Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection on Joy

Jack Owicki
Sunday, February 29, 2004
Palo Alto, CA

It was 1974, and it was a tough period in my life. I was twenty-six years old, and had recently returned to grad school from involuntary servitude in the military during the Vietnam war. My research was going nowhere, and theologically, I was in a barren place. I no longer believed in a personal God or an afterlife, but there wasn’t much that I did believe in beyond the order of the natural world — and that was kind of cold comfort.

1974 was also the hundredth anniversary of the first performance of the Requiem written by the great Italian operatic composer, Giuseppe Verdi. On a chilly spring evening, April 30 to be exact, I attended a performance of the Requiem by local college musicians and some imported professional soloists.

A Requiem is a Roman Catholic mass for the dead, often set to music for voice and orchestra. It’s nominally for the dead, but it’s really for the living, who are bereaved and reminded of their own mortality. These are universal themes.

I had never heard the Verdi Requiem, and I didn’t know what to expect. By the time the piece approached its last section, I was moved by it. The young soprano soloist, Katheryn Bouleyn, was exceptional. But the experience was merely that of attending a good concert.

Then something happened. It was deeply personal and entirely internal, and it’s hard to put it into words. I’ll try, though I know I’m bound to fail.

The last section of the requiem was the Libera Me. The words go, “libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna” — “deliver me, Lord, from eternal death.”

Now, if you’re going to ask almighty God to save you from eternal death, what tone are you going to adopt? A humble, beseeching, respectful one, right? And that’s what it was for a time.

Then the chorus began a fugue, like singing a round. One section would sing “Libera me, Domine” then another “Libera me, Domine”, then another. It was like a crowd of supplicants before the walls of heaven, no longer merely beseeching, but growing insistent.

Next, the fragmented chorus coalesced into a single body, starting quietly but oh so intensely, then building and building, until the entire chorus was pounding on the walls of heaven in unison, shaking them with its demand.

As this happened, the angelic voice of the solo soprano emerged from the crowd, ascending higher and higher over the chorus. It soared over the ramparts of heaven and took me with it. It was a moment of incandescent power and beauty. I, with the god-shaped hole in my being, was utterly overcome.

What was it that I felt that night? I hesitate to call it joy, because conventional wisdom would have you believe that joy is a simple, pure emotion. This was complex, textured, and tinged with an aching longing.

Yet on balance I think it is fair to call it joy, and I’ve discovered that no less a person than C.S. Lewis agrees with me. He experienced very similar feelings that he called joy. The power of his joy was shown by its central importance in his conversion from atheism to theism.

No such conversion for me, I’m afraid. The music died away to a hush, its energy spent. It may be futile to pound on the walls of heaven when there’s nobody home to hear you, but what a magnificent gesture.