Cary: Music essential to devotions

McClatchy Newspapers

The Rev. Fran T. Cary, pastor of Trinity A.M.E. Church, Kansas City, Kan.: Music is something we both hear and sing when we worship. This is related to the fact that worship is both call and response. The call of God reaches the depths of our hearts with special power through music, and our singing expresses with special power the deepest response of our hearts to God.

When we recognize the importance of music we do not detract from the centrality of word and sacrament. On the contrary, music adds immeasurably to the power of Scripture and preaching, prayer and sacrament. Because music is also rooted in the emotions, music can express the inexpressible and serve as a mask for realities in life.

Music allows us to demonstrate our belief in and faith in God through adoration and praise. It is an attempt of the human spirit to touch the divine through religious activity. Keeping this in mind, there are some things that music should do.

First, the quality of music should be constantly tested by the biblical norm. Second, music must be understood in the context of worship. Third, music must reflect the social as well as the theological history of the community. Fourth, music should contribute to the edification, or “up-building,” of the people of God.

Rabbi Mark Levin of Congregation Beth Torah, Overland Park, Kan.: From the human perspective, God is wholly other. We share only the holiness God has implanted within us. But God has provided humans with an intuition of God’s existence and the means for humans to cross the infinite gap between the human and the divine. Among these are love, altruism, meditation, prayer and music.

Music has many roles in worship. Where words conceptualize and build one upon the other like bricks in a building, music’s immediacy bypasses the rational and taps directly into the emotional. Music facilitates intimate experiences of the divine, even though those experiences are entirely personal and therefore nontransmittable except among those who share the moment. Music brings the divine and human together beyond rational cognition to nearly familiar communication.

Often music is used not only to construct a communal experience, but also to facilitate memorization and repetition. In the Hebrew chanting of the Torah, musical cadences are harnessed to express the grammar and divine intent of the unvocalized text that contains neither capital letters nor punctuation.

Thus music is the interpretive tool to transmit divine words to the people. In combining movement, prayer and music, the entire body is brought to the prayer experience and utilized to connect to God.

Music connects the past to the present and links global communities in different times and places together in a shared experience of approaching God.