The Prayer of Music

One of my favorite activities when I spent seven years as youth minister at St. Ann Parish in Phoenixville, PA was “Music Night.” It was a night when one by one the kids would let everyone know their favorite song at that particular time in their lives. We would then listen to the song together as a group. The purpose had multiple levels to it.

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”

Plato

At first glance it was a chance to acutely listen to the lyrics of the song and then decide whether the message was positive or negative. This was important as it illustrated just how much music influences all of us, especially to the ears of their forming minds. We had a lot of fun with this as we would use the parable of the Two Foundations from scripture as our context. As a result, both individually and as a group we had to decide whether the songs message was rooted in “rock” or “sand” and reasoning behind our answers.

On another level, every song we listened to, from Eminem to Pink, to Imagine Dragons to Carrie Underwood, to Jay-Z to Led Zeppelin, was an opportunity to allow the immersion of their everyday lives into the realms and contexts of their faith. It brought to the surface life within them, and thoughts they never seemed to think about before.

Yet most importantly, what I hope they got out of it was that every song, no matter what the message was, even the darkest ones that were a no brainer for the “sand” category was an opportunity to experience God’s presence and mercy. In other words, what some of the kids were starting to figure out was that every song had the opportunity to be rooted in rock when the context was the Cross. Every song is a form of prayer. Because every song is a yearning for something outside of themselves.

Living in Switzerland and riding the public transit system now for 7 months, which is unbelievable by the way, leaves me with plenty of time to listen to music. Along with many others on the bus, tram, and train, it provides a time to allow music to speak to us, for us, and with us with words we sometimes can’t come up with ourselves. It provides a time during the hustle and bustle of the day to enter into ourselves and face things that otherwise lay dormant. It is a time when music becomes the outward sign of the state of our hearts and soul. In other words, it is a time of prayer.

I once heard that a bus driver is a driver of a million broken hymns. If this is the case, music brings those hymns to the forefront. It is the hymn of the awkward girl who is listening to a song that gives her comfort after spending another day believing she isn’t beautiful. It is the hymn of the man who is listening to a song that gives him purpose and meaning as he goes from job interview to job interview in an attempt to provide for his family again. It is the hymn of a teenage boy who is angry and filled with rage because his father left him and his mother.  And now it is only the song that can give expression to that anger and provides him the feeling of “manhood” in the wake of being fatherless. It is the broken hymn of the woman who just received bad news from her doctor and is on the way to pick her kids up from school. She listens to a song that speaks to the unimaginable fear that she now feels.

Music is prayer, because for most of us it is an expression for what we all yearn for the most.

To know and be known.

To see and be seen.

To Love and be Loved.

As for me, I go from one song to another, genre to genre, searching for the ones that help with my prayers on that particular day. These days that is Yelawolf, The Sixteen, NEEDTOBREATHE, and the 1975. It is Jay-Z, Mat Kearney, Lauren Daigle, and Sam Cooke.

Yet, on the days when I need it the most my prayers come from Audrey Assad. For my deepest prayer is for God to deliver me to the place where “I Shall Not Want.”

And for that day to be today.