MUSIC THAT IS SOUNDLESS

Music Within...is the Voice of God.....

Music that is soundless is a translation of a line from a poem of the mystic John of the Cross by the author Philip McShane. The title is taken purely from the poem “The music without sound/The solitude that clamours.” Very interestingly at one pint the book unfolds the truth that all of us, the entire creation (each member, each group, all are a wave in the eternal truth. He considers life as a crystal tear-drop on which snow falling in the tear-drop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If we only look into those tear drops for the next million years, we will never figure out who the people are, and what they are doing. Sometimes we sit lonesome for a storm. A full blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and completely wild. This he says, God playing music in his favourite cathedral in heaven-thundering on the keys – perfect harmony and perfect symphony and perfect joy. If we are attuned to our self, the other and the nature I am sure will begin to find meaning of the word God growing in our hearts.

He tells us a method by which we begin to understand God. For this he gives an example of the scientific understanding of the self. Just as a blind man cannot understand a disquisition on colours, so a person with no experience of direct understanding cannot be expected to reach by introspection an understanding of what direct understanding is: and similarly a person without experience of introspective understanding cannot be expected to reach by an introspecting of the second order and understanding of what introspective understanding is. One must begin from the performance, if one is to have the experience necessary for understanding what the performance is.”

This is how Bernard Lonergan has explained about the scientific self-meaning of God. Further he adds all ‘Music calls to an ear not the musician’s own, all sculpture to an eye not the sculptor’s, architecture in addition calls to the step as it walks in the building. To summarise, God is Understanding, has a meaning towards which one is oriented by self-appreciation, that it has a meaning which is the meaning of each man’s history and all men’s history, of history and eternity. So we can speak of God as Understanding where one means also LOVE, JOY, DELIGHT, LIFE, ATTENTION etc. Therefore God is the unrestricted act of understanding, the eternal rapture glimpsed in every Archimedian cry of Eureka. So God is glimpsed too in human love and human joy. But if God is glimpsed in the contemporary world it is perhaps partly because there is something inadequate, something sick, about human love and human joy, human aspiration and human meeting.