Listening for God

I am returning to blogging once again. I see that my last return was in November of 2017 and the Augustine passage at the end of today's post was on my mind then, too.

This past weekend, I had the wonderful privilege of sharing in several events at Forest Hills Presbyterian Church in Martinsville, VA as part of the McAllister Lecture Series. I shared the meditation below during the church's Sunday morning worship as a summary of our time together and as a way of supporting music in its speaking.  

Listening for God
McAllister Lecture Series
Forest Hills Presbyterian Church
September 30, 2018

From Jubal in Genesis to Revelation’s worship at the heavenly throne, music is pictured as a cornerstone of civilization and an expression to God in both time and eternity. We sense the profundity of its presence in the psalmist’s exhortation to make music with all the resources of Creation and we feel its grounding gravity in Jesus' singing a psalm when utmost evil was afoot.

The musical impulse seems to come from a place in the soul where expression is before or beyond words. Music sounds in the body and stirs the emotions. It restores us to mindfulness by changing the mood of the present, engaging memories of the past, and focusing on the flow of time to the future.

Music empowers us to claim passing moments as more than ordinary and to mark them as full of meaning. It lifts us from the level to which we’ve fallen and raises our gaze to the transcendent.

Its beauty addresses us with grace. As Aquinas, the great doctor of the Church puts it, beauty pleases us merely by being perceived. Beauty, he says, is a thing of wholeness and harmony and radiance. I believe that radiance consists of the creative image of God refracting from one person to another through works of art.

Such radiance lights the way to communion with God. As the Biblical authors attest, beauty accompanies the coming of the gospel. There is beauty in holiness. There is beauty in lives lived quietly and with gentleness. And the humble are beautified with salvation.

How does this come to pass? And more specifically, how does the art of music function so exquisitely in our spirituality as believers?

I think it does so by giving form to spiritual ideals, by putting the truths we profess into action, by bringing out into the world the loveliness that was not meant to stay only in our hearts and minds.

Giving form to the spiritual: This is what our God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, did by calling into being all that is good.

Putting truth into action: This is what Jesus accomplished by dying and rising as one of us.

Bringing loveliness into the world: This is the work of the Holy Ghost who comforts and guides the Church.

In each instance, aspects of the physical realm have been and are being brought into alignment with the spiritual; similarly, in our human processes of creating, we labor over the materials of art to give concrete expression to our experiences of faith.

To conclude this meditation, I share this excerpt in which Augustine delves deeply into the transformative power of this expressive link between the physical and the spiritual. He writes:

[We must share in] the mystical meaning of [the psalmist’s instruments]. On the timbrel leather is stretched, on the psaltery gut is stretched; on either instrument the flesh is crucified . . . This psaltery or timbrel He wishes you to take up who loves a new song, who teaches you, saying, “Whosoever wills to be My disciple, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” Let him not set down his psaltery, let him not set down his timbrel, let him stretch himself out on the wood . . . [for] the more the strings are stretched, the more sharply do they sound. The Apostle Paul then, in order that his psaltery might sound sharply, what did he say? [I am] “Stretching forth unto those things which are ahead . . .” 
He stretched himself: Christ touched him; 
and the sweetness of truth sounded.