DEVOTION UNSPOKEN

Alan Soffin

Last night, at a small, Episcopalian church in Doylestown, I heard the Philomel group play Telemann, Vivaldi, and Bach. The music was the sound of human feeling. A double miracle: that feeling can be heard and that its hearing can be shared.

Though enveloped in the glory of the music, I at one point realized it flowed out upon a sea of gray. If there was anyone under forty in the audience, I missed that person. The rest were silver-haired or bald.

I was aware, at the same time, of the gothic-arched stained glass windows, the blue-tinted apse rising in a Gothic taper behind the players and the silence of the cross suspended before the altar, painted, with its own painted cross, on which Christ was painted, silent and suspended. Devotion, unspoken, to something higher, prevailed—a wordless upwardness in which the only supplication was the sound of human feeling woven into beauty by the body and the mind.

The whole was stillness of a time-unfettered kind, made stiller by the imminence of death—not just the death that neared us aged listeners, but the death that stalked the glory of the music, and the modesty, as well, with which the building yearned for what ennobles life.

What was present was civilization—not its compassion but its passion, its upward reach from the primordial toward what invisibly ennobles. So fragile in a world whose gods are change and goods. I thought, I guess, of death—for the building was so small in the world, the listeners so few in the world, and the music so little heard in the world.

—The interests of Alan Soffin,Doylestown, Pennsylvania, include philosophy, religion, reflections on culture, filmmaking, writing, classical, jazz, rock, and international music.