Is Sacred Music a Way to Find God?

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Charlemagne_II said:
This was my mother’s favorite hymn. We sang it at her funeral service.
This is a great one to get your family around and sing together.

youtube.com/watch?v=HXwpNBlpJsE
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This really is a beautiful hymn and is also one of my favorites. It has never failed in any church I’ve ever been in to have the rooftops blown up from everyone singing this.

Here is another favorite of mine. We had this as my processional at our wedding/

youtube.com/watch?v=SDVMe0boOH4

I couldn’t find a good version of it with this text:

O God beyond all praising,
we worship you today
and sing the love amazing
that songs cannot repay;
for we can only wonder
at every gift you send,
at blessings without number
and mercies without end:
we lift our hearts before you
and wait upon your word,
we honor and adore you,
our great and mighty Lord.

Then hear, O gracious Savior,
accept the love we bring,
that we who know your favor
may serve you as our king;
and whether our tomorrows
be filled with good or ill,
we’ll triumph through our sorrows
and rise to bless you still:
to marvel at your beauty
and glory in your ways,
and make a joyful duty
our sacrifice of praise.

but found one with “I Vow to Thee My Country” from Princess Diana’s funeral

youtube.com/watch?v=LmeQ_M7fPMw&feature=related
 
Sarabande said:
My husband started out playing the guitar and taught himself mostly for rock music. It wasn’t until he was in college, did he begin to immerse himself into classical and started taking lessons in both piano and composition. (Although, there are photos of him as a tot “conducting” Beethoven with a pencil.) He also became bored with playing rock when he realized how easy it was to play (although I will still sometimes ask him to play and sing for me the Beetles “Blackbird”. He desired something deeper and more complex and he got that with classical composition.
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Interesting, I agree that most rock music is easy to play. But did he play progressive rock? Groups like Yes and Genesis had more depth and complexity than other groups of their time. In fact, a lot of those bands frequently did covers of classical pieces with more modern instrumentation. Of course they aren’t as full and lush as an actual orchestra, and sometimes the arrangements are cheesy, but it is interesting to hear them from the perspective of an entirely different genre. Just some random thoughts. 😛
 
CTA1967 said:
Interesting, I agree that most rock music is easy to play. But did he play progressive rock? Groups like Yes and Genesis had more depth and complexity than other groups of their time. In fact, a lot of those bands frequently did covers of classical pieces with more modern instrumentation. Of course they aren’t as full and lush as an actual orchestra, and sometimes the arrangements are cheesy, but it is interesting to hear them from the perspective of an entirely different genre. Just some random thoughts. 😛
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HI CTA. Sorry, I missed your message. Yes, actually my husband did play that kind of rock - Genenis, U2, Stevie Vye, Eddie van Halen, etc. (Yes is great, but at the time he was playing guitar as a teenager, that group really wasn’t something kids our age were interested in) Anyway, I asked him more about his reasons. He said that although the bands like Genesis did use more instruments and textures than just a guitar, drums and piano, the parts themselves really weren’t much more complex to play. It was still pretty easy. He does submit that the technical virtuosity of the solo playing of Eddie van Halen and Stevie Vye (I don’t know the spelling, as I actually never heard of him until he mentioned it. I really am a big dork. haha!) was virtuosic in their genre, but when compared to playing the virtuosic ability of a classically composed solo guitar piece or Spanish guitar, it’s still not as difficult. For example, works by Agostin Barrios Mangore - considered the Chopin of guitar - his music is beautiful, but the ability needed to perform many of his compositions is incredible. There are a number where it sounds like you need two guitars and four hands.

That’s not to say he is putting down rock music. We both enjoy it and recognize difficulities for its genre, but for what it is.
 
budgie2 said:
I personally would listen to religious music often as it is a form of prayer. My mum likes Gregorian Chant and I like Taize. It helps you to pray when you are doing your work and doesn’t absorb you like watching TV. So good luck.
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have u ever been to mass and only a few people r singing?we open the book and notin comes out.God loves to hear us sing to him.Why when we sing we r not ina sin full state.pride keeps many from singing because they worry.bad voices keep many too but God made thoese vocies.religious music is for God and from God.paryer,singing ,giving thanks to him who made us is alsome .
 
Sarabande said:
For example, works by Agostin Barrios Mangore - considered the Chopin of guitar - his music is beautiful, but the ability needed to perform many of his compositions is incredible. There are a number where it sounds like you need two guitars and four hands.
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Interesting, I’ll check out his music! Yeah, it seems like in the early 20th century, there were guitarists like Robert Johnson who would play what sounded like accompanied parts on a single guitar. Later on, you mostly get guitar technique that sort of degenerates into double stops and bar chords. 😛
 
Charlemagne_II said:
I have often thought that God wants to speak to the language of our hearts more than to the language of our brains. After I had left the Church for many years, I remember that my first movement back toward God was marked by listening in a darkened room one night to Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus.” It was only after getting someone to translate the words that I realized the music was Mozart’s great tribute to the Blessed Sacrament.

Has anybody had a similar experience? How can science explain this kind of movement of the heart played upon by musical instruments?
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I have never been able to find the God of all creation through music. I did find God through the reading of the Bible. Music is not to be our focus to finding God. The Bible should be. God said you shall know The Truth, the Bible/Christ and The Truth shall set you free. Jesus said He was The Truth, The life, and The Way and the no one come to the Father but through Him. Music can not bring us to God. Only through a personal relationship to God by faith alone in Christ alone will one find peace with God and heaven as your home forever.
 
DLClark said:
I have never been able to find the God of all creation through music. I did find God through the reading of the Bible. Music is not to be our focus to finding God. The Bible should be. God said you shall know The Truth, the Bible/Christ and The Truth shall set you free. Jesus said He was The Truth, The life, and The Way and the no one come to the Father but through Him. Music can not bring us to God. Only through a personal relationship to God by faith alone in Christ alone will one find peace with God and heaven as your home forever.
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If in beautiful music you have never felt the Presence and love of God, I feel very sad for you.

You’ve missed the point of this thread entirely.

Nobody has suggested that one can find ALL there is to know about God or ALL the truth of salvation through music. I strongly suspect that nobody on this thread would believe that. Bach, Handel, and Mendelssohn – deeply devout Protestants all – would not have believed that. But for many people, the realization of beauty; that the universe is a beautiful place; can be a step on the path that leads them to God. (Check out CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity.)

With regard to your other comments: No one is denying the Bible as God’s Word. The Bible is not under discussion here, nor is the heresy of sola fide. I’m sure that you can find threads to discuss the issues you raise to your heart’s content.
 
DLClark

*I have never been able to find the God of all creation through music. *

Possibly the title of the thread was not suited to your sensibility. I didn’t mean that one literally can find God in sacred music, so much as that one can build a connection with God that did not previously exist. Certainly one is going to literally “find” God in the Scriptures, without which we would have little to go on indeed. But I do think sacred music is a way to build on what we have found, a call to our heartstrings to lift our thoughts and prayers in a beautiful way to connect with the fount of all beauty that is God.

As Augustine says, “He who sings prays twice.”

Would you say that you have ever been moved to feel closer to God by listening to or yourself singing Amazing Grace?
 
DLClark said:
I have never been able to find the God of all creation through music. I did find God through the reading of the Bible. Music is not to be our focus to finding God. The Bible should be. God said you shall know The Truth, the Bible/Christ and The Truth shall set you free. Jesus said He was The Truth, The life, and The Way and the no one come to the Father but through Him. Music can not bring us to God. Only through a personal relationship to God by faith alone in Christ alone will one find peace with God and heaven as your home forever.
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If the Bible is really the only the place you find God, would you like to live in some perpetual reenactment of Biblical events? 🤷 Of course music can’t substitute the Scriptures. But that’s definitely not what Charlemagne II was suggesting.
 
I love music and it does bring me closer to God.

I’ve never really liked classical music before, when I was Protestant, but ever since becoming Catholic, I’ve been really drawn to Gregorian Chant and other similar styles…

A while ago I went to a Latin Mass and they had a wonderful choir there. One of my favourite moments was just after Communion, when I was kneeling at my pew, and I felt so close to God in the Blessed Sacrament and at the same time listening to this beautiful music :heaven:

this is why my favourite parishes are the ones with beautiful music lol.
 
If any of you use iTunes, I reccomend buying the entire album of Richard Proulx and the Cathedral Singers, with Catholic Latin Classics. They are performed with such precision, and they’re just so amazing.

The Sixteen, a group dedicated to Reniassance music, is another excellent choice.

All I listen to these days is liturgical/classical music. Gorgeous stuff.👍
 
Sarabande said:
MOST DEFINITELY!!! I can’t answer the scientific side of it, but I can most assuredly say that music has brought me to higher levels of spirituality and closeness to God more so than almost any other thing on this earth. As a musician and someone who uses my voice to produce music, the entire experience can sometimes become transcendent. For me, music speaks the language of God.

I believe all music that I make is a prayer. I say a prayer before I open my mouth and the notes and words come out as my prayer as well. There have been times when while I was singing, whether sacred classical music or secular classical music, my mind will suddenly shift and I’m in this level in which I feel enraptured, like in ecstasy. I feel so much warmth and love, which I know is from God. Then, when I look out into the audience or down into the congregation from the choir loft, I sometimes see this glow surrounding many of the people and this warm light in the room. I know I probably sound like a TOTAL nut talking about it, but this is what I truly experience and feel. Once I am done singing during those special times, it’s as if I’m in a daze and not quite aware of my surroundings. It’s not until I hear from audience and sometimes even from congregants who seek me out after mass that I realize something occurred because they felt the same ecstasy as well.

When I am the listener and the same thing has occurred with the performer or musician who is rendering the music at mass, I also experience that same kind of ecstasy which the musician(s) (instrumentalist or singer) were used as a conduit between the spiritual and the earthly. It’s the most bizarre, yet amazing experience, and I know that at that moment the musicians I hear have tapped into their spiritual depths, let go of everything earthly and relied solely on the music to create such an inspiring piece of spiritual beauty. That is true art in any form of art, really.

It also doesn’t matter for me what language or lack of language it is in. Although I’ve had to learn languages for my musical training and have an elementary understanding of them, I actually don’t need to know the literal translation to experience what is being sung. If the singer or the instrumentalist understand what they want to convey, it will expose itself naturally. AT least that is what I get.

After a few years of analyzing myself, because I am so emotionally and spiritually connected to music, I think that is the reason why my negative reaction to poorly composed or just aesthetically ugly religious or sacred music is so visceral. I have at times come to the point of running to the bathroom to throw up when I’ve experienced it at mass, although I’ve more recently learned to keep it down and offer it up.
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that is wonderful that you offer your music to God as a prayer 🙂 this is beautiful.
Charlemagne_II said:
I* think that is the reason why my negative reaction to poorly composed or just aesthetically ugly religious or sacred music is so visceral.*

Not sure exactly what your role is musically. Singer, it seems. Do you also direct a choir?

What has been your experience with poorly written music? At our church we hired a Protestant organist who turned out also to be the choir director. I have found many of his musical selections unsingable and uninspired. Most of them are or more recent vintage , in the last thirty years or so. The old classics are rarely heard any more in church. The congregation doesn’t sing with the choir either because the hymns are strange and don’t even “sound” Catholic.

I have never heard Mozart’s “Ave verum Corpus” in a Catholic church!!! Not even on the organ during the distribution of Holy Communion. Is this a scandal?
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I find it sad how so many parishes these days use the modern hymns 😦 I like very few of them. Musically, they are just not inspiring. I don’t have anything against VII itself, but I think after VII people forgot some of the old Catholic traditions, which should not have been forgotten. However, I’ve been noticing a trend in the other direction, and people seem to be rediscovering Gregorian chant once more 🙂 and I think it’s great that our Holy Father likes it too. Hopefully with time, more and more parishes would bring back the beautiful old music and the organ.
DLClark said:
I have never been able to find the God of all creation through music. I did find God through the reading of the Bible. Music is not to be our focus to finding God. The Bible should be. God said you shall know The Truth, the Bible/Christ and The Truth shall set you free. Jesus said He was The Truth, The life, and The Way and the no one come to the Father but through Him. Music can not bring us to God. Only through a personal relationship to God by faith alone in Christ alone will one find peace with God and heaven as your home forever.
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I don’t understand. Can not God use music to bring people to Himself? I think He can, at least He did for me 🙂

God bless.
 
John_Monaco said:
If any of you use iTunes, I reccomend buying the entire album of Richard Proulx and the Cathedral Singers, with Catholic Latin Classics. They are performed with such precision, and they’re just so amazing.

The Sixteen, a group dedicated to Reniassance music, is another excellent choice.

All I listen to these days is liturgical/classical music. Gorgeous stuff.👍
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thanks! 🙂
 
“In church, sacred music would make believers of us all - but preachers can be counted on to restore the balance.” ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960
 
“I remember a debate in which I had praised militant music in ritual, and someone asked me if I could imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band. I said I could imagine it with the greatest of ease; for Christ definitely approved a natural noisiness at a great moment.” G.K. Chesterton

youtube.com/watch?v=irZmknvOB4I&feature=related
 
John_Monaco said:
If any of you use iTunes, I reccomend buying the entire album of Richard Proulx and the Cathedral Singers, with Catholic Latin Classics. They are performed with such precision, and they’re just so amazing.

The Sixteen, a group dedicated to Reniassance music, is another excellent choice.

All I listen to these days is liturgical/classical music. Gorgeous stuff.👍
Click to expand...
Speaking of music recommendations, Cathedral Classics by the Dale Warland Singers is one of my favourites. The Amazon page the link directs to also has a few short free previews, too.
 
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