An Epiphany of Gentleness

On Bach's 6th Cello Suite in D Major

You should not love your possessions, but one of the possessions that I love is Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of the Bach Cello Suites, Six Evolutions, on vinyl. I enjoy the physicality that vinyl brings. I like Spotify and Apple Music like everyone else, but having an endless choice of music always at hand has done something to how we listen to music. Very few people have the patience to listen to an album in its entirety, for example. There’s something right to me about having to flip a record if you want to keep listening. Still, I can become obsessed with just about anything, so I’m trying to become a disciplined purchaser. I recently heard Gabor Maté talk about how purchasing music was an addiction for him at one point. I get this, so I’m trying to enjoy the actual music and the action of putting the record on the player and flipping it in due course instead of the mere idea of having the music on vinyl, if that makes any sense. Anyway, it’s felt right lately.

Admittedly, I have listened to Cello Suite No. 1 in G major the most. It’s not only the opening movement, but musically my favorite.

Andrew Arndt

and I were recently geeking out on a podcast about the Prélude in G major. There’s glory in it! But of course, the first disc tends to get the most attention regardless. Yesterday after church, however, I wanted to intentionally take things slow. I decided to cook a pot roast which, of course, takes about 5 hours or so. I decided to work in silence for a while because it’s an easy habit to put music on in order to dull the silence. I need silence and am becoming increasingly aware of this fact. But eventually I felt like putting the record on. No one was at the house so I turned the music up loud enough to get me evicted from an apartment if I were leasing one. As I mentioned, Bach’s Cello Suites are “Six Evolutions,” or movements. They are as follows:

1. Nature at play
2. Journey to light
3. Celebration
4. Building
5. Struggle for hope
6. Epiphany

What caught me off guard and nearly took my breath away last night was the sixth movement. I have, of course, heard it before, but I never noticed just how gentle, how light it was. You would think that after the “Struggle for hope” there would be a sense of triumphal conquering to follow; a victory cry after winning the battle, or conquering the mountain. The Epiphany is not that. And this, if we have ears to hear it, is good news.

On the cover of Ma’s recording is a picture of him playing Cello surrounded by 6 ghost-like figures dancing. I had forgotten this. I don’t know what dance Bach was picturing when he wrote the sixth movement, but I pictured a grandfather dancing with his granddaughter. The grandfather I pictured was me. This is such a different picture than winning a battle. Some of us are obsessed with leaving a legacy.¹ We want the legacy to be in the book, or the conference tours, or the crowds, or the accumulated wealth. What if that legacy is a move backwards instead of forwards? A move away from maturity? What if the legacy after the struggle is supposed to be gentleness, playfulness, laughter and lightness? What if almost no one reads our Substack, but those we love most said we became more gentle as the years passed? I listened and thought of an unexpected snowfall on a bright and mild day. Have you ever experienced this? The sudden burst of snow on a day when you say to yourself, ‘is it even cold enough to be snowing?’ This kind of snow never accumulates. This snow is the snow of surprise, not accumulation. Its presence is known and welcomed, but it is not there to do anything other than open your heart to the wonder of it all. I thought of this when I listened to the sixth movement.

Today was strange. It snowed off and on. In November. In Tennessee. It was unusual. I was playing the 6^th movement again and my son Spencer said, ‘Look! The weather is doing what the song is doing!’ Indeed it was. The multi-colored autumn forest was the backdrop, the sun was shining, and a gentle snow was blowing steadily. Hallelujah.

There’s a way in which musicians like Bach do what apophaticism is after. His work is theological, his negation is his wordlessness. This wordless explication ends with wonder at the Ineffable. The sixth movement was a negation of any kind of Almighty-ism.^⁠² Don’t mistake me, there is a heartbreaking beauty and awe here that could make you fall prostrate before the Creator. But the overwhelm is in the Still Small Voice, not the hurricane. I’m not naming any of this well. Perhaps I can only really say that I was caught up with what this movement wasn’t. It wasn’t life as performance. It wasn’t life as conquering. It wasn’t life as accumulation or largeness. It was the negation of all of these things. Perhaps to be able to name it is to betray it. As I listened to the movement I thought of the brilliant fourth line of the song which Rich Mullins and David Strasser (aka Beaker) wrote, “Sometimes by Step”:

Sometimes the night was beautiful
Sometimes the sky was so far away
Sometimes it seemed to stoop so close
You could touch it but your heart would break…

I listened to this movement and thought, this is what it is like to at last be at home with yourself and God. I want this! How fitting, then, that the song ends on the one. Most songs end on one, of course, but this song ends on the one single breathtaking note which, in musical language, also happens to be the one rhythmically (beat one) and melodically (the root note). In the end there is a singularity in the single (one) note which is further represented by also being the one (first note) in the scale and the first beat (the one) in the measure. But then I realized that while the final movement ended on a singular one, there was even more going on. Glory! The sixth movement is in D major. I was in the car listening when this hit me and I thought, “it can’t be?!” I waited and looked back and yes, sure enough, the first movement is in G major. You don’t need to fully understand music to get this, but you can take my word that a basic principle of music is that the fifth chord in the major scale typically calls for a return to the one. The fifth note in the key of D major (the key of the final movement) is G (the key of the first movement). If all of this is lost on you, I’m saying that there are perhaps two things going on here. First, the movement ends in simple but stunning singularity. It ends with a sense of home. But it’s also possible that this completion may also signal a return to where it came from (back to G, the opening key, in this case). In the end, then, the closure is not a finality into nothingness, but a return to the home it has been longing for all along; the home it came from. The city whose builder and make is God.^⁠³

Hallelujah.

1. I recently heard

Chuck DeGroat

(check out his Substack and books!) talk about meeting with several older men to glean wisdom from them at that stage of life, yet being disappointed that they seemed to still be obsessed with “legacy” and the other things we get caught up in. I’m certain this was on my mind as I was writing this paragraph and as I was listening to Bach.

2. “God is not almighty.” This is an apophatic statement. Apophatic theology deals with negation; it says what is not in order to open our hearts wider to the God who was, and is, and is to come. To say that God is not Almighty is not to say that God isn’t mighty, or even all-mighty, it is rather to say that the word mighty (like all words) needs to be negated if we are to speak well of the God before whom all words fail. God is more than mighty.

When I speak of Almighty-ism here, I am also dealing with our often overemphasis on the power (as we humans understand power) of God through mighty acts rather than a focus on the humility of God. God’s humility is God’ might on display.

3. Heb. 11:10