I recently met up with a group of friends from theological college who were also ordained in the summer. We chatted about our experiences and how we felt about our new roles, and I was quite relieved to discover that most of us occasionally find ourselves pondering the question, “How did I end up here?!”, “What brought me to be doing this extraordinary thing with my life?”. Of course, for each of us the reasons are complex and diverse. But what was interesting to reflect upon is how, for each of us, music had somehow played its part. Some had sung in church choirs, some had been professional singers or instrumental performers, some had been drawn to go and listen to choral evensong in college chapels, one had even formed a Christian rock group! But on each journey of faith, music had played a more than incidental part.
So what is this link that appears to exist between music and growth in love and obedience to God? It’s something we all probably implicitly acknowledge, particularly in this Church where we value music, not simply for reasons of the pleasure it brings us but because somehow we feel it’s fundamental, an indispensable part of what makes worship divine worship. But if we examine it, what is the link between music and God? Well, I think there are two ways of viewing that link which, borrowing a very contemporary computing analogy, I want to call the “dial-up connection” and the “broadband connection”.
The dial-up view of music and spirituality is incredibly popular these days and its essentially come from the view of music presented by romanticism. Since the late eighteenth century, the romantic thinkers, writers and composers have sought to challenge some of the more inhuman aspects of modern society. The values of the Enlightenment – rationalism, empirical science, production and market exchange – may have brought much positive progress for humanity but we might also feel that they’ve had the effect of somewhat “flattening” what human life is about. For William Blake, for example, the “dark Satanic mills” of modernity represented a new enslavement of the human spirit and denied it the beauty, wisdom and love that are integral to who we really are. For him and many others (our own John Keats of course), the arts, therefore, became a critique as well as a complement to the rather more mechanical and rationalistic world of modernity that, through the industrial revolution had come to dominate people’s lives. And music of course is a central part of this, not merely through the romantic composers such as Schubert, Lizst and Wagner. Romanticism allows us to see music more generally as quite antithetical to the values of modernity – it is difficult to dissect or over-analyse and it has also come to be seen as a profoundly unproductive enterprise, not something that contributes to the vitality of the economy and hence all that we now constitutes the modern healthy nation. The musician and the composer around this time take on a less institutional and more bohemian character, penniless for their art and marginalised by the emerging market state who sees them as having little to offer. And I’m sure many here tonight who try and make a living out of music recognise that those values aren’t changing very fast in our own time.
So in the romantic view music reminds us still today that human beings aren’t just bundles of molecules who serve their purpose as cogs in the machine of the world before returning again to being a more disparate bundle of molecules. Music confronts us with the truth that there is something beyond all that. Through its beauty, its gratuitousness and its intensity, we are reminded of the depth of our human identity.
I agree with all of that. But where I am more concerned is how this romantic view has evolved into a postmodern view of spirituality which sees music as the individual’s means of “dialling up” into the realm of transcendence while remaining rather disconnected from a number of other things which used to view as quite important in relation to God. People have come to see music as a kind of fast-track to the spiritual while bypassing all those unpopular things like ethics, sociality and doctrine. Taking to the extreme the Romantics’ emphasis on subjectivity, modern spirituality thinks very little about what it means to live together as a body in the way that is fundamental to the New Testament understanding of God’s purposes for the world. And linked with this is the popular idea that “dialling up to God” via music can constitute a much more inclusive and gentle understanding of transcendence than all that divisive religious stuff that requires you to make truth claims about the world which might be incompatible with other people’s. Religion causes wars but spirituality softens people.
I’ll have to go into all the reasons why I disagree with that on another occasion but suffice it to say in this St Cecilia’s sermon that this is an impoverished view of the relationship between music and spirituality. In its postmodern assumption that there is little content to religious language and dogma beyond what is subjectively true for the individual, it requires music to be spiritual in order to fill the existential void. It instrumentalises music and puts a lot of pressures on it to accomplish something that the majority of churches, less fortunate that this one in its musical quality, will be unlikely to achieve. Sometimes with dial-up your modem lets you down.
A broadband connection is very different. It’s not one we have to “dial up” to tap into the internet, its on all the time, streaming into our computer at an extraordinary speed and volume. And this is something more of what Augustine is telling us about the relationship between God and humanity in music. For Augustine, making music is not a grasping after the transcendent, it is a response to transcendence in which the transcendent is involved, and if the parable of the sower teaches us anything it is that Christianity is about making a response. For Augustine, the kind of response that it is – this “new song” as he puts it – is fundamentally one of being overwhelmed by something. Like the broadband streaming into our computer, the new humanity who have received God’s grace are saturated with energy, activity and revelation. In this state of saturation, singing the new song is actually the only response we can make to the overwhelming gift of the Kingdom. Words are not enough, we lift our hearts joyfully in song. “How can I sing that majesty that angels do admire?” asks John Mason. How indeed? But perhaps we can sing it more easily than we can say it and, what Augustine would add is that God will reveal Godself to us within that joyful outpouring too.
Far more than the romantic understanding, this is the Biblical view of the relationship between music and the divine. We have the two most famous examples every week at evensong in the songs of Mary and Simeon – the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimitis. Mary is overwhelmed by the presence of God at work in her life, even in her body, and in the redemption of the world. She responds with this extraordinary song, not about ethereal spiritual themes, but about the realities of what God has done and is doing in the life of the world. It is a doctrinal, creedal song of the joy that is brought about by believing in the mighty acts of God. And Simeon in the Temple, after years of silent prayer and anticipation, is overwhelmed by the realisation of God’s promise that he should see the light of salvation brought to the whole world. Again, it is a creedal about the ultimate liberation that believing brings. Both Mary and Simeon sing because words are not enough to express what they are singing to God in their hearts.
Many people today find signing up to doctrine very difficult and would be far more comfortable with faith that is more of a dial-up connection. Many people tell me that they love the music in church but they find it difficult to say the creed. We can’t go into all the reasons and responses to that this evening, but the legitimate side of those concerns is perhaps that we have come to think of a creed as a set of empirical statements in the rationalist mode that romanticism sought to critique. It’s as if at the end of each line of the creed there should be a box in which you either put a tick or a cross. But the reality is that any statement about God will always be a crude approximation to the super-abundant truths that have been revealed. Perhaps music is a way in which we ourselves enter into the spaciousness, the overwhelming nature, of these truths. In the church where I grew up we sang the creed and I miss that because for me the story of the Christian faith is the song of the church, the song of our being overwhelmed by the mighty acts of God. The narrative of the creed is the new song that God has given to us as the gift of our redemption and as our joyful response. And in my experience, believing these truths is not an a constriction of my intellectual freedom or self-expression, but it is the song within which I have found my own voice to sing the story of my life. That is what I shared with those friends from theological college who have all in their own way been caught up in this new song of the new humanity – people, if I might say, who have switched from dial-up to broadband!
St Augustine also said that “Singing is what a lover does”. How often we forget that in drawing us into this story of Christian faith, God calls us before anything else, to be lovers – lovers of truth, lovers of justice, lovers of one another, lovers of the one who created and redeems us. True love is always overwhelming. Words can never fully express it. So thank be to God for music, because words are not enough to express what we are singing to God in our hearts.