Sacred Music Is the Divine Love Elixir and Temperature Fixer
Confucius said, “Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.” Likewise, the most exhilarating sacred ecstasy simply cannot occur without music. While it is possible to experience a direct infusion of sacred emotion, akin to being struck by divine lighting, this is extremely rare. Transmission usually requires the magical potion or ecstatic elixir of sacred music to serve as a carrier.
Music is the primary means of heavenly communication and ecstatic penetration, which is why a sacred song is simultaneously like a divine telephone line, a glass of holy love, and an arrow or spear that can pierce the heart. If you meet someone who claims to have spoken to God, ask that person to sing. If there is no song, then immediately flee and warn others to stay away. Music is “a higher revelation” (Ludwig van Beethoven), “the language of spirits” (Kahlil Gibran), and “the only art of heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to heaven” (Walter Savage Landor). It is “a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens” (Maria Augusta von Trapp).[i]
The basic practices of Sacred Ecstatics aim to stir up sacred emotion and help open your heart to its divine source by soaking you in a bath of sanctified music. The whole combination of rhythm, melody, and harmony that constitutes music carries more emotion than rhythm, tone, or movement alone. When you experience music with a tuned body instrument, the original emotion that led to its creation is received more strongly. When your whole body hears, rather than only your ears, we like to say that true hearing, rather than only “earing,” takes place. Not only is the eardrum vibrating, so are your head, shoulders, hips, fingers, and toes. Experiencing music after your body has been attuned and aligned with changing movements, tones, and rhythms is the ultimate sonic mystery.
Sacred music from anywhere in the world is most beneficial when it physically moves your body in response to its emotion. The creative source of such music is divine and leaves you singing and dancing in kind. As composer Joseph Haydn elaborates this experience: “When I think of my God, my heart dances within me for joy, and then my music has to dance, too.”[ii] Welcome all divinely inspired music no matter where it was geographically composed or what spiritual tradition subsequently held and honored it. If it holds sacred emotion, do yourself a favor and soak in it. Music will “fix” your spiritual temperature, that is, set your heart, soul, body, and bones on fire.
-The Keeneys, May 17, 2020. Excerpted and adapted from The Spiritual Engineering of Sacred Ecstasy (2018).
[i] Quote attributed to Beethoven by Bettina von Arnim, Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child (London: Longman, Orme, Brown , Green, and Longmans, 1839), 207; Kahlil Gabran, The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gabran (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2009),484; quote by Walter Savage Landor from Kenneth W. Osbeck, 101 More Hymn Stories: The Inspiring True Stories Behind 101 Favorite Hymns (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1985), 145. This quote by Maria Von Trapp is widely attributed to her, but the original source is unknown.
[ii] Nathan Haskell Dole, Famous Composers: Volume 1 (New York: Thomas E. Crowell, 1902), 172.