You brought music back into the house. I had forgotten. 

These are the words spoken by Captain Von Trapp in the 1965 musical The Sound of Music. He utters them to Fralein Maria moments after his miraculous transformation from angry and militant to warm and joyous. And it all happened because he heard his children singing in the house – singing he had silenced with insatiable demands for order and obedience.

Our deepest desires call us to the transcendent, and yet we too often conflate the fulfillment of those desires with earthly trappings in which the futile search for them exists on a spectrum ranging from aggresorial austeria to bedlamic bacchanalia. Yet both of these, and everything in between, still exist on a plane of existence that excludes the divine.

Music, nature, art, sacred texts, poetry – all of these are spiritual languages that call us to transcendence – to fly high above the draconian Baconian single-vision prison we have voluntarily locked ourselves into. Like Captain von Trapp was before he heard the sound of music, we are trapped in a wasteland devoid of spirit, of joy, of wonder, of meaning, of purpose, of love and of mercy.

This reductionist flatland of the scientific reality principle is a disease that affects all of us. It is a way of thinking that we have accepted as the only lenses with which to discern what is real and what is not. And it compounds another disease that has existed from the beginning: selfishness. In selfishness we see people, places, things, and systems of thought as utilitarian – they are for us to cultivate and harvest pleasures and tools that benefit us most.

In many parts of the world, especially the West, theology, so-called, has surprisingly drifted and deflated into the flatlands, and Churches and Christians with it. We have traded the experience of loving God and loving others for the study of God and of the heresy of others that will justify why we do not love them.

It is time to bring music back into the house of God. We have forgotten.

Source Scripture
Matthew 11:16-19; Luke 7:31-35

Connect
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Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com

Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist 
(Apple I Spotify)