Johanesspassion in the Westerkerk

I am just back home from the Good Friday performance of Bach's Johanesspassion in the Westerkerk, the one with the unmarked grave of Rembrandt's. While listening to the music, I was wondering how it must be for Rembrandt's to hear it year in year out for centuries? Is it still moving or simply bothersome? Well, is lover and their son are also buried there so at least he has a good company.

It is also in this church where Queen Beatrix was married to her late ex-Nazi husband. Surely, Rembrandt's ghost was present at the wedding, what was his opinion of all the hoopla with state carriages and smoke bombs?

Then my attention switched to the austere interior of the church - it was purposely built for Protestant services, so there's bare minimum of decoration, what makes it nonetheless imposing. The majority of the audience - or rather congregation as it was in fact a service, not a secular music performance - were Dutch Protestant, I could spot them by their dull tousled hair and studiedly worn-out clothes. It has been more than 30 years since God officially left Holland, but the mentality conditioned by centuries of Calvinism still persists. In the peculiar lighting of the church, their faces looked different than in the street - as if the importance and gravity of the occasion had cast a different light on them.

And then I remembered that Anne Frank's house is right behind the church and most likely she was betrayed to the Nazis by one (or a few) of the Westerkerk's parishioners, the same people who must have many times attended that very Easter service. How deaf and hardened your heart must be that time after time it stays closed to the main message of the Gospel even further reinforced by Bach's genius! (Actually, I read that the real culprit is our "compartmentalised conscience".)

And still then my mind wandered on again to the Homomonument next to the church, a memorial for men and women persecuted for their homosexuality. For me, it's a glimpse of hope for the goodness of human nature, a proof that the humankind is still evolving.

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This piece never fails to get me totally undone: Bach - Johannes Passion - 1. Coro - Herr Unser Herrscher: