Music

Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.” This is a thought that strikes home, so far as I'm concerned. As a fridge magnet I have reminds me, "Where words begin to fail us, music takes over." Words can never be enough to address the mystery that is God; indeed, far from opening up that mystery and making it accessible, words become things in themselves to believe in, raising barriers and forming sects. Music is much better at breaking barriers, and it connects immediately with emotions.

Of course, music can be misused, and songs can be sung in hatred and anger, as part of what identifies this group as opposed to that one. Even then, however, there is I think a subversive risk about music; somehow, it is always conspiring against the sectarians and wanting to side with freedom and justice. I remember, many years ago, singing some of the great revolutionary anthems of Latin America (along with John Lennon's "Imagine") as one of many thousand voices in a football stadium in Porto Allegre, Brazil. There was a power and energy present in that singing that I've hardly experienced anywhere else. The music almost seemed to have a life of its own.

As a Christian, I am impatient with doctrine. I have no desire to know how many angels may dance on the head of a pin - though I'd love to know what songs they're dancing to. I find I am able to sing with people despite the divergences between what I believe and what they do - and, having sung together, I find we can share and work and witness together. And laugh together: as someone has said, and I have no idea who, "The best songs are those that write a smile on the heart." And I am sure that something like that is God's high desire for his people, that we should have smiles on our hearts.