Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today’s readings begin with the beautiful Quoph section of Psalm 119, which explores an attitude of expectant openness. Various phrases bring this sense to the fore, but among them are these two verses:

Early in the morning I cry out to you,
for in your word is my trust.
My eyes are open in the night watches,
That I may meditate upon your promise.

This kind of posture seems consistent with what the Saints say about prayer: that it should be heartfelt, the fruit of concentration, simple, offered in humility, an expression of faith, zealous, deliberate, heartfelt, etc.

Today, I am contemplating how this basic posture corresponds to music.

I am conscious that music seems to communicate certain postures directly—not merely representing them to the mind, but speaking somehow to my inner intellective capacity. Why might that be? I suspect it is because the composer has managed to “get out of the way,” to become so malleable as to become a sail through which the Holy Spirit moves—an image I have read before in this context.

Music itself must mysteriously participate in a deeper reality. The medievals thought that our music was part of a larger inaudible “music of the spheres,” and as such, it participated in the larger dance of reality. Such a manner of thinking seems foreign to us, living as we do in a disenchanted, post-Scientific-Revolution and post-Enlightenment world. We are used to thinking about matter, even of sound waves, as dead material.

However, the material universe speaks loudly of God’s presence, which is already “everywhere” and filling “all things,” and when we stand before God in prayer, we are looking to the One who makes and sustains, the One who loves and knows us, in spite of our failures. Thus, prayer, standing before God in the physical world, has resonances with the experience of Transcendence through music.

Such experience is not simply feeling “moved” or “satisfied” by music. Rather, music seems able to open the inner person to something beyond itself, and that experience may be painful, but also enveloping and reassuring. It seems to be yet another way this universe bears enchantment, and in which God can break through and speak truth to our inward parts.

A bit of music that seems relevant in this connection is Peteris Vāsks’ Pater Noster, a work that to me expresses the synergistic relationship between human effort and the overarching presence and activity of God in prayer.

Yours in Christ,

—Justin