I
will never forget the many childhood experiences I had while attending Sunday morning Catholic High Mass. In
those days, before Vatican II, they didn’t have those annoying and preachy folk masses in English.
You didn’t turn with superficial greetings of your neighbors in the pew or chat in the presence of the Host
enshrined in the altar. And the words were in Latin so, as an extra bonus, I barely knew their
meaning. But, as I knelt or sat in silence, I was able to hear in the resonance
of it a similar experience I later heard it in a Bach Fugue, Beethoven’s
Fifth or Chopin Etude. The visuals of the almost perfect mathematics of a
cathedral or the random splatterings of paint on a Jackson Pollack canvas, also
evoke the feeling the evolutionary forces towards consciousness first described
by Darwin, or equations of Einstein (though I am almost entirely ignorant of
mathematics), that there is order to the universe I am a minutely humble but vital participant
of. This glorious dance of creation, as horrific as it appears to be; the
collisions of gravitational forces; the explosion of stars; the black-holes in
the center of every one of the billions of galaxies (including our own); that
once depressed me is now seen in concert with the compassion of Christ, the
Buddha and the saints of all faiths. It is the rhythms… the pulse of the
backbeat to the music… the Rock ‘n’ Roll… of the spheres that I can now dance to and with
the music… the order of chaos.
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