A weekly column by Father George Rutler.
The rabbis talking with the twelve-year-old Jesus about
the Torah must have thought that he was a child prodigy. There have been
such, and as a proud pastor I delight in the extraordinary skills of so
many of the children in our parish, so adept at piano and violin and so
forth. “Prodigy” means a sign or a gift. Betraying a prejudice, I’d
propose that in addition to the five ways St. Thomas Aquinas proved the
existence of God from natural evidence, prodigious Mozart would be a
sixth. You cannot compose a symphony at the age of eight and ascribe it
just to chemistry or biology.
A nice thing about Mozart is that he was nice. People liked him,
and he liked them, and he did not storm about like the self-styled
geniuses of the romantic period a couple of generations later. He
thought of himself as a craftsman who enjoyed his craft. Simple as that.
But he never produced anything second rate, which is why I propose him
as proof that there exists a God who does great things through his
creatures. Mozart said that music is not in the notes but in the silence
between the notes. That might sound like a nice throwaway line, but he
meant it, and his music is proof. So it is with our daily lives: God is
to be heard in the silent spaces between all that we say and do.
Jesus cannot be filed away in the category of child prodigies. He
is the source of all prodigy. At the age of twelve in the Temple, he
called it his “Father’s house.” In him was more than genius. It is true
that great artists, like Jesus himself, give the impression that what
they do is effortless. The Latin phrase ars est celare artem
means that the essence of art is to give the impression that it is easy.
Great opera singers would have you think that their sounds are
effortless. Compare that with the rock singers who affect an air of pain
when they scream into sound amplifiers, as though they (and not their
listeners) were enduring some form of torture. It is their attempt to
make you think that their artlessness is art.
In the sixteenth century, Baldassare Castiglione coined the term sprezzatura
for affected nonchalance, or deliberate casualness. But there was more
than that in the miracles of Christ. There were times when the disciples
saw the anguish his purity endured in a broken world, as when he
groaned before he raised Lazarus from the dead. Prodigies receive their
talent from God. Christ is God himself. Mozart understood that and said:
“It is a great consolation for me to remember that the Lord to whom I
had drawn near in humble and childlike faith, has suffered and died for
me, and that He will look on me in love and compassion.”
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