Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today is the feast of the Presentation of our Lord as it is often called in English. This date marks the 40th day after December 25, and it commemorates in our annual cycle the occasion when Mary presented Jesus at the temple 40 days after his birth. This day, also known as Candlemas, is an occasion when candles for the rest of the year are brought to church for a blessing.

The text that encapsulates this day’s themes is Luke 2:29-32, the ‘Song of Simeon’, when the ‘righteous and devout’ man takes the Christ child in his arms. Today, it may not come as a surprise, I’m thinking of this day through the lens of Arvo Pärt’s Nunc Dimittis.

I love Pärt’s music because much of it embodies today’s theme: epiphany — or if you like, manifestation or revelation, while also doing justice to some deep polarities. In the first place, the subject of his music is God, understood both as someone completely Other, as a Mystery, while also experienced as Present, as a Person. That two such vastly differences could be reconciled is the great mystery and miracle of Jesus becoming human.

There are other polarities too in Part’s music, such as life and death, hinted at by the natural imagery in the video. As we examine activity in the biosphere, animals, a leaf, the flowing of water or reflected light, we sense the mystery of life, of beginnings and endings, of natural cycles, of both the electric spark of animation and the shriveling decay and passing of vivifying principles.

At the human level, we experience this polarity in the presence of grief, of suffering and of our sinfulness against the equally present reality of love, goodness and truth. That an artist might combine these two topics, not in a nihilistic pastiche, but in a unified symbol of reality, makes this art a vehicle of faith. Indeed, such faith rests precisely in a God who’s Son shows ultimate solidarity with humans, even including suffering and death, and by the Spirit who intercedes for us in our weakness with ‘groanings too deep for words’. It is this ‘interpenetration’ or ‘interweaving’ — both terms used by Peter Bouteneff — of pain and of hope in Pärt’s music that connects seamlessly to the ‘bright sadness’ envisioned in the Greek and Russian spiritual traditions.

Pärt’s Nunc Dimittis shows Christ as one who comes into our painful reality, as one who suffers with us, and with whom is the promise of redemption and a hope that all will be well in the end.

Yours in Christ,
Justin