Music in religion

I used to work across from the Jewish Community Center, and we did their printing. At one point, we were asked to produce an illustration of the inside of a synagogue, with a number of written explanations. Curious a fellow as I am, I read it over, and noticed that the diagram used the word "cantor" for the leader of congregational singing, just as we Catholics do.

Much later, I became one (rarely - mostly, I sing and play in a folk group.) I became very aware that no religion I've even heard of separates music from worship. Even those people who declare themselves to be "Jedi" when the census is taken probably spend a lot of time listening to the theme from Star Wars!

In the Catholic faith we have many debates about music. Our worship was reformed about forty years ago, when the use of Latin was largely removed from the Mass. All of a sudden, there was an urgent need for new hymns, as well as a need for music to be written to accompany the now local language versions of the Propers and the Ordinaries. One particular group of composers, a fellowship of Jesuit priests from St. Louis, responded quickly with a large body of hymns and music that has dominated North American Catholic music ever since. Praise and Worship music also entered the church doors, as artists like John Michael Talbot began to raise the bar from the rather plain music of the Jesuits. Talbot has written many gorgeous and wonderful to sing hymns of praise.

What some lament, however, in the switch from our traditional rites, is that the Mass sometimes feel as though it has become a bit of "a show." It is meant to be a collective sitting down at table with one another before God, and with and through God. Vatican II was meant to increase the participation of the faithful, but if people sit back and think of my group as entertainment, we're not doing our job!

What is nonetheless true however is that music stirs the emotions. The cynic would say that religion uses music, scriptures, incense, and rites to stupify the believer out of their sense of reason. And they are right in the sense that religion caters to the limbic system.

But are we not feeling creatures? You can't comfort the intellect. You need the intellect, to be sure, as the intellect is what needs to finally find a way to assent to a religious conviction. But it is not the intellect that kneels or prostates in prayer. The intellect does not fast on Yom Kippur, or make the pilgrimmage to Mecca.

Some might say that the emotional, primitive aspect of religion is what drives us to do irrational and hateful things to one another. And there is no question that these have been done in the name of religion.

But one need only look at the agnostic frameworks that have been set up to supplant religion: in Rome, religion was at many times for all intents and purposes supplanted by a cult of Caesar, who was divinized. Nazism was a cult of self, in which the blue-eyed, blond-haired human was exalted, and not a deity. Stalin saw fit to destroy twenty five million of his own people for reasons that were hardly rational.

Authentic religion takes the primitive self, and unites it to the intellect. It asks the intellect a fantastic question - What if there is more than you can sense? And asks us to explore that question. That is why music is the perfect example of what religion welds. The words of songs tell us things. The music of songs moves us to things. Perhaps to take action, when all other means of convincing us has failed. Or perhaps simply to look past what we sense.

But something that powerful could be quite dangerous if wielded for ill, couldn't it? It is quite remarkable, considering that potential power, that the history of music is mostly one of accomplishment, when it could be a history of dark accomplishment. Maybe the tendency of music to be used for good is itself one of God's miracles.