The lessons were I Samuel 16:14-23 and John 1:1-5

The great Swiss Calvinist, Karl Barth, was also a passionate lover of Mozart. Now, Barth was quite a hard-nosed theologian. He believed, for example, that God was “wholly other” - inaccessible to human beings except through the Bible. But paradoxically, Barth’s insistence on God’s otherness seemed to free him to revel in the world at hand. He loved tobacco and other creature comforts, and his tastes in art and entertainment were hearty and worldly. In this spirit, he was devoted to Mozart.

This devotion was fervent bordering on fanatical. His love affair with the composer actually predated his love affair with theology. He said that it had begun at age five or six, when his father struck a few measures of The Magic Flute on the piano. “They thrilled me through and through” - and he was hooked.

Barth never began a day without Mozart. First thing every morning, he would put a record on the phonograph and listen for an hour or so. Only after that would he turn to his newspaper, and then set down to the day’s work - his 13-volume systematic theology, Dogmatics.

Barth once declared that “if I ever get to heaven, I would first of all seek out Mozart - and only then inquire after Augustine, St. Thomas, Luther, Calvin, and Schleiermacher.” And where did he think he would find him? Well, he once grudgingly admitted that maybe the angels played Bach when going about their daily task of praising God. “But.” he went on to say “I am sure. . .that when they are together en famille they play Mozart and that then too our dear Lord listens with special pleasure.”

Despite all this, the theologian had a bone to pick with the composer. As a Protestant, Barth was troubled that his hero insisted on being a Catholic! To be sure, Mozart was not an active Catholic, and was in fact on the outs with the church hierarchy.

Still, there was a Catholic piety that never left him, and he said he would never want to live outside a Catholic country. Furthermore, he had critical things to say about Protestants: he thought their religion was all in their head! Once he said that an “enlightened Protestant” would never be able to understand his masses, especially the Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi (Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world).

Well, Karl Barth wanted to argue with Mozart about all this. In a dream one night, he was given the chance. In this dream, Barth was supposed to give Mozart an oral examination in theology. He knew in advance that “under no circumstances would [the composer] be allowed to fail.” And so he did everything he could to make things easy for him; he filled the exam with friendly prompts and hints about his masses. But in answer to Barth’s question about “Dogmatics” and “Dogma” and what they might mean, Mozart’s response was - total silence!

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It seems pretty clear, doesn’t it, that Mozart had the right idea! Why worry about 13 volumes of “Dogmatics” when you can write a mass? A symphony? A serenade? We can imagine him inwardly chuckling at a Protestant theologian’s impudent questions! All in his head, indeed!

I think Thomas Merton gets it right about Barth’s dream. The great 20th century Catholic contemplative, who was profoundly moved by the dream, said that it’s about our salvation. Merton writes, “Barth is perhaps striving to admit that he will be saved more by the Mozart in himself than by his theology.” He suggests that, by playing Mozart every morning, the theologian may have been unconsciously trying to awaken the hidden Mozart within himself, “a central wisdom that comes in tune with the divine and cosmic music and is saved by love, even by eros.”

Why Mozart? Over the last two centuries, lots of people have tried to explain his distinctiveness. Karl Barth is not the only theologian to have loved him - Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Kung are two others. Many have made him out to be almost a divine figure. Tchaikovsky, for example, called him “the musical Christ” and even a skeptic like Bernard Shaw has said that his was “the only music yet written that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.” They’re picking up, one might guess, on the effortless-sounding quality of Mozart’s music - a sense that this is not music he wrote, but rather music that he heard from another world, and wrote down.

Other writers - including Barth and Kung - caution against such divinization. Mozart’s genius, they say, comes out of his being thoroughly human, in all its dimensions. His music captures the entire range of human experience - the highs and the lows. For example, Barth says, “One marvels again and again how everything comes to expression in him: heaven and earth, nature and humanity, comedy and tragedy, passion in all its forms and the most profound inner peace, the Virgin Mary and the demons.”

And yet, through it all, Mozart “never stops playing.” His music always sounds “unburdened, effortless, and light” and thus “unburdens, releases, and liberates us.” In an open letter to the composer, Barth wrote, “With an ear open to your musical dialectic, one can be young and become old, can work and rest, be content and sad: in short, one can live.”

But unlike Barth, I’m not a Calvinist - I’m a universalist. Which means I believe there’s more than one path to salvation, musical or otherwise. I love Mozart, yes - and I also love Bach and Beethoven, Berlioz and Brahms - not to mention Verdi, Mahler, Stravinsky, and Debussy, not to mention jazz, rock, and world music. Modern research confirms what the ancients knew: that music can go places where words can never go. It can touch, and heal, and liberate us in ways that theology can only stand back and envy.

But here’s one caution: There’s a certain danger in focusing on the greatest of the great artists. We can fall into the trap of believing that only they are creative - only they are carriers of the divine spark.

The Gospel of John tells us something different: The Dabhar, the Logos, God’s creative energy, runs through the whole universe. It’s wrapped up in every speck of dust, every molecule - all things are made through it. And that means that we - each in our own way - are carriers of it, too. Each of us is stamped with the image of the creator; each of us bears the face of God.

And what we are called to do is find our own uniqueness, and to live it! A wise rabbi, Rabbi Zusya, once said, “At the end of my life, God will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ God will ask instead, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” God will not ask why we were not Mozart. God will ask why we were not Sue, or Barbara, or John, or Fred - ourselves, in all our glory.

I’ll give Thomas Merton the last word. He was addressing Karl Barth, but I think he could be addressing any of us, as well. He says: “Fear not, Karl Barth! Trust in the divine mercy. Though you have grown up to be a theologian, Christ remains a child in you. Your books (and mine) matter less than we might think! There is in us a Mozart who will be our salvation!”

Thanks be to God.

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A few things to read:

Barth, Karl, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Clarence K. Pott, trans., foreword by John Updike). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1986.

Kung, Hans, Mozart: Traces of Transcendance (John Bowden, trans., foreword by Yehudi Menuhin). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1993.

Merton, Thomas, “Barth’s Dream” in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday 1966), pp. 11-12.