The Power of Music to Revive a Soul

After 30 years of religion, I was numb, discouraged, and dismayed. Preaching I seriously disliked. Church I couldn’t walk into. Music was all I could tolerate. And it became the salve for my soul.

I’d been a pastor. I’d been a lay leader. I’d tried to keep my faith real and sincere.

But crisis, it came. I’ve written plenty about it in a memoir, “Letters to My Son in Prison.” The title kinda says it all. For me it was part parental crisis and part spiritual crisis. I had hoped for God’s blessing with my family—but that seemed impossible now.

So, what do you do when you’ve lost hope? How do you connect with God when he feels nonexistent—or at the very least, distant?

Well, for me, only one thing worked: music. In particular, worship music. It was the only thing I could tolerate. And it was the only thing that could get through to me.

Preaching? Nah. That shut me down. It felt like piling on. I’d delivered sermons and heard them for thirty years and my logical, scripture-knowing left brain was closed down. Someone up there pontificating on exactly how God would work and when he’d answer prayer and what I needed to do to ensure his blessing…please…those sure-fire preachers made me want to run.

But I didn’t want to shake my fist at God or curse him or fall away. I just couldn’t. It wasn’t in my DNA. So, what could I do? Should I just give in to the numbness?

My breakthrough was unplanned. The raw materials for it just came about one day when I stumbled into a church down in Hollywood. As the deep bass of a guitar vibrated my chest, the lights dimmed—even the band was in the dark. Then lyrics were projected onto a large screen and Mumford and Sons-style music accompanied hymns I was familiar with. I swayed on my feet and moved with the rhythm. The band wasn’t rock and roll or obnoxiously clangy…just a perfect accompaniment to spiritual songs. I remember thinking, This is going to be good. It might have been the first time I actually felt good in a church in ten years.

And it’s important to note, the darkness and music didn’t feel manipulative to me. It didn’t seem like they were using it to evoke a religious experience. These folks seemed sincere. So I leaned in; I began to give myself over to the upswell and the elevation of my spirit; I allowed myself a little musical euphoria. And it’s funny, even though nothing in my life had changed, even though no spiritual insight had taken hold, I felt close to God again; I agreed with the affirmations of the lyrics; I felt a little Christian once again.

It sounds simplistic, I realize, but it had been a long time…a looonnnggg time since feeling that connection. I needed this in-the-dark, music-enabled, spirit-lifting connection with God so I could bypass my feelings of failure and separation. But even more than that bypass, the worship experience helped trump my otherwise ill feelings for so many things Christian—like preaching and church-going. I felt so unchristian for how distasteful those things were to me. So to be in a dark auditorium, to be shouting out in a song, to be crying my eyes out to God, and to be connecting with the lyrics like I was…maybe I wasn’t as unchristian as I thought I was. Maybe I was just a Christian who needed a different medium through which to connect to God.

Once I settled into this new realization, I could open my Bible again; I could pray without Mr. Finger-wagger standing on my shoulder mocking me. I could recover a semblance of a Christian life, albeit one that needed the aid of music to maintain a pulse. But so be it.

Now, to be honest, preaching and church attendance are still hard for me all these years later. I don’t exactly know why, but they are. But now I’ve learned to accept it. It’s probably not a forever sentiment and those things, by the way, don’t determine a Christian life.

Could I have recovered without music? Probably. But it would have been different. It might have taken years or just been the weathering of life. Or it might have just happened one day out of the blue. I don’t know.

But now music is a big old fat part of my life. It’s probably a bigger part of my spiritual practice than it should be. Why, just last weekend, I think I might have seen heaven open during a song. Yup! I was standing in my yard, with earbuds in, and a song came on that moves me like no other right now: “What a Beautiful Name.” When the female vocalist started the line, “…death could not hold you, the veil tore before you, you silenced the boast of sin and grave…” I just melted; my entire body went flush—even writing it right now brings me to tears. I stared into the blue sky, my arms stretched high, belting out the words, and, I don’t know, I might have seen it…I might have seen the sky crack open a bit…heaven might just have schismed for my little old eyes to see.

Okay, okay, I know I got carried away there, but that’s not the point. That’s how I felt. And I hold onto that. Because I want more than just an ordered life, a suburban normalcy, a left-brain existence, a 2+2 always equaling 4. Come on now! I want some magic in this here walk with God, and little euphoria and a glimpse of heaven and some wonder and awe thrown in and a delicious taste of the Spirit.

And if I ever fall again into spiritual dystopia, that place where I can’t see my hand in front of my face, that place where God feels like a memory, I’ll know where to lean. It may not be the same church in Hollywood, but it will be someplace where I can let myself go and give myself over and remind myself of the most elemental thing of all: I love God.