Music gives a soul to the universe,

wings to the mind,

flight to the imagination

and life to everything.” — Plato

Strangely enough, a midwife--and not his mother--baptized Antonio Vivaldi the moment he was born. Those who speculate on such things claim tiny Antonio might have been sickly, while others point to an earthquake that hit Venice just then, an event that may have traumatized the new parents. And then there are those who say that his mother rushed things along and thereby devotedly consecrated her new baby boy for the priesthood.

If that's true, she was successful because her son became a priest, a musical priest, at a small church (for Italy and Venice)--this one, Chiessa Della Pieta, a gorgeous place long ago connected to the Devout Hospital of Mercy (Ospedia del Pieta), an orphanage for abandoned street kids, where Vivaldi wrote and taught music for thirty years--and where the young women he taught performed that music. 

It seems a dream today, but we were there for a concert some years ago, right there  in the very church. It was a pure blessing to sit where his students performed, and listen to his Four Seasons, done with a sextet of strings and a harpsichord, by musicians who throughout the text appeared to speak to each other through the movements of the music, to gift each other with the beauty they created.

I think he was right about music--Plato, that is: "music gives a soul to the universe." It opens us into believing that there's reality above our own, it makes us smaller than we might want to think of ourselves and fills us with a joy that isn't our own.

That Vivaldi concert came to mind--maybe I should say came to my soul--on Saturday night at another cathedral, this one also storied, a magnificent creation pioneer Luxembourgers right here in the neighborhood built a century ago as tribute to the God they worshipped. St. Mary's stands atop the highest hill in Sioux County, where its twin towers insist on being seen from miles away. It's a church, but it's also a monument that reveals the story of a people who came to the unbroken ground of Siouxland prairie and simply insisted their God be worshipped in the kind of magnificence and beauty they remembered at home.

Saturday night St. Mary's was the setting for a candle-lit concert by a quartet of strings whose artistry and accomplishment, to my mind and my soul, was no less a pure blessing as that concert we attended in Vivaldi's Venice. The music--familiar show tunes--may well  have lacked the heft of The Four Seasons, but the concert itself, its artistry and grace, accomplished by extraordinarily good and local musicians, in an atmosphere redolent with devotion and worship, will be, at least to me, just as memorable as Vivaldi's work.

We're at war again in the Persian Gulf. The news promises more of the same.

What we heard in church on Saturday night was an alternate vision for human kind, music that "gives a soul to the universe" and out distances the world of fiery anger and brutish belligerence, a reality vastly more important than military strength--candle-lit life, not death.