This will seem quite a different blog, so I've left several days in between posts (sure, that's why I did it.) Last Wednesday was a day of culture for Deb and I. We ended the evening at the Hatch Shell in Boston beside the Charles River with a free concert by the Landmarks Orchestra with stars from the upcoming Boston Lyric Opera performances of Abduction from the Seraglio (early Mozart opera about which Schaeffer has the king of Prussia say "too many notes." It's all Turkish sounding music [remember that Muslims were surrounding and threatening Vienna much of those days--Muslim clothing fashions and music were all the rage]), The Elixir of Love by Donizetti (typical opera of the late Romantic error, frivolous, with some lovely singing) and Puccini's La Boheme, one of my favorites of all time--it snows on stage in the second act. It's the typical opera thing where the female is sick with what is likely consumption (that was the fashionable operatic disease to die of, as did Violetta in La Traviata) and the young man in the dark tries to help her find her key, and touches her cold hand and tells her his life story and falls in love with a woman who is dying of not being able to breathe and sings about it for two more hours.

Oh, but it is wonderful. It was one of the first opera recordings I owned, when I sent away to Columbia Music Club: you got this set free but you had to buy 10 more in a year. I played it and played it. Rudolpho (who falls in love with the expiring Mimi) was sung by the young Pavarotti. In the opera, unlike the movie version of Rent which is based loosely [maybe the word I'm looking for is rudely or inelegantly] on the same story, Mimi actually dies, but after some wonderful music. The singers were quite good, but the soprano was, to my ears, the most consistent and best. All three, uncharacteristically for opera singers, were very gracious and encouraging to each other and wonderfully in character (though not costume). Every night a free classical concert with an above average orchestra--hard to beat. Easily accessible by way of Alewife (down Route 2) by way of the Red Line (Charles/NGH stop). We arrived at 6:45 for the 7:00 concert with only our blanket and had not trouble finding a front row seat (we got back to Alewife by 9:39pm).

The earlier part of the day was spent at the Museum of Fine Art. NOTE: Wednesday nights, thanks to some bank or other, are free, at least this summer. Too good a treat to miss. many famous paintings like this of Monet. And a wonderful collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts. Hokusai's Tidal Wave is there but not yet on exhibit (at least, I couldn't find it--there is an upcoming exhibit on Japanese art that is in process).

And many wonderful surprises like this by the English painter John Martin of the seventh plague (hail). Note Moses with the rod and Aaron at the lower left. Martin used archeological sketches newly available in his day to create an accurate setting to show the power of this massive and advanced civilization, over whom Yahweh still rules.

It was also interesting to me to see biblical references in Latin in the musical instrument room which were untranslated by the exhibit, though it seemed every other non-English word in the museum was translated. "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord" on this clavichord.

"Praise Him with loud sounding cymbals" on this spinet harpsichord. (I'm guessing here; I'm no Latin scholar.)

We had to buy tickets to see the Edward Hopper Exhibit, which is soon gone. Hopper, like Stephen Sondheim, is very good at pointing out the idiosyncracies of our society but, also like Sondheim, not as good at suggesting answers. He spent two summers in Maine with his wife (of 44 years--she was also an artist and died nine months after he did in 1967) where he painted his famous lighthouses.

But more significant were his glimpses into city life. Living in Washington Square in New York City (only a couple of blocks from Cooper Union, where our son Josh attends), he would paint pictures of people that you'd likely glimpse as you'd pass by on an elevated train or see from a distance. People who don't know they've been seen. Kind of an exposed anonymity. You see it on the subway a lot, people reading, earphones in, isolated by the company of others. Each Hopper painting is tantalyzingly "the suggestion of enigmatic narratives," but you don't know what should happen next or what came before, the people are oddly the kind of memory you would take away from a glance in a lit window of a building, they are almost faceless, blank. Here, see a couple framed by the gray window of their city apartment. The husband is just home from work, having taken off his suit coat, and is already engrossed in the newspaper. His wife sits, as the exhibit says, "desultorily," plucking away at the piano. She is dressed in an evening gown. Has she been at home all day and is now dressed for going out, but her husband has come home and is in his own little world? We can't know, but we do know there is a story here, that draws us in.

Hopper shows us "the solitariness of individuals, even when in one another's company." In Nighthawks, see how distant each person looks, even the sugar, napkins, salt and pepper reinforce the isolation.

Or in New York Movie, see the movie screen and off to the side, the usherette lost in a reverie about her life (reflective of or inspired by what she sees in the movie?).

Or this etching, from above, to bring out the stark loneliness of the solitary man walking.

Artists have so poignantly, in modern times, shown the flaws, the idiosycracies, they've become mirrors that have allowed us to examine in us what we don't normally see, but when we see through the artist's eyes, we can say "Oh, I know that feeling. I've seen that, felt that, know that . . . " But a diagnosis is not enough. Nor are there simple disneyland/crystal cathedral answers that ignore the reality of a sin-broken world, as do the platitudinous answers most Christian books today offer ("Jesus is the super-economy sized best brand--buy Him®--He's better than all the other products."). The Bible is much wiser than either the useless and gnawing pessimism or unsettled groundlessness of our present modern times. It points to the seriousness of the Tower of Babel brokeness and the brutality of the cross necessary to bring real community. Real community doesn't so much grow out of spending time together doing happy things but, rather, really knowing who Jesus has shown Himself to be, serving Him together, suffering together for him, and serving each other as He did us. Those are the times that He works in us all that marvelous Day of Pentecost wildness that undoes the Babel curse, that we once again, if only intermittently until we are Home (but truly) share mystic sweet commmunion, beat out in the blast furnace of this world, as we see that the faith He has begun in us is pure gold and this time on earth is for the refining of that gold. Hopper has eloquently seen the problem, drawn the poison to the surface; Jesus has bought the medicine, applied the prescription that heals (not the bandage we prefer that hides and allows the untreated wound to poison the rest of who we are). A wonderfully thoughtful day in the real world.