The Spirituality of Sound

“Music confers upon human language addressed to God the appropriate silence and mystery required by prayer.  Music is the language of the soul made audible especially as music is the performative mode of the prayer and ritual engagement of a community” (Don Saliers) The author is saying that ordered sound shapes our thoughts into distinctive forms of affection and receptivity.

Let me illustrate.  For those of you who ever played jump rope—especially double dutch—you will recall that there was a narrative ritual to the game.  As you jumped you recited a verse. Ours was “Cinderella, dressed in yellow/Went upstairs to kiss her fellow/Made a mistake/And kissed a snake/How many doctors/Did it take/1, 2, 3, 4, 5. . . . “(with a speed up of the rope turning for the counting). As you analyze this you discover that children have to learn to accent the words just so.  The movements could become quite complex yet the rules remain simple: “don’t miss the skips, know the words, and do it all in a right spirit.” The words, the singing, and the movements were learned together. This image becomes a wonderful metaphor for the formative and expressive power of congregational participation in worship through established rituals.  When you fuse together ordered sound, and ordered movement the result is a communal sense of shared narrative.

I haven’t tried it for a while, but I would be willing to bet that my body still remembers and would react accordingly if I were to once again engage in the game of jump rope. The body remembers shared music making long after the mind may be dimmed. This is very evident to those of us who have participated in nursing home worship services.

“Music has the power to encode and convey memory with powerful associations.”  Ask those of us who lived through the civil rights movement and associate the song “We Shall Overcome” with courage, pain and suffering.  Because we live through time, music is probably the most natural medium for coming to terms with the relatively short time span we are all given.  Music helps us to transcend time and come to terms with it.  “Our lives, like music, have pitch, tempo, tone, release, dissonance, harmonic convergence, as we move through times of grief, delight, hope, anger, and joy. In short, music has this deep affinity to our spiritual temperament and desire” (Saliers).

It is no small thing when a congregation comes together for worship and engage in song for to do so effectively requires deep memory.  The act of singing praise, lament, thanksgiving, and intercession goes beyond the surface of words and musical score.  If the text and musical form are adequate to mystery, suffering, and to the deeper range of emotions then the soul becomes open to the transforming grace of the Spirit.

Since I have already quoted heavily from Don Saliers let me end with his words: “Music can thus express the verbally inexpressible.  For the tension between what we see and have not yet seen, what we hear and have not yet heard, is the pattern that a theological interpretation of life offers.  Music has the power to engage more than the sense…This means that ordered sound must make connection with attitudes, beliefs, and sustained ways of viewing the world…shaping and expressing that [which] leads to a theological interpretation” of the Christian life.