Long Walk Home

In 1705, the young Johann Sebastian Bach took an apparently unannounced leave from his job to walk more than 300 miles to hear one of the leading musicians of his day, Dietrich Buxtehude, play the organ. Bach was gone for weeks. One can only imagine the consternation this must have caused among those who directed Bach's work and whose work he in turn supervised.

One of my favorite music historians observed that Bach did this because he was Bach. I'm not sure that's quite right. I prefer to think that Bach did this because he believed what Bach believed--that there was something higher, greater, more beautiful, and more important than the admittedly significant and conspicuously pressing obligations of the day.

One of the subtler aspects of Jesus's travel into the wilderness is that the Bible tells us almost nothing about what he had been doing before he set out. I believe it would be a mistake to interpret this silence as suggesting that Jesus was idle, lazing about, and doing nothing that mattered to those who knew and loved him. Rather, it seems to me that the narrative absence signals something very powerful: whatever activities had been occupying Jesus's time, they were completely eclipsed by the higher, greater, more beautiful, and more important things that were about to happen.

This season of Lent is an excellent time to ponder the questions raised by this untold part of the story.

What am I treating as important that will, in the grand scheme of things, finally seem trivial?

What is the higher, greater, more beautiful, and more important mission that calls to me?

Am I walking through life ...

or to Life?