Riff—The Art of Fugue and the Art of Staying Human

On Outrage, Self-Regulation, and Staying Human in Violent Times

I’m still struggling.

Every morning I wake up to news of state-sanctioned violence—deportations, cruelty disguised as policy, the deliberate dismantling of what we’ve built together. And I feel this tightness in my chest, this urge to DO something. To make signs. To march. To fix it.

But here’s what I’m finally learning late in life: when I’m hijacked by outrage—when my body is screaming FIGHT and part of me just wants to curl up and give up—I can’t think clearly. I just react. And my reactions usually make things worse, not better.

So my first step isn’t the protest (though that may come). My first step is getting myself settled enough to remember who I am—a Jesus follower—and what that identity actually calls me to do. Sometimes faithful action means acting before I’m perfectly calm. But I at least need to know whether I’m acting from the true story I’ve been given or just from the false story my triggers keep telling me.

I’ve written before about my little coffee ritual. How grinding beans by hand every morning settles something in me. The repetitive motion, the sound, the smell—it all brings me back into my body, back into the present moment, back into something like peace.

But I’ve discovered something else recently that does this for me even more powerfully.

Bach’s Art of Fugue.

I can’t believe I’d never really listened to it before. It’s his final work, left unfinished when he died in 1750—the last fugue literally breaks off mid-phrase where death interrupted him. He didn’t even specify what instruments should play it. It’s pure musical architecture, mathematical precision made into art.

But here’s what happens when I listen to it: I hear these multiple voices, each singing their own song, each speaking truthfully and consistently, and somehow—impossibly—they’re all in harmony with each other. The technical term is counterpoint, but that word feels too small for what Bach achieves here. These voices don’t just coexist; they need each other. Each one makes the others more beautiful, more themselves.

And when I hear it, something shifts in me.

The tightness in my chest eases. My view becomes less cloudy. The darkness that threatened to overwhelm me is penetrated by light—not the light of easy answers or quick fixes, but the light of what humans are capable of when we’re at our best.

This is what we were made for. Life together where different voices sing truthfully, consistently, in harmony. Where we don’t have to choose between being ourselves and being in community. Where the ensemble makes each individual voice more beautiful, not less.

That’s the art of fugue. And it’s also, I think, the art of being human together.

I’m not naive. Bach’s fugue doesn’t stop deportations or restrain autocrats. And honestly? Some mornings I can’t hear it. The darkness is too thick, the news too brutal, and I’m too dysregulated to receive what Bach is offering. Those mornings I just have to sit with the grief and the rage and trust that the capacity to hear will return.

But on the mornings when I can hear it, the fugue reminds me that beauty is real, that human flourishing is possible, that we’ve done this before and we can do it again. It opens space for me to think about what faithfulness actually requires of me right now.

Maybe that’s protest. Maybe it’s something else. But whatever it is, I want to arrive at it from who I’ve been made to be rather than my reactive fury. From hope rather than despair. From the story I’ve been given rather than the one my panic tells.

So this morning, I’m commending The Art of Fugue to you. Right now I’m savoring the Emerson String Quartet version, though sometimes I prefer organ or piano. However you can find it. Let those voices wash over you. Let them show you what we were made for. Be present to what they’re offering—some mornings you’ll hear it clearly, some mornings you won’t.

But I’m also curious—what does this for you? What music, what art, what practices help your community stay grounded enough to act faithfully? Because I don’t think this is just about individual rituals. I think we need to be discovering together what forms us, what steadies us, what keeps us connected to who we are when everything around us is trying to tell us otherwise.

We need every one of us thinking as clearly as we can right now. We need every one of us remembering who we are—and remembering it together.

The darkness is real. But so is the light.

And, for me these days, sometimes the light comes through Bach.