A passionate journey

Lutheran, The, Mar 2005 by Dahill, Lisa

Singing Bach takes me into prayer

"And when they had crucified him ..." (Matthew 27:35).

I didn't see MeI Gibson's The Passion of the Christ last Lent. I chose to linger in Jesus' passion differently: rehearsing and eventually performing J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

Like a child learning to read, I wanted to let the images emerge from my imaginative encounter with the story unfolding, rather than from an external visual display. And the Bach Passion is perfect for this journey.

For those performing and hearing it-most of all for the choir and vocal soloists who spend months "inside" the words and music in rehearsal-this three-and-a-half-hour Passion takes us into the very heart of Jesus' suffering, love and death.

That winter was difficult for me on several levels. Almost every week I arrived at choir rehearsal exhausted and depleted ... only to find the music speaking to me in ways I could never have predicted. In their tenderness and intimacy, their heartfelt experience of Jesus' final hours, and their prayerful, awestruck participation in the mercy poured out in him, the chorales and choruses became pray er.

Set to astonishingly beautiful music, they drew me over and over into proximity with the One who longs to draw close to each one of us. Somehow the music created sacred openings to Jesus' presence moving deep into my breath, voice, lungs, body, heart-even as the Passion's texts allowed me to linger in the reality of his life and death for me, right in the heart ofthat winter's pain. Sin, betrayal, empathy, suffering, outrage, consolation, joy: It's all there, all the human story, all my experience and the world's opened wide to God. But what really shines through this Passion is the love. Listen ...

Dahill, a research scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Stanford, Calif., translated this aria from the original German.