Spirit Song

Do you have a song that summons you into deep and instant meditation right when you hear it, like Spirit that shows up unexpectedly in the laughter of a child? It calls you into relationship with yourself without first fighting through thoughts that cloud your mind.

I took a class called Ritual Theory last semester and Professor Brown described music as a holding space for excess emotions. More often than not, that is how I experience music… a deep space that holds all things words fail to explain or express. But I do not think Dr. Brown has the whole story on music.

I think Spirit finds a particularly easy inroad to human souls through music. Music asks questions only spirits can answer. Music transcends time and space, even as it sets the body to a beat and the soul to a moment. The rhythms of a Life are set to music and music can blaze a trail to the Sacred.

Songs are not always sacred or even spiritual. Strangely enough, I’ve always disliked singing in church; standing next to people you don’t know, singing songs you didn’t write and sometimes don’t understand. They can be dead, tired, or painfully over done – like Christmas carols. (Yawn!)

But because music is a conduit that Spirit moves through, songs can be infused with new life spontaneously - at any moment!

Lately I’ve been listening to an old hymn that was recently redone. The moment I hear it I find myself entering into deep and instant meditation. This is a song that never stood out to me in all of my Baptist, hymn-singing days as a child, but all of the sudden it holds a power over me that can not be explained as a ‘holding space’.

I can be found listening to this 7-minute song over and over again - sitting in what feels like complete silence. This is the quietest noise I’ve heard in a long time.

Mmmm….