Every month, downtown New Bedford has an arts and culture night — AHA! Night — with concerts, art exhibits, lectures, and tours. For the past six months, our church has hosted a free classical music concert on AHA! Night. And tonight, Ann Sears, from the music faculty of Wheaton College, played Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

After the concert, Ann told me that the stillness was so profound that she was tempted to look up after the first variation to see whether everyone had walked out. I told her that was my experience of New Bedford audiences as well; that sometimes when I’m preaching everyone’s so quiet I wonder if anyone is actually listening; and I think maybe it’s a cultural combination of New England Yankee reserve and Portuguese politeness and reticence. Yes, said Ann, after the concert people came up to me and told me how moved they had been.

They had been moved. I greeted people as they walked out, and you could see it in their faces. The man who had shouted Brava! at the end of the concert had a transcendent smile. The hip young couple who had literally run in at the beginning of the concert, talking and laughing on their cell phones, went out smiling and she gave me a thumbs-up sign — Good, she mouthed (she was on her cell phone again). Everett, who’s a poet, stopped to talk with me for a while. Wow, said Everett, wow. I said to him, My head’s in a different place than when I came in.

I walked Ann out to her car. She said, It’s such a good thing to have free concert series like this. You know, I said, there were at least a couple of people there who didn’t have two nickels to rub together. She said, I thought so. And, I said, there was one woman who had just come back from chemotherapy today; this was very healing for her. Ann said, Yes. I said, You don’t get that kind of audience in a concert hall. Ann said, I know; I’d love to come back and play again.