One morning after graduating from High School, I was driving to my summer job — a warehouse gig, unskilled labor for a small business that made wood products for home construction. That summer I was falling in love with classical music, and this particular morning I was listening to our lone FM classical station as I drove west across the Virginia Peninsula from my home in Buckroe Beach to the warehouse in west Hampton. The morning sunlight danced across billowing cumulus clouds dotted throughout the azure sky. The music and the morning light were so beautiful that my mundane commute was, just for a few moments, transfigured into a sense of the eternal overflowing in the present.
The music was the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” by the British Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. It came from a series of tunes that Tallis, a Renaissance musician, had composed for a Psalter (liturgical music for the chanting of the Psalms). Tallis’ theme was haunting and ethereal, and Vaughan Williams gave it an even more transcendent feel, achingly beautiful and filled with the kind of longing that only the Divine could fulfill.
Forty-five years later and the Tallis Fantasia still transports me. I know that classical music is not everyone’s cuppa, and the sheer neoplatonic otherworldliness of this particular piece might not speak to those whose spirituality needs a more down-to-earth habitat. In the years since that morning drive, my understanding of mysticism — and my taste in music — have both widened, so that now I hear the mystery in John Coltrane and Sandy Denny as much as in Vaughan Williams.
But embracing an earthy mysticism does not mean we cannot also be transported by a heavenly spirituality as well. I hope you can hear the whisper of the eternal in the Tallis Fantasia. Listen for it.
This month I am traveling to speak with contemplative communities in Connecticut and New York. While I am on the road, I am reposting articles from the AnamChara archive. Today’s article was first published on November 27, 2024. I’m sharing it again especially for new readers, while trusting that longtime subscribers will enjoy revisiting it.
