For Wilshire Baptist Church
In Wilshire’s Epiphany class we’ve been considering some big questions recently, including maybe the biggest: “What evidence do we have of the existence of God?” That one can generate a lot of answers, among them the majesty of nature, the meticulous and amazingly organized structures of our bodies, the miracle of birth, the perfection of a rose, the clever deceptions of the rabbits that invade our garden. And for someone like me who grew up in the church, the answer may be, “Parents and church people have been telling me about God since the day I was born.”
I didn’t offer any of those answers in our class but a thought was rolling around in my head and was confirmed again Thursday night at the Meyerson Symphony Center: music is proof of the existence of God. And especially really big music.
Thursday night we heard the Dallas Symphony Orchestra perform the world premiere of Jonathan Leshnoff’s “Violin Concerto No. 2.” Leshnoff is a 45-year-old American composer and his four movement piece was a wonderful new work that I look forward to hearing again. And then they reset the stage and performed one of the greatest pieces of music ever conceived: Ludwig Van Beethoven’s “9th Symphony.” If you don’t know it, the fourth movement explodes into the roof-raising orchestral and choral extravaganza we know as “Ode to Joy.”
So what does this have to do with the existence of God? Well, nonbelievers are quick to pass off everything we know of the universe, the planets, our earth, all living things and you and me as just the natural evolutionary progression of atoms and molecules of gas and dust over billions of years. And as living creatures, everything we do is motivated by our evolved instincts for maintaining life and surviving in this evolved world.
I recognize that much of what we do indeed is basic to life and survival of our species: eating, sleeping, mating, migrating. These are activities we share with the birds and the beasts. We just do it at higher level because we have developed skills and methods greater than any other species. Fire ants build complex underground mounds; we build ranch style houses with impressive home entertainment centers. Rabbits eat the raw vegetables in our garden; we gather the veggies into the house and put them in a sauce or stir fry and, voila!
But at the Meyerson during the playing of both of these majestic pieces — and many other times that I’ve sat in that hall — I’ve had an overwhelming feeling. Mainly, that nothing taking place in that room is happening by chance or by natural selection or evolution or instinct. There is something bigger happening — something spiritual and eternal.
When we go to the symphony, we’re not there for eating, sleeping, mating or migrating. We are there for the sheer pleasure of it. We are drawn by a certain knowledge that by being there our souls are going to be stirred and stimulated in some magical way. Our spirits will rise and fall with the music and when it ends we will moved to slap our hands together and maybe shout or even stand. And it’s an expression of gratitude for what we have just experienced.
And then consider what goes into what we have seen and heard. Men and women have spent untold hours learning how to play instruments made of wood and brass and silver that were invented and perfected centuries ago by people who sought a way to create sounds of different tones and timbres. They manipulate those instruments to create those sounds in a precise order that was written in symbols on paper by men and women using a sort of complex tonal mathematics that itself was developed over centuries. And it’s woven into a sort of aural tapestry that is thrilling and pleasing to the senses in ways that we can’t really explain.
Scientists may say I’m wrong, but I don’t believe any of that has anything at all to do with our animal drives for food, shelter, safety, comfort, reproduction or rest. And when you eliminate all the animal instincts that we are wired with, all that is left is the part of our existence that science can’t measure and explain: the spiritual, and that is the place where we meet God, the one who made us.
Why am I going on about this? Because there are days when I have serious doubts about the existence of God and the meaning of life, especially in these days of violence and unrest. Sometimes the human race behaves like soulless animals motivated by nothing but raw energy evolved over time from the Big Bang. But then I hear a great piece of music and I know there’s something greater than chance at work.
Leshnoff, the composer of the first piece we heard Thursday night, is well known for exploring Jewish spirituality through music. In the program notes, it said: “The authentic Jewish mystical schools outline in great length and detail the spiritual architecture of the universe and its relationship with God and mankind. It is within those systems that Leshnoff draws his inspiration.” And in an interview with Nashville Public Radio, Leshnoff said, “Spirituality and music, for me, are two sides of the same coin. I like to say that music is the lower part of the high world and the higher part of this lower world.”
And of Beethoven the program said: “Although he was not religious in the conventional sense, he found spiritual sustenance in his art.” He once told a patron in a letter, “There is nothing higher than to approach the Godhead more nearly than other mortals and by means of that contact to spread the rays of the Godhead through the human race.”
Interestingly, Beethoven’s inspiration for his 9th Symphony was a poem, “An die Freud’s” (Ode to Joy) by Friedrich Schiller. These words are translated from the chorus:
Brothers, above the canopy of stars
surely a loving father dwells.
Do you bow down, ye millions?
Do you see the Creator, world?
See Him above the canopy of stars!
Above all stars must He dwell.
Beethoven and Leshnoff — one 200 years ago and one today — find a direct connection to God through their art of music. And listening, I do the same.