Consolations
I keep a shortlist in the back of my head of pieces of music that spark feelings of transcendence. Items include: the last few minutes of Mahler’s 2nd and 8th symphonies, Bach’s 2nd English Suite, the first movement of Mahler’s 9th, Isolde’s Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan, the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s 7th, and a variety of other pieces by Philip Glass, Copland, Schubert, etc.
Some of these pieces have been with me for a very long time. In high school I would listen to certain Bach Cantatas to get myself jazzed up before final exams. In college I listened to Mahler and Wagner with religious fervor.
The music did something for me. Listening to it was, as I think many of these composers would have wished, a momentary glimpse into the divine. I was taken out of myself. I would feel myself singing, with Beethoven’s soloist, “Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen” because while listening I too felt like a hero destined for victory. And when I listened to Birgit Nilsson singing Isolde or Brunhilde, I too felt the rapture of dying for love, for union, for a longing reaching supreme intensity in the moment of its fruition.
The other day as I was out walking and singing along to Brahms’s German Requiem, it struck me that many of the pieces on my list are taken from sacred music, and often have texts which are either Biblical in origin or deal explicitly with Christian themes. In Brahms, my favorite moment happens to be a quotation from 1 Corinthians 15 (“Tod, wo ist dein Stachel? Hölle, wo ist dein Sieg?”). In Mahler’s 2nd, the climax is a choral setting of a text about resurrection (“Sterben werd’ ich um zu leben!”). It got me thinking about the role music has played in my own religious experiences.
As I aged out of adolescence and grew into my own personal variety of religious belief, the experience of being devout became more and more associated with austerity for me. Fasting, prayer, liturgical worship, eucharistic adoration, sitting through sermons—all of these were for the most part experiences of privation for me. I remember many times sitting at adoration, staring at the monstrance, attempting to achieve some sort of contemplative openness to God, and just feeling my eyes glaze over from being fixed on a single point for so long. Spiritual progress was about denying one’s base appetites and worldly interests in order to take up my own cross and follow Christ.
People talk a lot about spiritual “consolations,” and I think that for a lot of people there is an experience in the midst of contemplative prayer that really does something for them. Having never had such an experience, I don’t fully understand, but the accounts I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances vary from a momentary imaginative ecstasy or hallucination to the (somehow) palpable presence of God as a person directly with them.
Oftentimes, for people who have had these experiences, they seem to be decisive. The overwhelming confidence in the meaning and validity of the experience rules out a variety of alternative choices or beliefs. This person cannot conceive of Catholicism being untrue, simply because Jesus once appeared to them in prayer and provided assurances. Another person fully believes in his vocation to a specific religious order because of a voice that spoke in his head while he was seeking guidance in prayer one day. And so on.
For other people not gifted with mystical visions, spiritual consolation often takes the form of a vague sense of assurance, moral rectitude, or positive relationship. Jesus has your back. God loves you. In the end everything will come out right. Forgiveness is yours if you seek it. Prayer is a direct line to God. Truisms like this form a backbone of spiritual comfort that provides believers with a sense that everything is or will be OK.
For me, consolation generally took three forms. The primary form was theological reflection. I loved thinking about theology, talking about theological questions, mastering distinctions and conceptual systems, etc. It was very satisfying to me, though mainly in a technical way and not as much in a transcendental way. Here you can play with all kinds of clever inversions, the reconciliation of apparent contradictions, the drawing of distinctions… Now and then in the midst of this reflection the sense of conceptual order would coalesce into something beautiful and harmonious, and I would get a feeling of intellectual clarity and beauty that made everything feel right.
The second form of consolation was tied to moments of emotional catharsis. These sometimes happened in the midst of religious activities, but more frequently they would strike while I was watching movies. I used to puzzle over the fact that I could cry much more easily from watching someone else’s drama on screen than from my own, and maybe more so at the fact that sometimes in these moments it was very obvious to me that my emotions were based in my own experiences, rather than what I was watching. It was as if my own emotional life had become inaccessible to me, and my need to grieve was buried deep enough that I could only access it when I had the excuse of someone else’s (fictional) problems to do so.
What didn’t strike me at the time but is obvious now is that my experiences of religious catharsis were often of the same form. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but it seems to me that one of the main functions of the Christian narrative of salvation is that it offers a catch-all myth onto which one can project and retrieve one’s own core life experiences (joy, suffering, anxiety, anger, hope, love, etc.). Shedding tears during the traditional offertory over the beauty the sacrificial offering was, in a certain way, very close to the experience of watching a movie like Andre Rublev and weeping at the ringing of the bell.
The third consolation, though, was music. And while I still get joy from conceptual systems and the crystalline clarity they have when all the ramifications are laid out and their principles reveal themselves again in the whole for which they are the foundation… (“And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”) …while I still get joy from books and movies, from the lyrical compactness of Rilke’s verse, Frost’s bucolic nostalgia, T. S. Eliot’s oh-so-relatable angst… it’s music that plays this role for me the most. Music is the thing that most consistently takes me out of myself and into that essential current of life that draws us toward rapture, death, and transcendence.
There’s an amusing scene in E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End where several of the characters squabble about the concept of meaning in music. What is the meaning of the third movement of Beethoven’s 5th? Is it, say, some sort of Hegelian reflection on the spirit of negation? Is it a tone poem about goblins or a troupe of dancing elephants? One character scoffs at such ideas, and insists that music has no meaning, just notes.
As readers, I think Forster means for us to sympathize with all of these views. The reductionist view is true, but inadequate—music may be just the notes, but it still means something to us, or at least offers an occasion for meaning. What the source of the meaning is, or what end it might point toward, I cannot say—even religious writings on this topic seem pretty clueless. But there it is, undeniably real in one’s experience, deeper than words, striking one deep in the heart.
It’s wonderful that we are given such things to delight in and experience, even though we can never fully understand them, even if their meaning transcends the notes or any particular story we might tell about them, religious or otherwise.