A reader from Texas writes:

Rod — It has been a blessing to “find” you this spring. I follow Ross Douthat on twitter, which pointed me to your book. I love “The Little Way” for all the reasons everyone else does, but it resonates with me for more personal reasons as well.

I was particularly struck by the spot in the book where you say that, even with you realizing it, your conversion to the Catholic church started when you saw the cathedral at Chartres. I think my conversion started in a similar way, more than 15 years before I actually came into the church. I grew up in a small college town in Arkansas. Raised very Southern Baptist. “Saved” when I was 7 years old after a James Robison crusade. But I had an experience as a high school senior that stuck with me over the years.

In my senior year of choir, for the spring contest season, our program included a brief piece by Palestrina titled “Haec Dies.” Probably the first time I’d uttered any Latin besides “E Pluribus Unum. But our director translated it for us – we all knew “This is the day the Lord hath made,” of course — and explained that Palestrina was the guy who wrote the church music for the Catholics back in the Renaissance. Fair enough. We started working on it.

Eventually everything came together the night of our spring concert, which we held in the local college auditorium. Rod, there is a feeling you get when you’re in the middle of that polyphony, when it washes over you like warm sunlight, when the haromonies converge on that frequency that makes the hairs on your neck stand up and your bones hum with electricity and something in your chest surge. It’s a feeling that I think is similar to what you described in the book when you saw Chartres for the first time.

That all came back to me when I was going through RCIA. I still remembered that piece we sang senior year, so I bought a Palestrina CD and popped it in the car stereo one early Sunday morning heading to RCIA class. I cranked it up and the first strains of the Kyrie from “Missa Papa Marcelli” floated through the air…I don’t know, it felt kind of like a homing signal to me.

I think your blog entry “God, Geometry — and Music” is relevant to what I’m trying to say. But I’m not smart enough to understand all the theological and philosophical stuff that you get into on your blog, and I’m not even a good enough writer to explain what I’m trying to say. Just thought I’d let you know that part of the book popped out at me and I thought “I get what he’s talking about there!”

A homing signal — yes! That’s it! And: a message in a bottle.

Art does this in a way that argument cannot. Of course, art — that is, beauty — can mislead. From a Protestant point of view, it did mislead in this reader’s case. And of course aesthetic excellence can be used in the service of evil (the most notorious example I can think of is Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph Of The Will,” but there are many others). Still, there is something almost noetic in the experience of great art, and its ability to communicate divine truth, and to help us not only to know God in our minds, but also in our hearts and bones.

Why are some people open to that, but others not? Why could I not imagine being part of a Christian tradition that downplayed the aesthetic sense? Why do some people respond to intensely emotional worship — Pentecostal style — but others (like me) are left completely cold by it, and in fact put off by it? Open question…

UPDATE: I just thought of a Buddhist proverb quoted by Richard Feynman in one of his lectures: “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.”

In this respect, art, it seems to me, is the most powerful key.