The power of context

Today I visited my birth town Haarlem and while there I visited the Saint Bavo cathedral for the Sunday mass. Today there was a man's choir augmenting the mass with beautiful latin church music. There is a wooden statue in the church that to me is a reminder of just how powerful context can be as to how we experience things.

When I look at this statue as is, the character this statue depicts brings about feelings of repulsion in me. The statue has an air of arrogance, of hautain to it that makes me dislike it straight away. If I let my imagination run free, I see in this statue a the image of an aristocratic figure of the worse kind. Letting my imagination roam, I'dd imagine this person would have been the type of person I could easily have gotten into a fight with. In fact, just looking at the smug self-important attitude this image radiated, I'dd imagine I would have had to restrain myself from punching a figure like that in the face.

I know it is impossible to add the proper context to this image in a blog post, so I need to ask you to use your imagination a bit. Imagine looking at this picture while one of the best man's choirs you have ever had the pleasure of listening to was producing the most angelic of music. Now imagine that listening to this music is the context that this statue is supposed to exist in. I wish I had better words to describe the experience with, but for me, the music in church transforms this statue from an arrogant aristocratic douche that I would have a hard time with not punching him in the face for the sole reason that he is arrogant aristocratic douche, into someone who could have easily have been my best friend who is simply allowing himself to fully emerge himself in the angelic sounds produced by an extraordinary choir's rendering of divinely inspired music. No arrogance. No hautain. Not even a hint of aristocracy. Just a humble figure getting lost in the heavenly music.

Experiencing this transformation of a static image through the power of context, through the power of music in this particular case truly makes me wonder. How many times am I, how many times are we, misjudging things around us because we are missing the right context. Because, basically, we aren't hearing the music?