Justin Appel

…he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”
—John 1:36

Dear Friends,

When I was about 20, I remember spending the summer at my parents’ home with my older brothers. Two things remain in my memory from that summer: sleeping on the floor and listening repeatedly to Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir, a piece of music I didn’t really understand. Although this music felt mysterious, in a way, even discomfiting, I kept listening. Eventually, the music worked its way into my soul.

What was so compelling about this mass? Looking back, I think the melancholy of the music spoke to me deeply. The pulsating, almost hypnotic chords of Martin’s Agnus Dei, for instance, with its searching melody spoke to the inner Angst I felt at that time in my life. The pain I knew as a young person, simply by being a sinner in a fallen world, found resonance in the pathos of these sounds. I longed to be integrated into God’s loving care—for things in life to “make sense,” and Martin’s music, deeply expressive as it was, helped communicate something real.

Perhaps what attracted me to this setting was the sensation of being drawn into something larger than myself. This music was one small way in which the Church expressed a sense of wonder and devotion in response to the gift of Jesus, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Jesus, the “Lamb that was slain,” and who would destroy death by means of dying. Somehow, that suffering reality spoke to me, and still does.

I trust that Christ, as this mystical Lamb, knows and takes up all the suffering of our lives and redeems it with his love. Through his life, death, and resurrection Christ brings wholeness, healing, salvation to all of us.

Yours in Christ,

—Justin