*2.6. Music and Prayer*

The embodied characteristic of music is also present when prayer is emphasized. Augustine, if he is responsible for "The one who sings prays twice," pointed there to the embodied deepening. So did John Calvin, who, like Luther, thought that singing was "peculiarly created to tell and proclaim the praise of God," but saw its chief use tied to public prayer in the assembly of believers [18]. Following Paul in Colossians 3:16, he regarded music as mutually edifying. When tempered to a fitting gravity he perceived it not only as lending "dignity and grace to sacred actions," but as having "the greatest value in kindling our hearts to a true zeal and eagerness to pray" [19]. John and Charles Wesley pointed in the same direction. As Carlton Young says, they "paraphrased the religion of the heart into song" [20]. S T Kimbrough identified "this union of music and poetry as Lyrical theology'" [20].

#### *2.7. Memory, Health, Emotion, and Time*

Memory, as Linman says, links texts and tunes. A certain melody recalls a certain text because the two were associated at some point, perhaps a critical one, in a person's life. Melodies also relate for many faithful churchgoers to Christian themes as in the church's liturgical year—some to Advent, others to Christmas (Christmas carols are the most obvious example), or Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost.

Music bears a relation to memory in other ways. When members of a church visit an old person who can hardly speak, they may be surprised if they start a hymn and find the person singing it with them as if wholeness were suddenly restored [21]. Health is involved here ([3], pp. 9–12), not only for individuals but also for assemblies of believers [22]. Hearty congregational song is a sign of a healthy people. So is healthy emotion, to which music also relates.

The emotional piece is a tricky one because virtually every musical venue in our period ties music almost exclusively to emotion, often in superficial ways. The two are related, as Leonard Meyer has shown [23], or, as Don and Emily Saliers say,

Because music is so close to human emotion and feeling, and, because faith is a matter of both the head and the heart, it leads us again and again into the realm of spirituality ([24], p. 17).

Meyer's and Saliers' insights need thoughtful consideration. (Their thought is more careful than much pervasive superficial talk about this topic.) However, one of the greatest twentieth century composers, Igor Stravinsky, also deserves thoughtful consideration and gives us pause about the unquestioned presupposition that links music with emotions. Stravinsky said that music was "essentially powerless to *express* anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, *etc*. . . ." ([25], p. 53). He thought it was a "misunderstanding" to search in music for "something that is not there" ([25], p. 162) and that looking in music for "emotions such as joy, grief, sadness, an image of nature, a subject for daydreams, or—still better—oblivion from 'everyday life'" is searching for "a drug—'dope'" ([25], pp. 162–63). For Stravinsky music's ability to express something is "an illusion and not reality" ([25], p. 53). His central point has to do with humanity and time:

The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between *man* and *time*. To be put into practice, its indispensable and single requirement is construction. Construction once completed, this order has been attained, and there is nothing more to be said ([25], p. 54).

What we see here are two spiritualities in relation to music. One emphasizes emotion; the other emphasizes music's relationship to time. This becomes more obvious when music without text is considered.

In the centuries following the New Testament, the church excised musical instruments from its assemblies because of instruments' association with idolatry and immorality [26–28]. That decision still stands in the Eastern Orthodox Church and points to the centrality of texted music sung by congregations and choirs. In the Western Church, the decision stood for the first millennium. After that organs and then other instruments were welcomed. Reformed communities in the sixteenth century and for several centuries thereafter reinstated the restriction, adding choirs to it. They largely have now embraced instruments and choirs with most of the Western church.

What then is happening when instruments play music without voices singing texts? If the music is built on a tune associated with a text like a hymn, the text will be referenced in the memory bank. If there are or are not such associations, whether music involves texts or not, it relates to time and to the time of worship as I explain in *The Heart of the Matter*.

. . . music spins itself out in time just the same as worship does. Music accompanies processions [as] the processional nature of the pilgrim people on the move takes place in time. Music articulates that time. . . Beyond that music articulates worship itself [in the] pace and shape and flow of a service [29].

That is, music articulates worship in relation to human life in time. That is why we sing the Psalms, which are about all of life's heights and depths before God. As Don and Emily Saliers comment,

Music is the temporal art par excellence . . . music is by its very nature ephemeral. It sounds within a *now* that vanishes. Our present moments are fleeting. Yet music mysteriously connects the time past with the *now* and with what is to come . . . The very flow of life is given back to us in music that can touch that deeply in our bodies and souls ([24], p. 54).

### *2.8. Community*

The historic sense of Christianity about spirituality and music is communal. The Christian understanding of God is Trinitarian. God's being as three-in-one is communal: "Father, Son, and Spirit are persons whose communal life is God," says Robert Jenson ([30], p. 226). In his view "God is *beauty. . . .* And the harmony of discourse taken for itself is its beauty; more precisely, its music" ([30], p. 234). God, says Jenson, "is a great *fugue*. There is nothing so capacious as a fugue" ([30], p. 236). That is, God is "roomy," and can decide to make room for others. "The opening of that room is the act of creation" ([30], p. 226) in which human beings are

taken into the triune singing . . . as the proclamation and prayer of the church regularly bursts into beauty. . . A congregation singing a hymn of praise to the Father is doubling the Son's praise, and the surge of rhythm and melody is the surge of the Spirit's glorification of the Father and the Son ([30], p. 235).

This community of God's very being which expresses itself in creation yields the community of the body of Christ that sings together. Individuals and their songs always exist in connection with the whole. As Bouyer points out, even the anchoritic monk needs and gravitates to the community ([7], pp. 207–10). The same is true for any solitary Christians, whether monks or not. Spirituality can clearly be separated from its Christian sense as among those who say, "I'm spiritual but not Christian [or] not religious [or] not related to a religious institution," but this is a civil religious or "common syncretistic" [31] instinct and not a Christian one.

As to the music that an individual or the community uses, its essence is what living believers sing. Something recorded and therefore frozen is not living. It is a dead artifact. Its use by individuals or even groups as they work or run or play may have a certain spirituality attached to it, but the essence of Christian song is alive with all the imperfections of life lived in time. In addition, the music that the individual or the community uses cannot be dependent on technology where, to quote Joseph Swain, microphone and amplifier have become "weapons of mass destruction"([32], p. 57). Worship is primal and requires living people who sing, not the "deadening" of "forced spontaneity" ([32], p. 166).

Community is also related to Linman's realization that various styles of music can lead us beyond our parochial times and places to appreciate the "rich tapestry [of the] human family" ([13], p. 66). For this leading to work out with constructive integrity, longstanding parochial expressions cannot be denied. That denial brings with it a denial of one's own identity. The song of the believers' time and place has to be affirmed along with the song of the other believers' times and places into a new song that brings the other two new songs in Christ ("new" here does not mean literally new, though it may encompass that meaning [33]) into collaborative interplay, just as neighborly relationships always do.

The danger of "spiritual tourism" has to be acknowledged and avoided in this encounter. Christopher Pramuk says, "Rather than probing the roots of our own spiritual or cultural malaise," using other spiritualities and their outcomes can too easily become a "self-centered way to retrieve something of our own lost innocence" in which "we as outsiders control or selectively plunder" another culture without inviting "our transformation and conversion" [34].

#### *2.9. Beyond Human Expression*

The embodying character, which paradoxically in Bouyer's words "finds its goal in what is beyond expression," moves from human sound to beyond the human trajectory. George Herbert says of church music,

But if I travel in your company, You know the way to heavens doore [35].

And Joseph Gelineau says that "in the celebration of the church's worship the point at issue is not 'music-making,' but entry by means of the art of music, into the salvific mystery" which "only by its beauty can signify the sacred" ([36], p. 10). Beauty, as with Jenson, enters this conversation too. It is a characteristic of the documents on which Gelineau relies, among them the *motu proprio*, *Tra le sollecitudini*, of Pius X in 1903. Pius, like Calvin, says music is for the glory of God and the edification of the faithful, but adds this:

It helps to increase the beauty and splendor of the ceremonies of the Church, and since its chief duty is to clothe the liturgical text, which is presented to the understanding of the faithful, with suitable melody, its object is to make the text more efficacious, so that the faithful through this means may be more roused to devotion, and better disposed to gather to themselves the fruits of grace which come from the celebration of the sacred mysteries [37].

When Francis Williamson sought to understand such descriptions, he analyzed them like this.

The phrase, "to enhance the word" [clothe the liturgical text], is not to interpret the word in a meaningful sense so much as to clothe the word with beauty and sacral character. Ultimately even this word becomes mute because it is secondary to the act of sacrifice and communion. The climax of adoration in the Presence is silence, symbolic of final peace [38].

Or, in Gelineau's words,

Music can never reveal to us the whole of its mystery until it has become silent and no more sounds reach our ears. For the praise of heaven, pure love, will have no further need for the art of sound ([36], p. 27).

Not all Christians see music moving to silent music as pure love or peace. I heard Walter Bouman on more than one occasion say that in the praise of heaven there will be no need for preaching, but there will be song. Christopher Page suggests that Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Saint John would concur, that while

the baser functions of the body will pass away in the blessed state, the higher ones will remain. . . In contrast to labour with the hands, eating, drinking, and the exertions of coitus, the use of the voice is one of the principal continuities between the states of bodily life on either side of the grave ([9], p. 49).
