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Surely this is the way the Lord intended mankind to live: neighbor loving neighbor, each brother safely kept.
Strange, that love can grow at all in a world shaded out, strangled by vines of hate.
You must be guided by integrity, mercy, and justice. You must let love carry all your decisions, all your words. That is what the Lord asks of us in every role: father, mother, brother, child. Neighbor and friend—nun and friar. That is all the Lord asks—that we live by Christ’s example.”
At that moment, the bells ring out the hour. The sound fills the chapel, quakes the weary bones of the world. The notes, massive and mellow in every stroke, shake loose the strictures on his heart. He closes his eyes and the purity of their music fills him; a song spills over inside. There is no room left in his heart for doubt or fear. He thinks, These same bells have rung since long before the Reich existed. And they will ring still, even after it has fallen.
All is in your own hands, just as much as God’s. And whatever your hands may do, do it with all your strength and will.
The bells will ring, even after the Reich has fallen. Everything in me that is sensible, everything that is rational, can’t believe it’s true. The Reich will never fall; it is too strong now, too deeply rooted, fixed in the routine of life.
But when, in moments of quiet, in my stillness of despair, I dare to ask what yet may be, the black veil parts and light pours in. It strikes me to blindness with its beauty. It floods my soul with tears.
Yet You said, in your boundless love and wisdom, Weeping may endure for a night—joy comes with the morning.
I cannot help but know it. Against all sense, I believe. Somewhere, beyond the ragged edge of night, light bleeds into this world.
Music eases every pain we don’t know we carry. It banishes the fear that is so commonplace now, we have grown inured to its shadow and chill.
That’s the nature of darkness. It comes at the end of every day, predictable as the striking of a clock’s chime, even in the heart of summer, when the light is full and lingering. You can never quite escape the night.
Music is a way of transporting emotion from one breast to another. It is a way of knowing the unknowable, of feeling what we can never allow ourselves to confront in any other way. These agonies and ecstasies—they can break us, use us up, burn us away unless we shield our hearts with music.
Even if we speak uncommon tongues, sound grants us the mercy of understanding. That sympathetic quiver of the heart, when a harmony rolls in thirds or a seventh resolves into the octave—it’s the greatest miracle God ever wrought, for it shows us that we are one. There isn’t a person among us, German or Tommy, Aryan or Jew, whole of mind or simple, who doesn’t feel what you feel, what we all feel. In his most naïve moments, he thinks, If I could only play for the Führer, I might make him see it, the unity of God’s creation. And once he sees, how could he continue in this course of evil?
Life everywhere continues. It is inexorable, and in its persistence, mysterious and infuriating. Life proceeds stubbornly, heedless of one’s wishes, as long as you avoid the men in black uniforms and keep your curtains closed by night.
Truly we are full of power by the spirit of the Lord, and of judgment, and of might. Hear this, we pray you, ye heads of the house of Power, and princes of the house of Oppression, that abhor judgment and pervert all equality. You build up our nation with blood, and stain the world with iniquity.
There is only so much one person may give before it exhausts your shallow well of courage and leaves you damned and dry. Before outrage becomes commonplace, and you grow used to the horrors of this life. They count on it, the Nazis—and other villains, too. Mussolini in Italy and Baky in Hungary, Ion Antonescu, purging the streets of Old Romania—and those who, in some future time when civilized people think themselves beyond the reach of moral failings, may rise to stand on foreign soil. They want you tired and distracted. They plan to burn this world down—our old ways of being. From the ashes
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Our tears are the glass of our compass case, and the needle that points our way.
