"Mystery of Enlightenment" Music and Musings

“Teachers teach and we are made more than we were.”
 From The Mystery of Enlightenment High Service

As I was considering what to write for this month in which we celebrate The Mystery of Enlightenment, my ears and mind were moving between the Vivaldi “Gloria in D major” that was playing in the background and thoughts around Phil Cousineau’s The Art of Pilgrimage.

I began to remember a journey I had taken with Bill Boast—to the time when I first visited Venice with Bill in 1981. For those of you who never had the pleasure of traveling with Bill, he was a living, breathing “Google search engine”.  Bill’s depth and breadth of knowledge provided instant context wherever you were and could enliven the landscape of any city or place with stories of its origins, history, people and current events.  Provided you could keep up with his breakneck walking pace, it was a non-stop oration for all who would journey with him.

While his knowledge about the details of a specific composer’s life or a musical composition may have been limited, he could enlighten you with the history, the art, the architecture, writing and clothing of each of the music periods—Medieval, Renaissance (his favorite historical period), Baroque, Classical (his favorite music period), Romantic and Modern (his least favorite on many levels!). He could describe with story and insight both the finest and the darkest hours of each time. He could compare and contrast each without missing a step while navigating crowded streets or museums. In addition to all the stories, he gifted me and many others with the ability to hear and see the music of a period in the art and architecture of the place we were visiting—without having to hear the music in real-time. 

A couple of years ago I had lunch with a host of a CPR Classical Radio show to find out what I needed to do to fulfill a dream of becoming a radio show host for CPR. From the moment we sat down to lunch, I began to be quizzed about my knowledge of music (“what music field did I study”, “what were the instruments I could play”, etc.). It did not take long for me to realize they were more interested in my understanding of ‘music theory’ rather than in what was generated by the lives and music of composers—the art, architecture, history, clothing. I can no longer recall which composer we were talking about that afternoon; I can recall sharing what I had learned in my readings and travels to London, Paris, and Vienna and what was generated by the composer. I channeled Bill as I regaled this classical radio show host with story after story about the people and places of these cities. When I paused long enough for him to get a word in, he fell back into his chair and said that he could only speak in 45 second increments about a composer and was envious of what I had just done. For years, he had only been eating the crumbs and was missing out on a grand feast that was available to him all along.

My reading of Cousineau’s The Art of Pilgrimage these past couple of months have been awakening memories of other journeys I have taken with Bill, and those with Megan as well.  All of these were made richer and deeper because of special and great teachers I have been blessed with along the way; all of them were more than a 45 second version of learning about something. Herein lies the beauty and magnificence of what Bill offered many of us over the years, and what Christuman and CHI continue to do to this day – a world of light, wisdom for the mind and for the heart—grace and beauty, the many paths of the Divine, an insatiable desire to learn more, to become Human. Indeed, “Teachers teach and we are made more than we were.”