Circles

November 26th, 2018

Visiting St Francis Xavier Cathedral in Geraldton recently I was looking at the stripes painted along its walls – a very striking feature of the interior of this exquisite building.

According to Fr Robert Cross (Chancellor, Diocese of Geraldton) they can be seen as parts of circles – arcs – somehow showing us how we are so closely surrounded and enveloped by God who has no beginning and no end – just like a circle.

Stripes to our limited perception – but, in fact circles – like the extent to which we are enveloped by God – but to our own limited understanding we sometimes don’t notice him enough in our lives. So we only perceive a stripe – and not necessarily the circle.

This brought me to think about circles – we learn about them in our school mathematics classes – and they really have quite a lot to do with music – after all, so much of our musical forms tend to have a circular-type adventure – the music begins, forays into various harmonic regions and ultimately returns to where it started, coming ‘full circle’.

Even the cycle of 5ths is often depicted as a circle – many of us as young music students use a circle to help us grasp this concept. And the basic shape of a musical phrase could also be seen as a circle as it undulates up and down with the concept of arsis and thesis steeped deep within it harking back to the earliest examples of chant – the phrase rises then comes back to where it started from – or does it? Is it only our limited perception whereby we think the music has returned to its starting point whereas, in fact, the piece has developed over the period of its duration – perhaps akin to the concept of the graph of a sine wave…

It’s interesting to note that even our musical notes in modern notation are, in fact, circular…

God sees the whole – we see only a part – perhaps this concept of the circle which we encounter in music somehow resonates with us at a deep level and, somehow, puts us in touch with Him helping us catch a glimpse of His omnipotence – we only see a stripe – but He is the circle of which the stripe is only a small part of…bringing to mind the words of the psalmist: ‘As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people from this time forth and forever’. (Ps 124: 2)