I have a theory: anyone who doesn’t care about music (or, heaven forbid, says they don’t even like music) is a serial killer or at least has the capacity to be one. There’s something deeply unnerving about someone who isn’t impacted by music - it’s one of the more universal human experiences. Music has been part of pretty much every culture, society, religion, and group that has existed in human history, and it continues to permeate every part of modern life. Even in the age of music videos, we can certainly imagine listening to music without a visual component. But can you endure a movie with no soundtrack? A commercial without a jingle (or at least some background music)? We put music in every pause at sporting events, in the background of every visual art, and even just filling the air at amusement parks and elsewhere.
Life without music is unimaginable. But why is it so fundamental to human existence? Why does music move us, get stuck in our heads, make life more bearable? Why does a chord change or a particular instrumental line make us emotional, even when there are no words? There are a few different ways we could approach the answer to those questions. Some would talk about the literally physical component of music, how sound waves vibrate our ear drums and create physical changes in our body. Others might take a historical approach and talk about the ways that philosophers for millennia have recognized that certain scales and patterns have the same emotional effect on people. We could even take a theological historical approach and talk about the “music of the spheres,” the way music’s math and connection to physics have long drawn the attention of those who see God’s handiwork at play.
But in order to talk about my answer to why music is so vital to our existence, we need to talk about sacraments. If you didn’t grow up in church, or even if you grew up in a more evangelical church that is disconnected from the historical church (see my previous posts Seeking Saints and especially Bankrupt for more on that), the word sacrament is probably somewhat unfamiliar to you. And even within Christian circles, there is some debate about what is a sacrament and what makes something sacramental.
Fundamentally, I believe that a sacrament is a “holy mystery.” The word sacrament comes from latin and means a “holy oath,” but the Greek word that it is translating is the word mysterion, which as you can guess means “mystery.” What does a holy or sacred oath have to do with mystery? Why are those two ideas combined in the idea of a sacrament? It might help to look at what we consider to be sacraments in order to understand. There are two sacraments that every orthodox church recognizes (the Catholic and Orthodox churches have more, and Protestant churches disagree on the number). These two are Baptism and the Eucharist (which you might know as Communion or the Lord’s Supper). In each case, Christians believe that something mysterious happens in these moments - in baptism, you symbolically die to your old self and are reborn into the Christian community, and at the Eucharist, the bread and wine somehow become (either literally or not, that’s a different article) the body and blood of Jesus.
So there is mystery here, clearly. We can understand the original Greek word making sense here - something is happening that is clearly beyond our understanding, the physical and spiritual are blending together in ways that we aren’t used to in daily life. Yet what about the solemn oath? Each of these is also a declaration, a statement about who we are, who God is, and what God has done/will do. In baptism, we declare that we are made new in Christ, yet we know that it is God who does this, not us. In the Eucharist we give thanks for the death and resurrection of Jesus and declare that he will come again.
Now what does all this have to do with music? One of the core marks of a sacrament is the way that the physical and spiritual are intertwined - we need the physical water and the spiritual water of baptism; the physical bread and wine and the spiritual body and blood. Ultimately, sacraments are one more way that we meet Jesus, because Jesus was the greatest union of the physical and spiritual - God and human united perfectly in one being. This is not the only thing that makes something a sacrament (and I certainly don’t indent to weigh in on how many sacraments there are/should be) but it is something that is clearly central to music, too.
Music is one of those places where the physical and spiritual meet. As much as we try, we can’t fully explain why certain sound wave vibrations can make us cry, get us excited, evoke deep memories. For every physical explanation we can pair it with an emotional and spiritual one. In music we can find ourselves and lose ourselves; you can be deeply in your body, dancing and singing, or blissfully spiritual, practically floating on air when your focus is on one piece of beautiful music. More often than not, we are both - dancing yet unaware of our body, lost in the music yet fully present.
Music is one of the great unifiers - everyone loves music (except for those psychos we mentioned up top; don’t be friends with them). And it provides us with some of the best pictures we have of what it means to have a flourishing life in community. Think of a choir, or a band - each individual member must do their part, yet without everyone else their part would not make sense. If you’ve ever been in a choir you know that sometimes your individual part isn’t very interesting or fun to sing, but when you hear the whole it creates a beauty that wouldn’t be as lovely without your boring part.
I’m not here to argue that music is a sacrament, but it is sacramental - it is a picture of Jesus, a place where the physical and spiritual meet in surprising ways. I think this is why we need it so much, why it permeates everything we do - because we all long to be whole people, unified in body and spirit. We want the world to be more than just physical, but we don’t want to lose these bodies and this earth. Music lets us have the best of both. Bodies that dance and sway, move to the rhythm; souls lifted by gorgeous melodies; emotional release that lets us experience the full range of what we can feel. Music lets us be fully human, in a way that does justice to every aspect of how we were made. Who could possibly be neutral to something as wonderful as that?