This is a resolution I intend to keep
“Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and joy are in his dwelling place.” I Chronicles 16:27 New International Version
If you’ve been trapped in an ordinary day and then heard a song you love, you know what happens. If I’m flipping through a sales rack when an old Motown tune starts up, I can’t help but smile. Trumpets and saxophones, the vocals and rhythm, and even the memories change my mood. Everything suddenly is better.
Music and joy are intimately connected, so my resolution for 2017 is more music. Specifically, the great classical works because they move me in a way I can’t explain. I may want to dance when I hear Motown, sing along when I hear show tunes, or lift my hands when I hear gospel, but when I hear a Beethoven symphony or a Mozart opera, I’m overcome by wonder. Wonder is that feeling of amazement and admiration, caused by something beautiful, and it’s the incubator of joy. When wonder surges into a great wave of happiness, then joy has taken hold. More than an emotion, joy electrifies us.
The connection between music and our bodies is mysterious, giving rise to research and even careers in music therapy. Music can make us laugh or cry; it can help us exercise or it can stop us in our tracks. I’ll never forget the first time I heard “The Bells of St. Genevieve.” I could almost see Louis XIV sweeping through a room of silver furniture at the Court of Versailles. It was as though part of the universe disappeared—the part that controls time—and the twentieth century fused to the seventeenth century. The music pulled me into its orbit, and I didn’t just imagine the French court, I felt it, with its intrigue, haughtiness, whispers, and weariness. Windows opened, birds flew in the gardens, wine flowed, and dangerous liaisons grew like vines wrapping a trellis. Years later, this piece continues to have a haunting effect on me.
Music speaks to us without words yet in a language we understand. Think of how movie soundtracks amplify our emotions, increasing our terror when the bad guy is about to find the good guy, or melting our hearts when two people fall in love. Music can sound like death, destruction, or danger; or hope, happiness, and even hilarity. Early cartoons used music to great effect.
We’ve created music since our earliest days on this earth. In Genesis 4, Jubal is described as “the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe.” These two instruments—one a string instrument and the other a wind instrument—form the foundation of so much that followed. I’ve read that flutes, carved from the ivory of mammoths during the Ice Age, have been unearthed in German caves. Remarkably, they use a pentatonic scale, the same tonality we use today. Musical descendants of Jubal’s lyre and pipe are everywhere—what are the piano and guitar, if not stringed instruments? And the trumpet, if not a wind instrument?
King David, who wrote many songs for ancient string and wind instruments, wrote a special song for the arrival of the Ark of the Covenant. Recorded in I Chronicles 16, it reminds me of the cannons exploding in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture: thunderous with praise and exulting in God’s triumph. Of the many things David says about God, he includes this little phrase: “strength and joy are in his dwelling place.” As I meditate on this picture of God’s dwelling place, I think about music. If God dwells in a place of joy, and if music makes joy greater, then it stands to reason that it’s happening in heaven. Walter Savage Landor, an English poet, once wrote: “Music is God’s gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven.”
Too often I’ve made New Year’s Resolutions for silly things. Unrealistic things. This year, I resolve to learn something that may prove of everlasting benefit. Since the last psalm rouses us to praise God with all manner of instruments, beginning “with trumpet blast,” perhaps music–even a trumpet blast–will be the first thing we’ll hear when we cross to the other side. Perhaps Henry Van Dyke had it right in his poem, “Gone From My Sight.” He described death as like a ship disappearing from view. Although it leaves one shore, and those watching say, “There, she is gone,” others wait for the ship’s arrival, ready to shout, “Here she comes!” This is a beautiful image of the experience of those burying the dead and those welcoming the saints into the resurrection. But what of the dead themselves, the “ship”? Will the sound of music be the clue that they’re entering the New World? Paul wrote that the resurrection will begin with “the blast of the last trumpet” (I Corinthians 15:52 NIRV). “Listen, I am telling you a mystery,” he explained. “We will not all die. But we will all be changed. That will happen in a flash, as quickly as you can wink an eye. It will happen at the blast of the last trumpet. Then the dead will be raised to live forever. And we will be changed.”
I can only imagine. For now, I want to hear more.