Musician Spirituality?

Tonight I had something of an epiphany as I went to fill up my poor frozen car with gas--and no, it had nothing to do with the fact that I was getting gasoline. It had a great deal more to do with the accidental fact that my radio was playing. Playing music, that is. And as I half-consciously pondered the emotions that the music was raising (I'm not even sure what they were... it was some country song I've heard a hundred times, probably), it occurred to me that I tend to think about them a bit more seriously and spiritually than I do most other things. It's a well known fact that music, as memory, lasts longer and thus would seem to strike deeper chords than most other memories.

The epiphany that this sparked was related to a brief discussion that occurred yesterday at Boston Pizza in the midst of many much zanier conversations. Travis and Aaron were talking about Ignatian Spirituality, a subject I'm pretty ignorant on, although a seminarian's ignorance is often a layperson's expertise, where Church matters are concerned. Anyway, in touching on Ignatian Spirituality, Travis summed it up as being when you put read a gospel/Biblical text and put yourself into the position of the people in the text. The conversation moved on, and I thought nothing more about it, for while a number of seminarians really like Ignatian Spirituality and find it very appropriate for their personalities, insofar as I am acquainted with it, that's not been the case.

Going off the simple definition above, perhaps the reason that Ignatian Spirituality doesn't work so well for me is the fact that I have too much of a historical bent, meaning that while I'm capable of putting myself into other people's shoes, I tend to focus too much on getting it right than on letting the spirit of the moment say something too me. To put it another way, I'm too knowledgeable of the cultural/linguistic differences between myself and those of a Mediterranean culture 2000+ years ago to let myself get into it fully. Now, while it could very well be that I've simply not been fully and properly exposed to Ignatian Spirituality, as far as I currently know it, it isn't a personally successful schema thus far.

For whatever reason, however, when I was thinking about music and its effect this evening in the car, my subconscious dredged up yesterday's brief definition of Ignatian Spirituality, and something clicked. I realised that if one changed the context from putting oneself in the place of Biblical characters in a given story to putting oneself into the context of a particular song, then the basic pattern worked extremely well for me.

Well, to clarify somewhat, I don't generally imagine that I am that person either singing or being sung of, but I meditate rather on the emotions in me that the song raises. In many cases, particularly those of religious or liturgical nature, the emotions raised tend to be directly associated with the priesthood, and tend to tie in directly with my feelings about my vocation. Indeed, if I had to express exactly what thinking I'm called to the priesthood feels like, I'd be clumsy trying to get it out in words, but I could name easily a dozen songs that are exactly it, not necessarily in their lyrics as in their tunes and the emotions they evoke (naturally, the musical pieces that lack lyrics will of necessity be that way).

Now, some people are music snobs, and will be unable to fathom that after hymns and classical music my chief musical listening pleasure is country--and not classic country, but modern country, and all the "pop" feel that it is purported to have. Not being an expert in pop, I cannot attest to that; all that I can attest to is the fact that I enjoy listening to it. It tends to be drastically more bittersweet that listening to something like an "Ave Maria", and the lyrics often play a more important role. The bittersweet element comes in, probably, because of the secular element of the music, and I don't mean secular in a derogatory sense, but in the sense that it is pretty much directly opposed to the priestly life in terms of what it promotes. The vast majority of country music either promotes happy, romantic life, or else bemoans the lack of it. And this is well and good. The marriage vocation is the human default in many respects, and "it is not good for Man to be alone".

All the same, it cannot be said that such a vision is any way compatible with the life I am choosing by being in seminary, and since such a vision (even if presented through an oft-distorted lens) is presenting something that is inherently good, it is a bittersweet moment to ponder on it when a seminarian, and I think it is valuable to go through that, since it's a constant testing and reminder of the truth of what the life of a priest is.

Otherwise, there is pretty much no music that I listen to on a regular basis, so I cannot speak as to the emotions that, as a broad genre, they tend to bring up, except to say that this may explain why I dislike the more "noisy" and discordant ones. In any case, there are within my preferred genres enough divergent individual pieces to feed just about any meditative mood.

It's possible too that this may shed some light on why I find meditation to be something of a struggle. As a general rule, I can't meditate on a text. I can read a text, and I do my best to ponder on it, reread it, and speculate... but I never feel like I'm getting any further than the surface. And I'm utterly incapable of meditating on an image, or just sitting there: my mind wanders far too easily. Music has the dual advantage, it would seem, of distracting me from all those thoughts that fill my mind and seek to get out and preoccupy me, while simultaneously giving me something to concentrate and meditate on.

The more I think about this, the more I am intrigued by it. Now I have to see if I can get music in chapel during Adoration. (Hmm... that reminds me that I REALLY found Taizé worship to fit my meditative style.) Fat chance of that, and for good reason: while my personal style is most conducive to music, this is not universally so. Perhaps the Spirit is trying to broaden my spiritual horizons with other forms of meditation, but it's a painful process if so.