Dr. Jonathan Juilfs

And there's just something to me, part of my, I think even my childhood thinking about God was about limitlessness.

And there was something about the ocean that I couldn't find the end of it.

I couldn't see beyond the horizon of my own experience.

And

There is something absolutely stunning when you see the sunlight unhindered by cloud, just kind of create a line off into the horizon.

Those who have read Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Trigger, there's some images like that, I think, in the final chapters of that book.

But that's one image that comes to mind of kind of the limitlessness, the infinite of the ocean.

I also have a bargain with God.

I know we're not supposed to make bargains with God, but one of my bargains with God is that in this life, I'm not going to have enough money to probably to own my own boat at any point, but I would sure like to learn how to sail from him in the world to come.

And that's long been a kind of animating image for me in the future.

The other one, and I can't resist the music since you talked about Beethoven.

My adult years, really since we were spending time together at the Divinity School, have fallen in love with the choral works of Morton Lauridsen, and if you know that name at all, I would argue he's the greatest living composer.

He's now 86 years old.

Lauridsen's pieces are, they're contemporary, they're contemporary compositions in terms of tonality and the like, but he has an incredible ability to set ancient words in really beautiful ways.

And it's really through having sung a couple of his pieces that I first began to grapple with this idea of, as a singer, we rely on our voices.

But in a really poignant or beautiful moment in a work of art that blends song and music in proper harmony,

you can find yourself in tears.

And the crazy thing is, you can't sing when you're crying.

So you listen, you listen.

And there's something about that moment that, for me, this is ecstasy.