Much later, as an atheist graduate student, I surprised myself by experiencing this same sense of awe and longing, this time mixed with a particularly deep sense of grief, at the playing of the second movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony (the Eroica). As the world grieved the death of Israeli athletes killed by terrorists at the Olympics in 1972, the Berlin Philharmonic played the powerful strains of this C-minor lament in the Olympic Stadium, mixing together nobility and tragedy, life and death. For a few moments I was lifted out of my materialist worldview into an indescribable spiritual
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