A Homily About Music

I gave this homily at the Winter 2011 "Jam Out" Lock-In:

I love music. I love all kinds of music. I love to talk music, ya know? To critique songs and artists. I LOVE live music. I'll attend almost any live show you invite me to. The process of making music fascinates me. Probably has something to do with the fact that I have NO musical talent whatsoever. But for whatever reason, making music might as well be doing magic, to me. Or its like when your favorite song comes on the radio, and you have the urge to push your ear against the speaker because it sounds like right on the other side of it is another world, and you are listening, into it. And then that moment comes with that certain line or note and you're lifted outside of yourself. Its almost like music itself is trying to tell us something. There's a film called THE SOLOIST and its about this schizophrenic homeless man who is also a virtuoso cellist and violinist. Its a true story, I've seen interviews with the real guy. Most of what he says is incoherent, because that is what happens when schizophrenia gets real bad and goes untreated, it becomes hard even to string words together. But when he taks about music, he says some beautiful and profound things. He talks about it like its alive, like its a person. One of things he says that I love is "Music is trying to tell us that life isn't that bad". I think thats pretty close to the truth. You see, musicians communicate the content of experience, what its like to experience something. I'd have a hard time writing a formula which would let you understand 'what its like' for me to see a beautiful sunset or what its like when I fall in love, but a musician using sound and word can communicate these things. Throughout human history the fullest range of human experience has been explored in song. And the amazing thing is, over and over again, at the foundation of almost every human encounter of the world is found something profound, or true, or fun, or funny, and almost always beautiful. In short, something good. And if the human encounters with the world can all be reduced to something good, then in a very real sense music is telling us that life is good, and can be embraced.

There is a tradition in Christianity of self-denial, of...puritanism, of removing oneself from the world. Now, I think this tradition is important, I think it has something to teach us, I don't want to give up on it fully. But there is another tradition, exemplified by the John passage, that tells us that Jesus came to give us life abundantly. It tells us that in Christ's death God is telling us that we can step out onto the adventure of life with reckless abandon, knowing that indeed we will make mistakes, and that horrors will even be produced by those mistakes, but that God has taken those horrors into Himself and overcome them, and so we can see life as good, and worth living. I think that is what we can learn from music. And the thing I like about it, is given THAT definition of music, it means that all music, sacred or secular, can get us closer to God. Because if the message is that life is good, then over life there can only be...love. Amen.