On Inspiration

​The other day I had, for me, an unusual experience. While doing my homework for the “Read the Bible in a Year” course, I was also listening to the first of two CDs of Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier. The first unusual thing is that I don’t usually listen to background music while doing concentrated work of this kind. There’s no special reason why I don’t. I just don’t. Part two of this unusual experience is that I finished my homework just as Andras Schiff played his last notes. But part three, the most unusual bit of all, is that I was inspired to write a short poem, which I proceeded to do. Now although I’m a retired university English professor who has taught courses on poetry and specific poets, I haven’t written a poem myself for years, in fact, not for decades. So, before I go any further, here is the poem that came out in what seemed like a fit of automatic writing, no thought required.

While listening just now to Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier,
Andras Schiff at the keyboard,
I knew without a doubt
That here was music that believed in God.
And for those moments and many more thereafter,
So did I.

I wish I could claim that I had been reading John 16:13. That would have been the icing on this cake of coincidences. In fact, I’d been plodding along through a rather dull catalogue of mostly unfamiliar Hebrew names of individuals, mostly good and bad kinds. There in John 16 (New Revised Standard Version) we read how Jesus, about to be captured and crucified, comforts his close followers with these words: “When the [Holy] Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.” This Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the traditional Christian Trinity, will thus be the heavenly comforter who helps the disciples, soon to be apostles, live their lives and speak on behalf of Jesus and God. In secular terms, we are talking about inspiration, a Latin-derived term meaning “the spirit within.” So, artistic inspiration of any kind, from poetry to prose to the graphic arts to architecture and “inspiring” public speaking, even to guidance in relationships and major life decision-making, can be said to come from this special connection with inner guidance from a higher plane. Interestingly, our word enthusiasm, in this case from the Greek, literally means the god within, Theos and ent, although we tend to use the word to connote inner excitement about something rather than getting comfort, guidance, or creativity from above.
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Another theological term for the Holy Spirit, interestingly also Greek, is Ta Hagia Ta Pneuma, literally the Holy Wind or Holy Suction, as in a pneumatic tube, where the object in question is pulled rather than pushed. And in fact wind is pulled from a place of lower pressure by an adjacent place of higher pressure. It does not actually blow. So my hope for all of us is that we will be “led in the Spirit’s tether,” as a popular English-language hymn has it, and find our own source of daily inspiration.

J.S. Bach (1685-1750), courtesy of Pinterest UK.