Today in Christian tradition is the day Mankind is most intimately offered hope and joy, the consummation of the mission initiated at Christmas. Easter is the fruit of Jesus’ sacrifice of Self for the welfare of all Others, His return representing how we may rise to the fullness of our humanity.

That is, a means to exceed our corporeal nature alone. A premise in which we may partake by living consonantly with His example, the contentment to be gained by caring for more than just our Selves.

I initially thought to follow my post ‘The Radical Realism of Good Friday,’ with a representation of such awesome implications, the Gloria of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. I personally know no music that better depicts divine omnipotence.

But I’m not really comfortable using endorphin-evoking works like the Gloria in a religious context, which should need no bombast.  So instead, I chose the hymn ‘Christ the Lord is Risen Today.’ This is often performed with a triumphalist tone (like the Gloria), but this version is serenely modest; all the trumpets in the world could not make its underlying message more compelling.

Bach, Beethoven’s peer in music’s pantheon, might have said that in his B-Minor Mass, he was channeling the divine, just serving as God’s instrument. Beethoven, who lived 75 years later during the hyper-individualistic Romantic Era, might have asserted the opposite: God was Being channeled through him, and his personal genius.

For that very reason, monumental though it is, the Gloria feels unsuitable for the gentleness elicited and required by love – from whose true nature, its hyperbole may even distract (tempt?) us. Easter’s message, that love both is the source and sustenance of life, may give us pause to wonder if there is more to our Being than physical existence. And if, with its flaws and challenges, physical existence should be assumed to be the only reality that matters. That it may not be, is perhaps the single most quintessential definition of ‘faith.’

Of course, the Gloria is also worth listening to, and to ponder whether any species that could produce such a thing could be just an apparatus of flowing blood, firing nerve endings, etc., or implies something inexpressibly beyond biological mechanisms. Something that echoes of the infinite promise bestowed today – not in spite of our imperfections, but because of them, in effect evoking greater love, as from a parent – in which we may repose faith, find peace and gain strength.

Not because our bodies do not return to dust, but because the best of our innermost being – the genuine good that we do, parallel to the benevolence Christ offered – need not vanish with our flesh. And whatever form such ongoing presence may take, may constitute Eternal Life, in the realest sense.

So please enjoy and contemplate this gently insistent music. What it lacks in grandeur, it may, with its lyrics, make up in serene suggestion of the goodness of existence.

To any who will allow themselves to perceive ‘existence,’ thus.