Notre Dame\u2019s restoration. The DSO has a magnificent organ, and Bradley Hunter Welch, the DSO\u2019s resident organist, is among the finest players in the world. Appreciating the significance of Notre Dame, its cultural and musical place, the symphony\u2019s homage was but the recognition of truth, of all the beauty of which this particular French cathedral has been the cause.<\/p>\n

For us, however, there\u2019s more to it than that. Not in a concert hall, but a church, our organ and this organist signify more. The famous cathedral, whose fate is still uncertain, you see, belongs to the heart of Western Christianity, to a particular story and claim, a faith. And its endangered beauty symbolizes something many Christians feel: the fragility of ancient splendor and a troubled culture\u2019s grasp of eternal truths. Thus, for us to welcome Mr. Latry is an act of catholic friendship and hope. Housing an essentially homeless organist, it speaks of bonds of faith and art at home in their native place, in temples built for divine praise.<\/p>\n

The organ belongs particularly to Christian worship. At least of medieval origin, its ancestors are those ancient instruments of Jewish sacred music: the shofar, the magrepha, the nevel, the kinnor. Each constructed to praise God; then as now, their purpose was to influence the soul, lifting it higher. This, actually, is where the faithful and the godless stand closest together. For Nietzsche, for example, \u201cmusic makes the strings of our inner life resonate.\u201d For him, life without the power of music was simply \u201can error.\u201d This is little different than what Plato said of music, that it can penetrate the mind with grace and beauty, or even what Pope John XXIII said of organ music especially, that it causes the \u201cmystical movements\u201d of worship to penetrate the soul.<\/p>\n

But these tense spiritual matters aside, there is something an organist teaches us all, and that\u2019s how to remain human in a world technologically reconstructed more inhuman each day.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not odd to look to the organist for such a lesson; the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty did so in his great work The Phenomenology of Perception<\/em>. For him, the organist shows how, as he put it, \u201cthe body is geared into the world.\u201d To make beautiful music, an organist must apprehend musical text and theory, but with her body, by \u201cgestures of consecration,\u201d the organist masters the machine. Wisdom and technology flow through the body of the artist to make art; the human remains at the center of everything. This, you see in every organist, virtuoso or humble: in play with not just the mind but with the body, every appendage in a dance mastering the pipes, technology tamed for a greater purpose.<\/p>\n

Which is the lesson, theology aside, open to all: that an organist (like so many other players and artists, but not all) can show us how to stay human in a post-human world of data, screens, passwords and other suffocating technological obscurity. If we\u2019ll but meditate upon the miracle of art and artists, the ancient organist king above all, upon a human mastering, not mastered by, the machine. And then to listen to the music of it, wondering what music we could make, if with all our glittering technology, we kept our souls.<\/p>\n

This column originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News.<\/a><\/em>[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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