The Day Thou Gavest Lord Ended Very Well!

Last night I didn't die and go to heaven. I went to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and found a piece of it there. The performance of Monteverdi's Vespers by the Dunedin Consort was a very rare experience, and one that would be hard to repeat in just that way and just that place at just that time.

It started at 8, at which time the setting sun was blazing through the gallery windows, illuminating the organ pipes and chandeliers. And as the music progressed the light mellowed, blended with shadow and bathed the interior in breathtaking benediction. To sit there and listen to a performance that was professional in the sense of a performance that is careful and cared for by the artistes, and to do so in the magnificent Kelvingrove Main Hall illuminated by sunset, and listening to music intended for high spaces, exacting acoustics, and for end of day, was more than memorable.

It was an experience absorbed into those fibres of our being that are not for mere remembering, but for taking away beauty, peacefulness, gratitude and wonder, as part of who we now are. It wasn't just the music; it was more than the glorious building; it was more than the passionate professionalism of the performers; it was even something other than the setting sun and encroaching peace of night. It was all of these, which taken together, allows the Spirit of God to insinuate into our deepest selves that longing and yearning that is love for all that is, for all that we are or can be, and for the Divine Love rarely more powerfully voiced than in the harmonies, aural and visual, of certain rare experiences in our lives. What someone called the unattended moment, a glimpse of glory, and for me, an evening when inner concerns of every human heart, are transcended for a while, by an encounter with that love 'that moves the sun and other stars.'

Other can write a review - I am simply content to acknowledge a debt.

 

Comments

[chris]

We *so* wanted to go to that - but were instead at a wedding in Yorkshire where John was playing. Glad it was wonderful.

[Jim Gordon]

Well that's how I couldn't find you and John at the interval! Maybe catch up again before the summer is too far through Chris.

[chris]

Hope so - got our Synod looming in June, with preparations for that, but surely ...