On the other hand, I remember countless hymns, every word of every verse of some of them. That probably has something to do with singing them over and over, whereas I only hear the homily once. However, I am convinced that there is more to it than that.

Wedding music to words imparts a power that lyrics are hard put to achieve on their own. This is a power:

• that encourages us, often without our realizing it, to let our guard down;
• that has the potential to touch us when nothing else can;
• and that can lead us to a holy silence.

Letting down our guard

There is something about music that encourages vulnerability — either to good (see “Thin Places”) or to evil.

As for the latter, the Anti-Defamation League says that “hate music has been instrumental in the formation of a white supremacist subculture….Hate music helps bring haters together into a shared community.”

Are hymns dangerous? They can be, if they come out of a theology that corrupts the gospel; but it is my impression that hymns may be theologically safer on average than sermons or homilies. For one thing, hymns are subjected to a sifting over the decades and the centuries that most homilies don’t have the opportunity to undergo. With hymns, the weevils don’t make it through the sieve of time, because they do not resonate as truth deep in the hearts of the faithful. (There are wily exceptions, of course, which do manage to slip through.)

Songs as recent as the late twentieth century are being submitted to this triage. Some of the worst have already been sifted out of the repertory. Thankfully, we now have fewer of the let’s-all-believe-because-the-sun-is-shining 1970s type of song. (What about when the sun is not shining, when we are laid in the dust by sorrow or pain?) And no longer do we hear the parish folk group singing “Puff the Magic Dragon” at Mass. (Yes, indeed, I really have heard this!)

It remains to be seen what will endure from today’s praise songs or Christian rock music.

Sometimes music can reach us when nothing else can.

Years ago, when I was preparing for a program called “Hymn-Singing and the Mystical Pilgrimage,” I ran across the following personal reflection on a web page. (I wish I could give proper credit, but the site no longer exists, and the entry was anonymous.)

In the early hours of my ordeal with brain cancer, waves of pain and large doses of morphine scrambled my thoughts. At the time, the most gracious and well meaning message from those wise and loving counselors could not penetrate the fog. Nevertheless, the following hymn is what the Spirit brought to mind and the words of which are still my comfort and strength.

The hymn was “My Jesus I Love Thee.”

And paradoxically, for some people music can lead into silence. It can even help create a space within that is quieter than no sound at all, a space where we can more easily enter into the loving silence of God.

On that note, and after many words, I will myself be silent.

I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praise to my God while I have being.
May my meditation be pleasing to him,
for I rejoice in the Lord.
(Psalm 104:33-34)

The young woman speaking was a good friend of mine from graduate school. She was intelligent and very gifted, working on her PhD and singing in a well-known choral group. Not only had she not had a “religious experience,” but, as I already knew, she didn’t believe in God.

She went on, “The closest I’ve come to a religious experience was singing Brahms’ German Requiem. I could imagine it might be something like that.”

If I had known then what I know now about the experience of God, I would have said to her that what she was recounting was probably indeed a religious experience. She just had not recognized it. In fact, we often don’t recognize the divine presence. Sometimes we go blithely on our way, never knowing that the Holy has touched us. Other times we may sense that something important has happened, or we may glimpse the mysterious depth of the moment, without being able to acknowledge that God was there.

The Celtic tradition speaks of “thin places,” where the veil between the temporal world and the eternal seems permeable, or “thin.” These have been called thresholds, or liminal places.

While the term properly refers to actual geographical places that are “thin,” I don’t believe we have to travel to Ireland or Rome or Jerusalem to find them. I suspect there are thin places that come into being when a location is infused with prayer. For example, I can’t count the number of times people have mentioned the peace they feel when they come through the front door of our Cenacles. It is not that the Cenacle community is any more holy than other people, but rather that the house has been steeped in prayer and worship — not only the prayer of the Cenacle Sisters, but also the prayer of our retreatants and guests.

Just so, the prayer corner in your living room, the chair in your bedroom, or the bench in the backyard where you pray regularly may lose its quality of ordinariness. What was previously an unexceptional spot may become a sort of thin place, bringing you more easily into awareness of the divine than most other places. Sitting there becomes a daily pilgrimage from the periphery of life toward the center.

Still other thin places, I believe, are not geographical at all, but are hosted within us. For me, music can open up a thin place. This is not automatic, of course, because any sense of God’s nearness is gift. But there seems to be something about music which carries within itself the possibility of liminality for people who are attentive. Even more remarkable, music can at times surprise into awareness those who would not normally be looking for the divine.

This gift of a threshold experience may have been what my friend was experiencing through the music of Brahms. She who did not believe in God tasted the reality of the divine, even though she could not name the reality she knew then as God.

My mother also liked to sing, but was not what you would call a Marilyn Horne. She barely opened her mouth in church, knowing that sometimes she wasn’t quite on pitch. In the bosom of the family, though, you never knew when she would burst into song.

On the highway in the family car—usually in the middle of nowhere and without any provocation that we could discern—there would issue from the front passenger seat the first words of “Dwelling in Beulah Land”:

“Far away the noise of strife upon my ears is falling.”

The volume would increase until she reached the chorus–by now joined by the rest of the family, my father, my brother, and me:

I’m living on the mountain,
underneath a cloudless sky.
I’m drinking at the fountain
that never shall run dry.
O yes! I’m feasting on the manna
from a bountiful supply,
For I am dwelling in Beulah Land!
(C. Austin Miles, 1911)

I don’t recall ever getting beyond the first verse. Indeed, I don’t think we knew the words beyond the first verse; and I don’t know where my mother learned even the first verse of a gospel-style song like “Dwelling in Beulah Land.” Our Presbyterian Church tended to stick to the more classical chorales and other “dignified” hymns (although at Sunday evening worship we could and did slip into more devotional songs); and the church of her childhood, in an effort to remain faithful to the tradition of the Bible, sang only psalms.

At home, too, Mama’s musical enthusiasms were irrepressible. She sometimes accompanied housework with operatic-style recitatives describing what was going on in the house at the moment. One day the mailman happened to step onto the front porch just as she launched into a melody delivered both fortissimo and appassionato. He managed to drop the mail in the slot before beating a hasty retreat down the steps as if pursued by who knows what unseen visitant.

Cantare amantis est, said Augustine. Singing belongs to the lover. My mother was a lover: of her family, of her God—and of laughter. She delighted in retelling the story of the startled postman stumbling from the porch.

Although I am not convinced that everyone who sings is filled with love, I do believe that when we sing, we tend to make ourselves vulnerable, taking a risk, as does anyone who loves. There is a kind of letting go in singing, whether we are divas like Marilyn Horne, or congregational singers, or those who sing only in the shower. Even the most staid adult becomes a bit childlike by opening his or her mouth in song.

But most people probably do not realize how powerful music is. I think that singing — or even just listening to music—can make us more reachable, for good or for ill. The Anti-Defamation League says that hate music:

“…is one of the most significant ways neo-Nazis attempt to attract young people into their movement; this source of recruitment is possibly the most important factor in the ability of neo-Nazi groups to expand or even maintain their membership.”

So even our musical letting go requires a bit of caution. Does the music we choose open us to goodness and love or to something less? The question is important because, after all, we are created for love. In this light I like to pray with St. Thomas Aquinas the beautiful prayer of the second verse of “Panis angelicus”:

Duc nos quo tendimus,
ad lucem quam inhabitas.

Lead us, we sing, where we are inclined to go anyhow, to the light wherein you dwell. Anything else would be such a serious violation of who we are and who we are made to be that an eagle might as well try to become a beetle.

We are made for love; and singing belongs to the lover.

Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.
And be thankful.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly;
teach and admonish one another in all wisdom;
and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.

(Colossians 3:14-16)