Lord God. We come before you this morning with all sorts of things going on in our minds, but now, we ask you to still our minds, and open our spirits to mingle with your Holy Spirit as we seek you will and your word for us in this Quiet Space.

This morning, we thank you for MUSIC, Lord; for the way it moves us, for the pleasure it gives us, for the beauty of blending melodies and harmonies that touch our souls.

We thank you for the music within our worship; for the hymns, old and new; for the worship songs, for the musical interludes which enhance of contemplation of things beyond ourselves.

So, in our thoughts this morning, inspire us through the beauty of music, sacred music, which brings us close to the Heart of God. Let our souls soar to worship you through this great gift that you have enabled humanity to create. Amen

Reflections

Today we are looking at sacred music and sounds. We touched on this last September when we talked about beauty, but we thought a focus on music only would be good to look at. After all music and sound is everywhere. From the birds singing outside, the wind through the trees, the words we speak and sing, and the music we play and listen to. Of course music features prominently in the Christian faith and also in other religions and beliefs.

We will be using the book Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O'Donohue. Personally I found his writings on music touched deep into my heart. I will start by reading a section of the book:

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SILENCE. BEFORE ANYTHING WAS, there was silence everywhere. As the universe was born the silence was broken in the fiery violence of becoming. As planets settled in the cold, endless night of the cosmos, silence was restored; and it was a deep and dark silence. We can imagine the cry of the first wind as it billowed against the strange curvature of new mountains and warmed over the restless, boiling oceans. In time, the earth settled and entered the adventure of its own journey. The rippling of waters and the wail of the wind were the only sounds until the arrival of the animals. Gradually the earth developed its own music. Streams gave voice to the silence of valleys. Between the mountains and the ocean, rivers ferried the long songs of landscape. In fresh spring wells the dreaming of stone mountains sounded forth. And from infinite distance the moon choreographed each sequence of tides. As the memory of the earth deepened, the wind built into a Caoineadh – a huge keening. It was as if the music of the mourning wind voiced the distilled loneliness of the earth. Who knows what presences depended on the wind in order to come to voice or how long they have waited for voice. The wind is the spirit-sound of the ancient earth.

Over hundreds of millions of years, the earth deepened its elemental music. Each note arises out of the infinite silence of the earth and falls away again into the vast stillness. The elemental conversation of the silence and the music of nature gives the earth a spirit of intimacy. There is an interesting symmetry between the silence of the earth and the silence of the human body. Just as the music of the wind and water breaks the deep silence of the earth, so the sound of the word breaks the private silence of the body. This threshold between silence and word sets the imagination free to create beauty. A world without this threshold would be a world of nightmare. An earth where noise never stopped or where clear dead silence was endless could never be a home for the mind. It is somehow consoling that at a primal level the heart of silence ripples in music and word. In terms of our theme, it is as though the deepest dream of silence is the beauty of music and word.

Unlike all our ancestral creatures, we have transformed the earth. We have brought much destruction and done much damage, yet our music is among the most delightful sounds on earth. Faced with the strangeness and silence of the earth, one of the most beautiful human creations has been music. The creation of exquisite music is one of the glories of the human imagination. Indeed, if we had done little else, music would remain our incredible gift to creation for there is no other sound on earth to compare with the beauty and depth of music. It has an eternal resonance. Yet of course that is as we hear it. Perhaps to animal hearing, there is nothing more beautiful than the sound of wind through a forest or the rhythmic salsa of Wild Ocean as it crashes against a cliff-face. To the human ear, however, music echoes the deepest grandeur and the most sublime intimacy of the soul.

O'Donohue, John. Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (pp. 59-61). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

I will now hand over to Janet - Janet’s reflection

MUSIC ….vibrations of different instruments and vocal chords, of different wavelengths producing different frequencies – high notes and low notes. A Vibration of 256 cycles per second produces the note we know as MIDDLE C. Double that to 512 cycles per second and we get the C above. Music and Physics are interwoven…but the mechanics of music wherein different instruments produce different sounds, maybe not inspire us, yet the result of these vibrations can move us to tears or to joy or to memories.

We associate music with different places, different scenarios, different emotions. How wonderful that God created us to enjoy music, to produce music, and to experience such a range of responses to different types of music. We have been created with VOCAL CHORDS – AS HAVE ALL CREATURES, but we can control the vibrations of these chords in our larynx – that is we can SING! The human voice is the most wonderful of all musical instruments, and God delights in the times when we raise our voices in songs of praise. God’s people have always been singing, heats and voices raised, God’s Spirit poured out among us, as we sing our songs on praise.

A quote from John O’Donohue - Unlike things of clay which contain themselves, the soul always strains beyond the body. A stone can dwell within itself for four hundred million years, take every sieve of wind and wash of rain, yet hold its Zen-like stillness. From the very moment of birth, consciousness is already leaking from our intense yet porous interiority. To be who we are, we need the consolation and companionship of the outside…….The human voice is a slender but vital bridge that takes us across the perilous distance to the others who are out there. The voice is always the outer sounding of the mind; it brings to expression the inner life that no-one else can lean over and look into.

O'Donohue, John. Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (p. 72). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

Introduction to Silence

Heart Chakra Tibetan Singing Bowls - Relaxation, Meditation & Balance (19 mins)

https://youtu.be/wvCO7ap59zU?si=DPxiWixpHIpztI_T

Blessing

A Blessing for the Senses

May your body be blessed.

May you realize that your body is a faithful

and beautiful friend of your soul.

And may you be peaceful and joyful

and recognize that your senses

are sacred thresholds.

May you realize that holiness is

mindful, gazing, feeling, hearing, and touching.

May your senses gather you and bring you home.

May your senses always enable you to

celebrate the universe and the mystery

and possibilities in your presence here.

May the Eros of the Earth bless you.

John O’Donohue, from “Anam Cara”

Thoughts to ponder:

Ephesians 5:19

"Speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord."

Because difference constitutes music . . .

Sound is . . . the rubbing of notes between two drops of water,

the breath between the note and the silence, the sound of thought.

. . . To write is to note down the music of the world.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, O'Donohue, John. Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (p. 59). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

MUSIC ALTERS YOUR experience of time. To enter a piece of music, or to have the music enfold you, is to depart for a while from regulated time.

O'Donohue, John. Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (p. 61). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

T.S. Eliot said: ‘Poetry like music should communicate before it is understood.’

O'Donohue, John. Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (p. 61). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

Feeling is where the heart lives. In claiming the heart so swiftly and totally, the beauty of music crosses all psychological and cultural frontiers. There is a profound sense in which music opens a secret door in time and reaches in to the eternal.

O'Donohue, John. Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (pp. 61-62). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

This is the authority and grace of music: it evokes or creates an atmosphere where presence awakens to its eternal depth …… for when you enter into a piece of music your feeling deepens and your presence clarifies. It brings you back to the mystery of who you are and it surprises you by inadvertently resonating with depths inside your heart that you had forgotten or neglected. Music can also stir memories, good or bad, and transport you back in time.

O'Donohue, John. Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (p. 62). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

Music embraces the whole person. It entrances the mind and the heart and its vibrations reach and touch the entire physical body. Yet there is something deeper still in the way that music pervades us. In contrast to every other art form, it finds us out in a more immediate and total way. The inrush of intimacy in music is irresistible. It takes you before you can halt it. It is as though music reaches that subtle threshold within us where the soul dovetails with the eternal. We always seem to forget that the soul has two faces. One face is turned towards our lives; it animates and illuminates every moment of our presence. The other face is always turned towards the divine presence. Here the soul receives the Divine Smile or the Kiss of God, as Meister Eckhart might express it. Perhaps this is where the mystical depth of music issues from: that threshold where the face of the soul becomes imbued with the strange tenderness of divine illumination.

O'Donohue, John. Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (pp. 62-63). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

Music is the surest voice of silence. From the beginning silence and sound have been sisters. Music invites silence to its furthest inner depths and outer frontiers. The patience in which silence is eternally refined could only voice itself in music. Music and silence are like lovers who gaze at each other and long for each other.

O'Donohue, John. Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (pp. 64-65). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

Chasing Francis

‘I am always brought to tears when I hear a marvellous performance followed by a standing ovation he said. I feel that at the climax of our cheering we cross a boundary, and unwittingly begin applauding some other reality, a performer we know is there but who cannot be seen. We want to thank beauty itself

‘Is it possible that during this evening’s performance we unconsciously sensed someone standing behind the beautiful? Someone who is it’s source and we were moved to praise him as well.’

‘All of us are meaning seekers, we approach every painting, novel, film, symphony or ballet unconsciously hoping that it will move us one step further to answering the question of why are we here.’

‘People living in the post-modern world however are faced with an excruciating dilemma. Their hearts long to find ultimate meaning whilst at the same time their critical minds do not believe it exists. We are homesick but have no home. So we turn to the arts and aesthetics to satisfy our thirst for the absolute. But if we want to find our true meaning in life our search cannot end there. Art or beauty is not the destination, it is a signpost pointing towards our desired destination’

Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis, A Pilgrim's Tale, 2011 Oasis Audio, Audible, Chapter 7

‘The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them. It was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through was a longing, for they are not the thing itself they are only the scent of a flower we have not found. the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.’

CS Lewis ‘the Weight of Glory.’

Remembered Music

'Tis said, the pipe and lute that charm our ears

Derive their melody from rolling spheres;

But Faith, o'erpassing speculation's bound,

Can see what sweetens every jangled sound.

We, who are parts of Adam, heard with him

The song of angels and of seraphim. Our memory, though dull and sad, retains

Some echo still of those unearthly strains

Oh, music is the meat of all who love,

Music uplifts the soul to realms above.

The ashes glow, the latent fires increase:

We listen and are fed with joy and peace.

Rumi

26 September 2025 Sacred Music

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