Joy, thou gleeming spark divine.

Last night I listened to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. I've loved his works since I first heard the third symphony the "Eroica" at the age of 13. I had bought a record of that symphony at a yard sale for fifty cents. It was then that I fell in love with Beethoven and ever since I heard the 9th symphony a few years later it has been my favorite musical work in any genre. The words from Schiller's poem An die Freude are used with such passion and intensity in the fourth movement that they have stuck with me.

While my German language skills in no way present any real fluency, I know enough to be receptive to the poetics of Schiller's writing, and the effects thereon created by Beethoven's usage.

While listening last night to the soloists and choir belt out praises to Joy that gleaming spark divine and invite all the brotherhood of mankind to consider the loving Father that must live up in the canopy of the stars, I contemplated the timing of Beethoven's work and what the "kiss to the whole world" might be besides Joy itself.

I would like to propose that in the year 1824, the year the 9th symphony was first performed, our loving Father in the canopy of stars did send out his "kiss to the whole world". He brought to the knowledge of his newly called prophet, the boy Joseph Smith, the record of his prophets in the Ancient Americas. This record shown to Joseph by the angel Moroni would later be known as The Book of Mormon. Lehi, one of the prophets whose words are recorded in the Book of Mormon, asserts that "Men are that they might have joy."

Through the Restoration of the Gospel and the revelation of the Book of Mormon, we are able to find joy in our divine purpose and "Happy as his suns hurling through the heavens, run,..,(our) race like the Hero to victory" (paraphrased)

Beethoven's work feels to me to be divinely inspired through his divinely given talents. He wrote it at a time when atheism was growing in Europe and confusion about religion in Europe and the Americas was rampant. I know that confusion can be taken away through the joy that is our Savior Jesus Christ and in his reveled words through the prophets both ancient and modern.

Freude, schoener Gotterfunken!