The Musical Path To God
It was a warm August night under the stars. The lead guitar sent a piercing, melodic riff skittering out across the crowd. We leapt to our feet, whooping, shouting. We knew this song. Ready to sing! Suddenly thousands of people were belting out a song that overwhelmed the sound of the band. Everyone was swaying, arms waving, exulting. Perfect strangers clapped each other on the back.
As the song wound down, I looked at the scene around me. This was a communal religious experience, what the ancient Greeks called ekstasis. Most everyone is embarrassed to sing in public, yet in this moment everyone was Freddie Mercury. We didn’t care what people thought of us. The boundaries we carefully tend between ourselves and others, between ourselves and the natural world under the stars, dissolved slightly. It was clearly an ecstatic experience.
“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” Oliver Sacks wrote in seeking to understand music’s unique power over us. Even hardened atheists, like Kurt Vonnegut knelt before a melody. “The only proof you need that there is a God,” he wrote, “is music.” And the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the one who famously declared that “God is dead,” had second thoughts in the presence of a song. “God has given us music,” he allowed, “so that above all it can lead us upwards.”
In other words, when exquisite music is washing over you, it’s almost impossible not to know the presence of God. Therein lies perhaps the easiest path to the divine. You know the real presence of God the same way you know the real presence of music. It is “completely abstract,” as Sacks notes, and yet music is intensely physical, sound waves literally pulsing and penetrating our flesh (to sit in the front rows of a concert is to be pummeled, ravished). I see in this power—both invisible and physical in the same instant—a manifestation of the eternal. It’s that easy to know God—it’s just how we know music. Don’t try to make it any harder than that.
As the poet Rumi wrote:
We have fallen into the place
Where everything is music . . .
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
If you’d like to read the whole poem, you can find it here.
Wow. Maybe this is why the hymns at church bring me to tears…
So you’re one of those teary hymn-singers. Me too. After nearly 75 years I keep thinking I’ll get over it.
Wonderful David; thank you!
Yes, indeed! If I ever doubt a loving God, music is proof. And you’re right, it is physical. I feel the vibration. I become one with the music as it repeats in me.
A minority opinion, from C S Lewis: “What we want to know is whether untrained communal singing is in itself any more edifying than other popular pleasures. And of this I, for one, am still wholly unconvinced. I have often heard this noise; I have sometimes contributed to it. I do not yet seem to have found any evidence that the physical and emotional exhilaration which it produces is necessarily, or often, of any religious relevance.” Hmm…..
Ha! One more reason to thank Mr Lewis for all he contributed to the spiritual quest…and to forgive him for being rather professorial and in-his-head. Classic C of E intellectual. But—with so many other gifts to offer.
For Mr. Lewis: Music is in the ear of the be-hearer?
Yes! And I think Clive Staples has a tin ear. If choral or communal singing is “noise” to you, you don’t get it. 😊
I’m quite certain Lewis was not using ‘noise’ as a pejorative; the word appears often in the Psalms: Ps.33:3, 98:6, 100:1 immediately come to mind. Far from having a tin ear, Lewis loved music and was an avid Wagnerite with a strong affinity for Sibelius. I think CSL is on to something, however. As a church music director for 48 years (now retired) I often observed that the euphoria of communal singing didn’t carry folks beyond the parish hall. Augustine warned us about the emotional pull of music and its danger, and that is every bit as true today. Music in the church must teach, not seduce; emotion is evanescent and can easily become an idol. Now you’re probably going to tell me I’m too much in my head. “Tant pis” as the French say.
Thanks for this reply, Kevin—I respect your years in music, and I think I too easily passed off CSL as a tin ear. As you can probably tell, Lewis is not my favorite theologian, though some of his work is truly remarkable. There is a way to God through the mind, the intellect, and Lewis is a great guide on that path. But that isn’t the only route to heaven, and it’s not the way of, say, John of the Cross, or Therese of Liseux, or Thomas Merton, or Richard Rohr—to name a few of my soul guides. So—that’s where I’m coming from. I don’t imagine that that path is the only one or the “best” one, so I appreciate hearing other perspectives. Thank you.
I was just hearing yesterday that the gtatuitous beauty in nature, like the peacock’s plume, is proof of a loving Creator. You make a compelling case that music, too, is similarly gratuitous. It isn’t necessary for survival, so it can’t be argued that it evolved to keep the species alive. Like beauty, it is purely for our enjoyment. It’s the lovingkindness of our Creator God. Thanks to you, I’m starting my day with thanksgiving for such a gift and such a God.
It may be that music serves no purpose, per se, and in evolutionary terms does nothing to preserve the species. But something that binds groups together like nothing else, something that calms the mind and soul—that may well have quite practical affects, even if its exquisite beauty seems to have no “use.” Thanks for making us think on this.