Music can transport and teach us in a way that other media cannot reach. Hymns can break open the Scriptures by sneaking into our hearts through a back door. They come with the perfect cocktail of emotion, nostalgia, and beauty – enough to anesthetize our ego and disarm our intellect.
When we are young, we sometimes write off Church music as being too cheesy or too pretentious, mostly because it becomes too familiar and we know the choir too well. Likewise with Scripture. We often can’t access the heart of the Scripture because we’ve heard it so many times and assume there can be nothing new there. Essentially, blah, blah, blah. Insert adolescent eyeroll.
In some ways, we well-weathered Catholics can be like too-cool teenagers. We assume that the Church Fathers can have nothing new to say about Scripture or that any given Scripture story has been picked clean of meaning, so it must be time to move on now.
Then later, perhaps, we are given the grace to hear with new ears. We hear a song pour out of a soul in love with God … and stop in our tracks. We’ve all felt it. That moment where we feel something crack in us, and the veil between us and heaven parts for a split second to reveal something that we couldn’t experience the moment before. Just as we can’t make a conversion happen in someone else, we can’t make ourselves feel love and devotion when we don’t. Piety is, after all, one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.
On her latest album, Born Again, Christian musician Jess Ray writes about her deepening conversion as a perpetual homecoming. In her song At Your Mercy, Ray takes the words of Jesus on the Cross, and anyone with ears to hear can’t help but experience them afresh: “Into your hands, I commit my spirit. Into your arms I surrender all. I am but the clay that you’re pressing into. I’m taking the shape of you. I couldn’t change this and I wouldn’t want to. I’m at your mercy.”
This letting go, being at God’s mercy, is maybe one of the most terrifying things for people. When you think of being at someone’s mercy, it can call to mind images of frightening vulnerability as if someone were holding you – legs dangling – over a cliff. But the image of us being the clay and God being the potter is gentler and more hopeful. Yet we might be more powerless in the latter scenario. As clay, we are an unproductive blob. Yet, in singing it, we don’t feel our wretchedness but only the hopefulness of someone willing our good, willing our beauty and flourishing.
What artist is there who doesn’t set out to create something beautiful? More than anyone, the potter wants to create something not only useful but also beautiful to behold. Could there be a more trustworthy artist than the Father who fashioned us out of nothing for no other reason than pure love and delight in our being?
In his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul calls us “God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them” (2:10). God made us for good. He didn’t make us to control us or to force our hand. He wanted to release us into the world as an artist releases a work of art, with pride and hopefulness. Why should we not trust him who sees us and “sees that we are very good”?
Sometimes, it takes ’90s church hymns or hip indie-folk Christians to drive the point home! In his letter to the Hebrews, St. Paul writes that God’s word is alive and active, so imagine the spiritual energy released when Scripture is internalized and sung from the depths of a converted heart. If singing is praying twice – as St. Augustine supposedly said – in music, then, we have stumbled upon a foolproof portal to heaven here on earth. St. Cecilia, patroness of music, pray for us!
