Many of my readers know that, in one of the great cosmic ironies, I am principal organist for a Lutheran church. In my post, “Emptiness,” I wrote about the experience of playing the organ in an empty space, and the surprising way this emptiness prompted me to notice what I was doing. I wanted to return to that theme because there were people in the building this morning as I played, and it was both exhilarating and, if I’m honest, a little disorienting.

We seem to be coming out of the worst of the pandemic anxiety, and, while we have a long way to go before we declare victory, the leaders of the church decided to begin the process of reopening — with plenty of safety protocols in place. And so today — Palm Sunday, which was not a coincidence — we began having services with some actual people in the sanctuary.

Which means that, I played the organ once again in a space that felt much less still and empty.

Turning inward during the last year of playing in an empty space gave me a new appreciation of playing the organ. When you just look at the activity, it’s really quite wondrous. I don’t mean that to sound self-congratulatory. I’m not saying I’m the best organist around; I’m saying that many pursuits of many excellences come together in any given moment of organ-playing. There’s the history of all the composers who explored the possibilities of this instruction — which, like all human artifacts, has been a work in progress throughout its history, replete with innovations and transformations that are not generally visible from the impoverished perspective of now. But the more I learn about the history of this instrument, the more I’m impressed by the never-ending dialogue between technological innovation and composers’ creativity — a feedback loop of expanding excellences.

And then there’s me: My hands and feet do what it needed to play this instrument, but I’m the beneficiary of many teachers and listeners, and countless hours of playtime, to make my body a sort of instrument of the instrument. There’s a joke that passes around organists, purportedly started by no less an organist/composer than J. S. Bach. Someone asked him how he did the amazing things he did on the organ, and he reportedly quipped that the organ is actually rather easy: If you hit the right keys at the right time, the organ pretty much plays itself.

When you achieve a fairly high level of excellence at an activity, much of that activity does become automatic — in fact, it must, if you are to be any better than basic. The basic component skills of an activity must become “routinized” so the neuron firepower can concentrate on higher-level skills: Otherwise, you’d never have the computation power to pull off a fugue, or even a hymn. But that in itself involves a sort of “internal” feedback loop: I direct my body to engage in actions that become increasingly routinized so that I can direct my body to do higher level skills, so they can become routinized — you get the idea.

Playing for human beings is also a feedback loop of excellences. You may not have considered this, but it takes a certain kind of skill to listen and see and experience activities like organ-playing, painting, drama, dance, architecture — the list of arts is long. We tend to think that science and math require initiation before understanding; why wouldn’t the same apply to other complex human endeavors? Achieving the knowledge and skills to appreciate the excellencification of an activity is yet another arena for the pursuit of excellence. Think about this old joke about playing the piano: The trick to playing the piano, says the uninitiated, is to get your two hands to do different things at the same — just like using a knife and fork! If we’re uninitiated to the complexities of an activity, we are all apt to fall into the mistake of reducing playing the piano to using a knife and fork.

These reflections may seem random, but they all point to an important lesson about excellence, a lesson that was not lost on Aristotle. For beings like us, excellencification is necessarily a communal pursuit. Of course, individuals deserves praise for the commitment and work that goes into their pursuit of excellence, but praising individuals should not overshadow the interlocking network of contributors to any single moment of excellence.

All of which means that living your virtue is also paying your debts to those who make your excellences possible.