Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Carl Orff after the Fire

I am setting here getting ready to prepare a spreadsheet to reconcile an account while I am listening to Carmina Burana by Carl Orff.  The whole thing.  It is one of those pieces that gets better every time I hear it.  How come we don't get music composed like that anymore.  Old man saying   "........they just don't write music like they used to." (said with a crackly cranky old man's voice)
 
For the Nitpicker among you.  I am fully aware he wrote this during Hitler's time in Germany.  So did lots of people. 
 
It's just fun to listen to.  A music expert I know (son Kevin) informed me that after he wrote Carmina Burana, Orff told people to destroy everything he had written up till then.  This was so superior. 
 
I know an artist who destroyed her paintings in a bonfire and I asked about it.   She explained they were hers and if she wanted to destroy them she had that right.  Maybe she had a Carl Orff moment.
 
I have boxes and boxes of sermon notes, sermon tapes and teachings I have given over the last 30 years.  Why I keep them I have no idea.  I have thought about going back and preaching some of them again.  But why.  What I would preach today would be so much better.  Now they are not only taping me but putting me on DVD for distribution.  That would be great but who is that fat man on the screen?  He needs to lose some weight. 
 
I have tapes of sermons I gave 10 years ago.  I listened to one the other day.  Good preaching but I would do it better now. You just can't recycle the word of God for the moment's revelation.
 
So, maybe Orff and Julie had it right.  Maybe burning those old sermons is the right thing to do.  I have this fantasy that I'll take them and compile them into a book.
 
We all live like Walter Mitty sometimes.

It'll never happen.

1 comment:

Julie said...

Burn.

It's a good release. And it frees you to do better work.

No pillars of salt.