Out of touch as I am, I almost never wear headphones. But I did sit in a padded room once, I forget what the occasion was, which was flooded with sound. It might have been selections from a Beethoven symphony. I found that experience to be overwhelming, even frightening. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never aspired to do that kind of thing again.
Truth be told, I’ve never been very good at listening. Probably that’s why I never advanced beyond the second chair as a saxophonist in my high school band. I am well-practiced at listening to my wife, as when asks me to help her to do something. But I never quite got the beat in the band. I’ve been even more challenged over the years doing music. Sure, I sing at the top of my voice during the Sunday Liturgy, but that’s because that kind of a singing is a kind of communal vocal forgiveness.
But seeing, for me, is something else. I’ve always loved seeing. Maybe that’s why I’m a museum rat. Thus as a kind of last museum hurrah, this spring my wife, Laurel, and I are planning to spend a few days in Manhattan, one of our longtime haunts, visiting all the great art museums there as well as blissfully enjoying the ridiculously expensive cuisine of a couple of well-recommended restaurants.
In this respect, I have noticed over the years, that I’m a kind of odd Lutheran. The Reformation was predicated on a radical kind of – hearing. You can’t really understand Luther without understanding, if I may say so, his pious addiction to the Word of God. In this sense, no hearing, no Luther. At the same time, Luther was deeply suspicious of any kind of spiritual reliance on seeing. In his view, seeing is often the royal road to idolatry. Not for nothing is J. S. Bach the greatest champion of Lutheran theology ever.
But come with me to stand before Pablo Picasso’s great 1937 painting Guernica. I’ve long hung a six by three print of that magnificent work in my study. Paul Tillich called it the greatest Protestant painting. It’s a visual cry of rage against the injustices of human society, particularly against the ravages of war. But you have to see it to believe it. It won’t help much if I try to tell you about it, even though I stood before it once transfixed, at the MOMA. In this case, seeing is believing. You can see the Divine Wrath against injustice.
I’m not opposed to surround sound, mind you. Thus I hope that I won’t ever forget hearing Bach’s St. John Passion once powerfully performed in the elegant Elizabethskirche in Marburg. But as my experience with Guernica reminds me, I am a strange kind of follower of Luther. Never mind the hearing. For me, what you truly see is what you truly believe. That’s undoubtedly why I treasure the words of Jesus so much: “Come and see.” (John 1:39f.)
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