Scott’s Column: Sacred Sounds

I’ve spent this lovely day with my office door open to the courtyard where I can hear the fountain running.  I’ve been working on the vespers service for Friday night at the All-Church Retreat at Platte River State Park.  Our theme this year is Sound.

As a young fan of the great fantasy writers C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein, I noticed something quite interesting when reading them–in both of their fantasy worlds, creation occurs through singing.  In The Magician’s Nephew (which, incidentally, I just finished reading to Sebastian), Aslan sings Narnia into being.  In The Silmarillion Tolkein’s creation story begins when the God figure, Ilúvatar, instructs his court to begin singing:

‘Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music. And since I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable, ye shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme, each with his own thoughts and devices, if he will. But I will sit and hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has been wakened into song.’ Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.

Genesis doesn’t include any singing at creation, but God does speak the world into being, which is different than many creation stories that involve labor, effort, and often violence.  Scholars have pointed out that this story cements the importance of language to our spiritual endeavors.

Later, in my religious studies as an adult, I encountered the ancient Vedic idea that sound itself is divine and that when humans chant the sacred OM they are participating in divinity.

Even the origin story told by contemporary physics is about a “Big Bang.”  Sound, music, rhythm permeate the universe.

In his fun book Music: A Subversive History historian Ted Gioia writes:

It’s worth noting how rarely myths describe music originating as entertainment or works of artistic expression.  Those categories may describe how we view songs in the current day, but our oldest ancestors knew something we ought to remember and which should be the starting point for all histories of song: music is power.  Sound is the ultimate source of genesis, broadly defined, as well as metamorphosis and annihilation.  A song can contain a cataclysm.

Not long ago I read a book about the internet by the historian of science Justin E. H. Smith in which he argues that we should understand the internet as “only one more recent layer of the ecology of the planet as a whole, which overlays networks upon networks.”  This too is a story about sound and how we use it to connect.  The internet is our most recent human method for telecommunication, though we’ve been trying to communicate over long distance since primitive humans drummed.  And in that way, we are a lot like plenty of other species, from prairie dogs alerting each other about dangers, elephant stomps that send vibrations over several kilometers, or whale songs that can traverse entire oceans and maybe even around the globe.  It seems the whale had global communication eons before we humans did.

Sound communicates and connects and is our way of participating in the deep rhythms of the universe.  No wonder sound itself has long been considered sacred.