All creation groans, and sings

I listened to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (Op. 11) again the other night. It always breaks my heart. I’ve intentionally avoided it for several years because, once hearing it, I find it difficult to free myself from the intense sadness of the piece. Barber’s strings moan with a wordless grief that builds to a wail and dies away to a weeping sigh. I always wonder what he was experiencing to create such exquisite agony in sound.

In contrast, Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations (Op. 36, variation IX, “Nimrod”) leaves me feeling joyous and hopeful, as if the sun has risen with golden fire after an interminable darkness, or as if Heaven has briefly opened to reveal God on his throne commanding the spring to return after a very long winter.

How is it possible for music to have such power over our emotions?

Perhaps I’m just odd that way. I have always found that music speaks to something deep inside and gives voice to much that isn’t easy to articulate. In Romans 8:23, Paul says that we groan as we eagerly await our adoption as God’s children. We groan. An interesting word choice. Why do we groan? Because there is much about our lives and our world that troubles us and leaves our hearts uneasy. Because we feel real pain and frustration and disappointment, and in those moments a groan or a sigh might be the best we can do to express what we’re feeling.

I find that music helps those groans speak with a more eloquent vocabulary, albeit a wordless vocabulary. Music has been an escape for me. When things were intense, I would put on my headphones, crank up the volume, and lose myself in Bach or Mozart or Led Zeppelin or Chicago or the Beatles. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it was just a temporary distraction, but that wasn’t so bad, either.

Music is a language for the tongue-tied heart. Music is a language of prayer, of praise, a language of yearning, a language of joy and grief, of victory and defeat, of hope and despair.

There is a scene in John’s vision of heaven in Revelation 5. Jesus, the Lamb of God, takes hold of a scroll that no one is worthy to open. The witnesses to this triumph fall down in worship, singing a song that has never been sung before.

And they sang a new song with these words: “You are worthy to take the scroll and break its seals and open it. For you were slaughtered, and your blood has ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” — Revelation 5:9 (NLT)

It’s no wonder that music can stir our hearts and imaginations in such profound ways. Music is a language of heavenly praise, a language that God has written somewhere deep in our human DNA to help us express joy and happiness, pain and lament.

London’s Howarth Company makes some of the world’s finest oboes. A professional instrument may cost $40,000, uses only the best materials, and is handmade by skilled craftsmen who have been refining their skills for decades. That instrument will then be played by a musician who has spent years, decades, learning and practicing, all for the honor of being able to sit in a very select chair in one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. Why do so many give so much in the pursuit of something so ephemeral as beautiful noises that will float momentarily in the air and then vanish?

Is there a hidden soul connection between the music of heaven and our human desire to create music? Did God hum a happy tune while he was busy creating the planets? Did he sing for joy when he first watched Adam and Eve exploring his garden?

In the late 60’s, some churches were worried that subtle satanic messages were being encoded into rock and roll vinyl records. If you played some recordings backwards, you could sort of sometimes make out something that might be horrible. Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven was one of those singled out for close examination, and I imagine many kids like myself spent hours trying to pick out those clever messages.

I don’t think God is that subtle.

On the last page of many of his musical manuscripts, Johann Sabastian Bach would write S.D.G., an abbreviation for the Latin phrase “soli Deo gloria” — Glory to God alone. Bach attributed his talents to God, and therefore thought it only fitting to give God the credit for his musical masterpieces. This was not some humblebrag. Bach believed beauty in all its forms pointed us to God, and the pursuit of beauty, the love of beauty, was something God had inscribed on human hearts.

We bear the image of God. It’s fitting, therefore, that we make music, that we enjoy music, that our souls are sometimes bursting with music while at other times, music becomes a refuge, a solace, a balm for our wounds. The heavens sing. Down here in the dust of life, I think we sometimes hear the faintest echo of those heavenly songs and we feel a tug, a God-given desire to join in.