I was struck by the wise words of a character in a Film I watched the other day. He said : “Music is wonderful because you don’t have to think about it.” You can see and her me give this Homily on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wveSZqOqAo
One of our problems is that when we pray, we try to think about God or to talk with God using words or thoughts. Why is this a problem? Because Jesus teaches us not just to think about him, but actually to “Abide” in him – to live in him - (John 15:4-10); and of course in our Gospel today (John 14:1-12) he has already taught us that he is in God and God is in him. The question that follows from this is how to understand this idea of not just worshipping God, not just praying to God, as somehow separate from us (which he is) but being more aware that we are also within God in a way that eludes thought. I was struck therefore by words from our 2nd Reading (1 Peter 2:4-9 about what we are called to be and to do as Christians. Yes, we are “A chosen race, a royal priesthood” – wonderful words to uplift us - but notice what follows? We are “A people set apart to sing the praises of God.” So, the heart of prayer is not thought but song, not words but music.
Now this doesn’t mean we have to be very musical. Some of us are good at singing whilst others might well sing in their hearts, or in the shower, but are not too keen on other people hearing them! However we sing, the truth is that music works in us in strange and different ways. We hear a tune, and before we know it, it is playing along in our heads. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I even wake up and find that tune still there humming away, endlessly repeating itself, or another one doing the same thing that has somehow popped up from nowhere. So, music doesn’t stay outside us to be examined or thought about. Music flows in and out of us. Even musicologists who do think about it, would be the first to say how wonderful it is that music is so much more than notes on the page or sounds in the air.
The other day someone said to me that he preferred a quiet more meditative Mass rather than a musical one. I do understand this, because we have been taught to think that prayer requires quietness rather than noise. It was certainly the way I used to think. My idea was that if there was singing in church, then I should be allowed to join in. The idea that I could pray by listening to the music and letting it flow into me, as well as by joining in, was never explained to me. Indeed, even when we do join in, we should realise that much of the prayer is not really in us singing, but in the music singing in us. That’s why I always say to people to sing along even if they cannot read the words. Orthodox Christians do not have this difficulty, because they are used to praying by listening to and absorbing the Liturgy being sung; and indeed I believe that Orthodox priests sing the Liturgy even if no-one is there, which few Catholic priests, except me, would think of doing! I was also very sad to hear of people who had missed the singing during the Covid Lockdown when they were not allowed in Church. “But why didn’t you just sing the Hymns at home?’ I asked; and discovered it had never occurred to them. Yet it’s not so long ago that singing hymns at home was quite normal. My grandmother used to sing Hymns while she did the ironing back in the 1920’s!
We need to remember that one of the main ways Jesus and his disciples would have prayed would have been to sing the Psalms – their Hymns – that they knew by heart. Only once is this mentioned, but it’s at a crucial moment; for it is just at the end of the Last Supper, and Matthew and Mark then record (26:30 & 14:26) that “When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.” It was of course actually something they did regularly, as did all the first Christians when they met for prayer. That’s why St Paul writes to the Colossians to carry on this tradition. He writes to them and to us: (3:16) “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom.” And how are we meant to do that? By “Singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”
But music is not just a very important way in which we communicate with God, a way that we must not neglect when we pray; but it also teaches us a little of what God is like. Looked at logically, in the world of thoughts and words, there is no way in which the fully and completely human Jesus can be so in union with God the Father that he can make the extraordinary statement that “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” But notice that Jesus insists on this, for he says of this that “You must believe me,” showing us how very important this idea is. It is of course from sayings like this, that it is made clear that Jesus is not just a prophet who shows us God, who brings us to God, but God himself choosing to be present to us in a fully human person. And it is because of this that Jesus can teach us that through being one with him, we are drawn into union with God, or to go even further, as it says in 1 Peter, (1:4) through his promises we “Become partakers of the divine nature.”
So, although there is a way in which prayer is addressed to God who is separate from us, a God to whom we can speak with words or thoughts, prayer is also simply a being with God, of being aware that he is in us and we are in him, at a level deep beyond words. That’s why I think that God is like music in the way it is both separate from us as something to listen to, but also becomes something that lives within us. Perhaps this is because Music, we are told, works on the right side of our brain, the part that is visual and intuitive, and surely we must apply this to God as well, to recognise that we need to meet God with both sides of our brain. I am reminded of the old man with very little learning who spent hours sitting and praying in church. When he was asked what he was doing, what words he was using, he said “Well I just look at him and he just looks at me.”
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