The Liturgy of Life

In a month I am to give a speech in honor of Philip Glass. Philip Glass is a contemporary composer famous for many reasons. A great pianist trained in Julliard and by Nadia Boulanger, the extraordinary goddess of the keys; a brilliant and unforgettable composer who will go on to posterity as an everyday Mozart or Beethoven; sweeper of concessionary garbage in the composition of feature films such as Kundun, the Illusionist and the Hours, and the artist behind operas such as Einstein on the Beach and Monsters of Grace.

Because I want to praise his work in a way that does justice to his creativity, talent, and humanity, I have entered the world of his music and his life as a joyful Voyeur. Philip Glass does not like experiences or life to begin and end. He wants to live and create eternally. Like Gregorian chants, his perception of life is a form of mundane liturgy. The mundane and the divine are combined in the alienating, hallucinating and precocious repetition of what remains and acquires the meaning we give it. Living life liturgically is the most elegant, generous and engaged way of living it.

Like a tree that extends from the sky to the earth possessed with light and oxygen, and full of infinite seeds, his work, like his life, is full of light, shadow, wind, profound anguish, discoveries and surprises. Storms and calms are the same if we allow ourselves to see their beauty and cruelty. There are no lessons in life or in his work, but there is a shared experience with those we touch and those who touch us. There is extraordinary discipline, noble work as a way of creating a fleeting and lasting connection with time, space and the love that transcends space and time. What a pleasure to share life with his sound, his honesty and his vitality, his sense of humor and his energy. I am charged with hope, even for Venezuela, that distresses me when I do not inhabit Philip Glass’ world.

The liturgy of life in Venezuela does not go on like a Gregorian chant. It goes on more as a mix of Rap, Hip-hop, bolero, and out of tune rumba. What is more, life in Venezuela in no way resembles a liturgy. Nothing is predictable except for the chaos, and because of this chaotic days surprise us with miracles. The liturgy in Venezuela is not baroque or renaissance, but it has miraculous moments of order, virtue and excellence, that appear unexpectedly and give us hope. The country of miracles develops from fright to fright, from bankruptcy to bankruptcy. Mills, dams and factories are built and in time they turn into tin. Highways and bridges are rebuilt centuries after hope has been lost. We are lucky we are not an African desert, but instead a biological and ecological diversity alive with contrasts. If we had been an African desert, we would have been burnt by the sun and our ashes carried away by the wind a long time ago. How lucky we are! We have the luck of lottery winners: rich from one day to another, then poor for the rest of our lives.

The liturgy of our lives is certainly not Gregorian and Philip Glass would have lost his monotonous and adventurous rhythm in the compact and never ending traffic of Caracas.