Contemplation of the Incarnation

Good evening, and God bless you. I warmly welcome everyone who has come to our church, to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Ladies and gentlemen, this evening, with this inaugural concert, the performers wish to invite us into the still unsettling world of the spirit — a world which urges the performers themselves, the authors of tonight's meeting, towards a kind of inner movement, towards casting that disquiet out of themselves: that is, towards the necessity of telling of the mystery of the spirit.

Because for the time being — that is, for some two hundred thousand years — humanity has come up with no better word for that intriguing part of our own immersion in time, the part we have never fully recognised. No better word than spirit has been invented. They want to let us in on a mystery. And yet uncovering a mystery always ends the same way. It leads to another mystery. Otherwise it is not a mystery at all, but knowledge, or routine — so adored by some, and so often mistaken for life.

But let us begin with the poster for tonight's concert; it should be showing on our screens. A cobalt ground, and across it white rays spreading outwards — do notice this — or else converging inwards, rays made of letters that form words. They are converging or departing, or arriving, but the direction is the viewer's to decide, because in life one either descends towards the centre or goes out, moves away from the centre, in which there is nothing but that very cobalt or indigo ground behind a small white spot — as on this poster.

And these three colours are associated with the symbol of the highest spirituality — in Indian anthropology, for instance: indigo is the highest chakra, the one that joins us to the spirit of the universe, just as white does in our own tradition, where it belongs to the Absolute. Following that thread further: indigo and cobalt were used to dye royal robes, and so the robes of the anointed of God.

Democracy — unfortunately and fortunately — has made us all equal; though what has really done it is the routine of democracy, or rather: democracy is routine. Tonight, however, the performers wish to lead us out of the comfort of the everyday, in which routine has taken us over and given us an illusory sense of safety, of a certain equality — because routine is surely the sister of forgetting the world of the spirit.

The performers are proposing that we meet the Incarnation once again. They lead us out of routine in order to lead us into the Incarnation. And yet in the moment I speak that word and it turns into a sound wave, I strip the Incarnation of all its boundlessness. It becomes apparently comprehensible, and by that entirely untrue — blurred, certainly, because it has been stripped of its mystery. The Incarnation flows out and flows in at once — like those rays on the poster: from the source it flows out to us, and with us it flows back into the centre.

A spiritual concert — for that is the subtitle its authors have given to this whole cycle, of which we too will be not only witnesses but, in some sense, makers — is the first scene. Tonight is nothing other than a meeting with oneself, if only we consent to that inner movement of ours, and so discover that we are not alone, neither within ourselves nor around us, and that fullness is trying to find an utterance which crosses boundaries rather than blurring them, and finds it precisely through music.

And finally, a request from the performers: please do not applaud during the programme. We give ourselves over entirely to a suspension of awareness and let ourselves be moved only as the waves of a boundless ocean are moved. We listen, and let nothing in us be active but our attentiveness to the spirit. And so let us welcome tonight's performers.