This is dedicated to my best friend, Joe Piszczor, who died November 21, 2023. Physician and musician, his kindness, humor and wisdom ‘disbursed the gloomy clouds of night’ for me, more than once.

Please bear with me, as I labor to elicit in words inferences that are beyond facile verbal expression:

I try to accompany my posts for Christmas with music; generally something composed for the Season. But this time, I hope to address the jubilant premise of the event – benevolent Divinity coming into the world as love and hope incarnate – with music not written for the occasion, but whose ineffable beauty is parallel, in scope, to that premise.

Below is a performance of Bach’s crystalline Gavotte en Rondeau – a dance rhythm – from his Third Violin Partita, which I perceive as a melodic complement to the spirit of Christmas as respite against the sorrows and troubles of life as we so often experience it. Those can engulf hope like a chasm from whose dark clutches not even light can escape, but opposing such a suffocating vision, the Gavotte’s delight, merry yet arresting, conveys resurgent joy as did the promise of Christ’s coming. This music erupts with grace which we may reflect back, to illuminate the dark recesses we must face.

Including whatever hardship, or cross, each of us bears in their own lives, for Bach’s genius here shows how there is light beyond any darkness. Like the outlandish presentation of Jesus as hope beyond hope and joy beyond joy, the Gavotte offers something to displace the transient fray of our mortal spans: Impossible beauty. ‘Impossible,’ yet there it is, an echo of Paradise, beckoning us to yield to its intimations.

The hardest thing to believe about Christmas may be its aspect that squares least with our lived reality: Too often, compelling evidence is that Life is a blind, callous juggernaut in which savage beings and indifferent Nature prey on vulnerable flesh, and for many if not most of us, the best we can plausibly hope for is to avoid too much suffering before it ends in our being obliterated; each and all. 

On the contrary, Christmas asserts, in the same way Bach’s ecstatic Gavotte does, that there is such positivity – grace – to be found in our world as to offset all the evil, sorrow and misfortune that confront us daily and perpetually. That the world and Existence itself are fundamentally ‘good’ phenomena, wherein the value and justification of the Self, as part of a splendid and greater Whole, may be found and fully revealed.  

For most of us, that proposition seems even more personally counterfactual than the Christmas story’s deviations from our world’s ordinary processes. We may focus too much on its unlikely dogma and details; divine incarnation, virgin birth, debatable timeline, etc., rather than on its radically extra-intuitive aspect. The import of that story should be taken deeply seriously, but not necessarily literally.

For it is not invariably necessary to believe that something is literally, factually true, in every detail, in order to place faith in it. Such an assertion cannot cure cancer, find us a life partner, secure us a career, etc. But ‘faith’ and hope in the presence and power of things forever beyond our grasp can center us, giving us space to believe that our time on this Earth is not at the mercy of that fearsome ‘juggernaut’ alone, and that our lives have intrinsic meaning and value that are otherwise not apparent. They are parts of the on-going, wondrous dynamic of an interconnected, interdependent Creation, vibrant with the Gavotte’s irrepressible energy.

Opening ourselves to such reflections can help us endure when the struggles of life seem unendurable. Bach was a devout Christian, but though he presumably didn’t compose this piece with any specific religious intent, I invoke it now because it conveys a vaulting sensation brimming with the same ardent bliss as the promise of love being born, personified, into the human realm. That – like this lucent, infectious melody – offers us a means to outrace shadows which seemingly must overtake us all eventually.

This was surely not Bach’s intention for the exquisite Gavotte, but he might have approved my depiction of his inspiration this way. It is three minutes of all-encompassing loveliness which, structured as theme and variations, allegorizes Eternity: An enduring essence, endless change, yet unfailing renewal. This compact marvel supports my notion that the hardest thing for us to accept about the story of Jesus’ birth may not be its factual unlikeliness, but its underlying murmur: life is essentially good, a medium for contentment and happiness, just as valid as the dispiriting, omnipresent evidence of its sorrow and misfortunes.

One of my routine objections to an exclusively rational perception of life is that its mechanisms are not its actual meaning. They explain how life happens and continues, but not what it is for. Its ‘meaning’ must be something grander than our transient ‘Selves’ – though not grander than ‘Ourselves’ – in which we can place hope, and extract gladness. We tend to give the mechanisms preponderance because they are things our minds can grasp to the point of quantification; hugely useful – but must they be the entire reality? Why must we infer that such transcendent loveliness as the Gavotte can be nothing but the result of pulsating brain tissue and firing nerve endings? If it can, then it is not so much splendid, dynamic ‘Life’ as a mere haphazard, meaningless alchemy of anatomical gadgetry.

Arguably more important, even if that mechanistic interpretation were accurate, how wise would it be for us to embrace such an outlook, exclusively? Through this music, we can be revealed, to ourselves, to be far more than mere devices for Self-preservation; we can resonate to an energy that can deliver our own existences from the apparent pointlessness that mortality intones.

As Jesus did, by Christian doctrine, in the eventual consummation of Easter: Love made flesh, love of the Other that may transcend Death itself. I realize this observation may seem insensitive, even ludicrous to those whose lives have been laden with true hardship or riven with real tragedy. But artistry like Bach’s may enable human constraints – even human suffering – to dissolve and merge with splendor that is usually inaccessible, a summit that, theoretically, should be beyond our vision, let alone, our reach.

Yet here it is, manifest through the near-miraculous ingenuity of a supremely great artist. Listen to this music again, let it suffuse you and reflect on whether ‘Divinity,’ however defined, can only be an irrelevant anachronism, as suggested by the barren seductions of rational comprehension alone. It intimates, at the very least, some superhuman presence and intent. Let it flow through you, and you too may feel that humanity is worth saving; even suffering for. If we are all indirectly stained by evil, like Stalin’s, can we not also be indirectly validated by the glories summoned by Bach?

All credit to Bach as the diligent instrument, but such expressiveness is only possible by surpassing ordinary human constraints. Personal talent and industry alone can hardly explain grandeur at this level; it is a reflection – an exposure – of the force of Creation itself.  Personally I cannot hear this multi-faceted effusion of shimmering loveliness and exclude the possibility of a tender deity, hinting to us of its presence (if not its consistent intervention), only because it doesn’t seem to comport with the rest of perceptible, measurable, predictable reality.

It may not be proof, but surely, it is credible evidence.

The premise of Christmas is not proof either, yet we should let ourselves wonder if a plain of being in which such sublimity could be generated and contained could be, in the final analysis, merely a venue of ugliness and misery. Utmost creativity, like Bach’s, are sparkling, standalone expressions of the glory – expressed here as artistry, but for all of us, accessible as love for the Other – that may manifest when the potential of the human spirit is fully invoked, and then exceeded. It reminds us, with galvanic iridescence, how our Nature may have heights we so rarely get to sense that we may understandably despair of their even existing. Like thin air at high altitudes, where we cannot function as we ordinarily do.

Protecting and enhancing our physical well-being is one of our intellect’s main tasks, but it is a false sense of empowerment to believe intellect can have no worthy purpose but to untangle the operations of the world around us.  This music conveys the resurgent joy I allow myself to feel (with no endorphin frisson) – not to ‘understand’ but to feel – that there is a positive Creative Force with affection and purpose for me, as for every one of us. A Force replete enough with Agapé to summon the Universe from a meaningless vacuum, and even to cyclically rescue its only conscious beings – us – from ourselves.

The very existence of art like this suggests that premise cannot be dismissed out of hand. To me, the Gavotte echoes that sense, lifting me out of my self-regard and into a dimension immaculate of the concerns of this one. Granted, such a sense cannot be defined by logic, but perhaps that suggests that not all in Life that is valuable to discover and experience can be ‘defined by logic.’ Perhaps so many of us respond to this work because it satisfies a void within us we may not even have been conscious or mindful of, till we feel it being filled by some burst of joy. Of which Bach’s inspiration is but one awesome example.

The random scattering of talents, even at the level of Bach’s, among us – just as genetic burdens are also randomly scattered – implies, to me, that our promise as a species lies as much in our each being parts of the great human enterprise, as in our individuality. It is only ‘we,’ not ‘I,’ who may plausibly go on forever, and there may be comfort in accepting such continuity. Most of us will not leave expressions like Bach’s – or like any other epic personality – to mark our lives for posterity to recall; but any of us may be able to contribute to the life-giving love that Jesus embodied, that unfolding, elemental ‘force of Creation itself.’

Thus, if you ever need hope beyond what it is rational to believe, this dance of exultation will be there for you, inviting you to join it, bounding over the sordidness of life around you. Or of super-rational hope, like the premise that Love may, in the ways that matter most to us all, ‘overcome’ Death by furthering the positive energy of the Universe – that is, the presence of love within it – an energy we may recognize as more powerful and actualizing than the presumed finality of non-being.