It's been more than mostly Mozart this birthday week on the radio -- I have heard Mozart sung in Arabic and played on the oud, hip-hop Mozart, German rock Mozart, Mozart transcribed for piano, for guitar, jazz improvisation on Mozart. And plenty of the real stuff, Mozart performed as he would have heard it for the first time.
Except that I understand its first performance was never the first time Mozart heard one of his compositions. I understand that he heard it in his head before it was ever written down. That he just listened and wrote what he heard. I understand that Mozart's music came to him from God. In a sense, Mozart was made of music. His thoughts were music, not words and not even images. He heard them.
I wonder if we're all like that and just don't know it. Not geniuses like Mozart, but hearing and seeing the same things within ourselves. Are we all made of music we don't hear? Made of words we don't write? Do we have images within us we never form with our hands? Is the genius simply the person who is able to let the beauty flow through him onto the page, into the clay, onto the canvas? The one who is born knowing how to get out of its way? Is the beauty everywhere, all around us, surrounding each of us, and do most of us live entire lives never feeling it course through us and out into the world?
Because prayer is like that. In prayer we are conduits, allowing the mightily attractive love of God to flow through us and to become us, more and more, getting out of its way and watching it do its work. Prayer is much more the work of God than our work; a graceful shower of love that never stops bathing us, which we can never understand but can learn to sense.
I guess music was like that for Mozart. Music and prayer, then, may be somewhat the same in the way they come to human beings.
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