c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) Surprises, the dictionary tells us, may cause us “to feel wonder or astonishment.” That kind of surprise is hard to come by. It something like finding a firefly amid the fireworks, especially in a culture that has come to value sensation far more than genuine surprise.

That everything must be bigger, louder or more vulgar just to get our attention is attested to by the summer movies that are designed for the gross-out generation. These feature belches and other mainstays of adolescent humor, as many commercials on television also do. A generation from now some anthropologist will get a doctorate by studying the role of the urinal in male socialization. In such low-grade humor, there are never any surprises.

On the very same passing-through-puberty plane are films that call themselves adult entertainment. There are no surprises in any of these, either. Pseudo-adults do not watch them to be surprised or to feel wonder or astonishment.

By its nature, a surprise of any kind goes against the grain of a culture that exalts personal choice as a value in itself, irrespective of what is being chosen. Anybody who makes a “right” out every whim of his individual choice can only be upset by even a minor surprise springing at him from the side of the road to interfere with his highly private journey.

What else would explain “road rage” except the explosive conflict of individual choices about lane, speed and right of way _ powerful symbols of the isolation of self and desire that results from overemphasis on one’s own choice? The dictionary terms this kind of surprise “an unexpected encounter” in the sense that encounter means “to meet an enemy.”

And, as I have written before, the iron-clad act of individual choice rules out experiencing surprise as “to be seized,” as its origin in the Middle English “surprysen” signifies. Putting our choice first may harden us to being chosen, as we are whenever we are “taken,” as we say, by the light in autumn woods, the innocence that lifts off newborns, or a book or painting that opens our lives by giving us a whole new way of seeing things.

Many good people experience pain and frustration as they try to make foolproof individual choices about the very thing that must surprise us if it is to enter our lives at all, love itself. For in love we are surprised, we are taken, we are swept away. We abandon our devotion to the gods of personal choice once love chooses us. The first lesson of real love, of course, is that we cannot choose it at all, that it chooses us in a sweet and irresistible surprise.

Once we understand that we cannot control the important experiences of living, we encounter surprises that nourish the soul and gladden the heart in the course of everyday living.

Who would expect, for example, to find it in the heart of big, anonymous cities, in the very crowds whose faces seem set against any challenge, in these fast-moving groups of commuters, each of whom, the stultifying popular legend tells us, is thinking of nothing but dot-coms and stock options and millions of dollars fluttering down on them.

Yet follow these groups, as The New York Times did, and find people who, by “chance meetings,” discover each other’s love for chamber music. They gather, these people who surprised each other, to play, transforming the soaring gray condominium buildings from within over the scores of Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven. The lonely city surprises us with the beautiful sounds of musical companions doing something that they love together.

The Times tells us that “the amateur classical music world … extends far beyond chamber groups. There are orchestras: the Doctors’ Orchestra, the Lawyers’ Orchestra, the Brooklyn Heights Orchestra and ensembles at the Bloomingdale School of Music and 92nd Street Y.”

Manhattan has been seized by an unreported epidemic of fine music that does wonders for the soul and does not harm the body. Indeed, great music harmonizes and integrates the dimensions of personality. It is one of the side-effect surprises of art.

Just as surprising are the comments of one of the players.

“Chamber music,” one player is quoted as saying, “by its very nature is a kind of analogue for community. It requires cooperation, it requires empathy, it requires listening to other people, all the things you have to do in society to make society run successfully.”

Perhaps New York has become safer because of its secret musicians as much as its public police. That is a midsummer surprise that is good for everyone’s soul.

DEA END KENNEDY