For me, the path of spirituality has always been music. It is not a thorny path. But the spectacle of beauty need not be scorned as being trivial, because as Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, or all ye need to know.” Nothing becomes so tiresome after a while as mere prettiness. We used to play ten-inch, 78 rpm records of the latest hit tune and play it to death, which came pretty soon as does the allure of some acquaintance who has a vivid personality and who overcomes us with charm for a while but who has no character to back up the flash. Bored with the hit tune, we flip the phonograph record and begin to listen with growing affection, the tune on the other side, which glimmers and then glows with greater intensity as we become familiar with greater merit, just as we turn to a new friend with no personality to speak of but with a world of human character. With friends as with songs on the hit parade, worthiness reveals that truth which we recognize as beauty. A Rembrandt self-portrait in old age, a defeated heap of a man, is not pretty. It is truthful, and therefore it is beautiful.
All men have heightened sacred words with music, from the chanting of Buddhist monks and the Gregorian chants of Catholic choirs, to even the secular half-time boosterings of football coaches, and oratory from legislative chambers, and even the stained-glass voices of some clergy somewhere, not here, before microphones made preaching softly possible.... The Bible says, “For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.” But when Handel has us sing those words, the beauty of his music reveals to us unmistakably the truth that the Lord God does indeed reign almightily. When Paul Utgoff played a Bach fugue as a postlude, we might have been sitting there wondering how fleet and accurate were his hands and feet going, and how difficult he must have found the playing. But by the time Paul could play that music at all, it was no longer difficult for him. He would have been thinking how to play beautifully, therefore revealing the the truth of what Bach must have been thinking. But neither Bach nor Paul could have put that truth into words. The composer Jan Sibelius said, “Music begins where words leave off.” And this ineffable quality is what makes music my path to spirituality.
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