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I'm going to start a new regular feature of The Daily Goose. As I've spent the last six months rediscovering my love for Bach, especially in the context of my troubled relationship with the Lutheran Church, I've also been giving a closer examination to the scriptural poetry that Bach set to his Cantatas. Obviously it is better to hear the full musical setting, where the lyrics are dramatized amidst Bach's brilliant constructions. In lieu of that, certainly giving close examination to the lyrics themselves provides, if not the fullest experience, certainly something worth the moment of contemplation.

To do this for real, we would all need to know German. Since we don't (though someone buried in the mind of this six-year German language veteran is fantastic fluency), I'll put the German next to the English translation. The manner by which I chose what passage to post is partly chosen for me, since Bach's Cantatas align with the Christian calendar. But even that is a good sized bit of words, so I'll excerpt from a particular cantata from the particular week of the Christian calendar at the time of posting.

Overall, I'm interested in the most enlightened manner of contemplation of Christian scripture possible. The more allegorical, or, in a sense, "universally psychological", reading available. For me, "God" is a force of the Kosmos (internal and external nature) that operates as invisible social force that, because it is so ephemeral, and so true, it is like the sun, or Medusa: it cannot be looked at straight. Thus God is depersonalized nature. It is the spirit of humans. The Holy Ghost left artifacted in sacred words, sacred music, and sacred ritual.