007 – The Genesis 2,4–3,24 project – An analogy with the mirth of Bach’s toccata and fugue in d minor

Permitting myself a distraction, I watched this expression of notes.

I laughed all the way through, enthralled with the mathematical resolution of it all.

Mental note: Should there ever be a Hammond organ in the hermitage [there won't be], I must make the resolution never ever to use sheet music. It all has to be memorized at one go since, after all, it’s all so mathematical. Not that I could necessarily do that. But the passion, I think, would be there. And laughter. Laughter because math is math and we weak human beings are what we are before the Lord of the heavens and the earth. And yet His mercy, His justice, is just so precise, so wonderful, making of us ever so passionately a symphony playing to the laughter of all the saints and angels. I love it. I just love it.

When I was a little boy, I sat down at the 2nd hand upright piano we had in the basement and started playing, not so much music, but what sounded good to me. My mother was horrified, not at what I was playing or that I was playing, but because she was still traumatized at the results of one of my sister’s attempts at playing the piano. It didn’t go well for her. Soon the piano was no longer to be found. But I remember being quite enthralled at the mathematics of it all. I loved math as a kid, but couldn’t find anyone to help me or even encourage me! Behold, my trauma.

Only later was my mathematical enthrallment to surface with language, specifically historic semitic philology amidst historical exegesis of a passage that was extremely tightly scripted, demanding that one cross everything with everything in every which way. I loved it. Couldn’t get enough of it. So I spent four years pouring over the most impossible connundrums, only to watch the resolutions come along like clockwork, like mathematics on a divine level, delivering the very revelation of God in the words of man. I loved every minute of it, however agonizingly difficult. It was like laughter all the way through.

But this is the difficulty with the academic thesis upon which this blogged out popular version is based. The thesis is like a mathematical equation a couple of hundred pages long. But for that reason the mirth is all the greater. Blogging out the ‘equation’, if you will, will be a joy, with much laughter, kind of like the beatitudes, at least the way I look at them in the ferocious beatitude series on the sidebar of http://holysoulshermitage.com