“I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might
have been - if the invention of language had not intervened - the means of communication between souls.”
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Last week, we visited Mount Lebanon Baptist Church, and having had that time to reflect on my personal experience there, I thought I’d share with you a few of my thoughts on the matter.
I am not a religious person, in the sense that I am not a church-goer, and I do not subscribe to any one particular religion. However, I am not quite a committed atheist. I am certainly open to the possibility that there is a spiritual side to our lives, but only a few times in my life have I felt that possibility become a tangible reality. Once was just after my first midnight communion at St Georges Anglican Church in Belfast, when the service simply overwhelmed me, and as we walked out into a gentle snowfall, I couldn’t hold back my tears. The second was last week, during the service at Mount Lebanon.
Friedrich Nietzsche believed that as human beings, we are all connected to a great, primordial ‘oneness’, a unity that precedes the development of the ego and the rise of individuals. Trapped in a rational cage, however, humans are unable to access this fundamental truth. Language, a clumsy, awkward tool even at the best of times, is unable to pierce into the truth of being. However, it is through music, Nietzsche argued, that we are sometimes afforded a glimpse of the innate unity which we all share as humans. Music bypasses cognitive understanding, and can evoke the same emotional response in a room of people, no matter what languages they speak, connecting us all and engaging with us on a level that is unexplainable on a rational level. Music speaks, as Nietzsche wrote, “from the heart of the world”.
At Mount Lebanon, during the intensely musical service, I experienced something unique. I hesitate to call it a religious experience – I didn’t quite feel like Saul on the road to Damascus – but it did set off a powerful emotional response in me that went right to my core. On some level, I felt connected to every person in that room. I felt that we were sharing in something, something uniquely and joyously human. The pastor may have said that what we shared was membership of the “fellowship of God”. Whilst I don’t know if that’s necessarily true – there’s something a bit too ‘Lord of the Rings’ in it for me – I had the feeling that whatever it is we were involved in, this crazy game of life, wherever it takes us and whatever becomes of us at the end, the one saving grace is that we are all in it together. I think that’s an important lesson to take heed of even on a practical, rather than a purely metaphysical level. One thing we all share in this life, beyond any petty differences of race and creed, is our humanity. And that’s something to celebrate.
