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For me, music is a wondrous gift from God enabling our dull, dry emotions to be awakened to the beauty of truths. I have had amazing encounters with biblical truths when they are set to music - either deliberately, or often inadvertently in the case of much mainstream music that ends up expressing deep truths about God without even realising it.
Music is a form of meditation on truth - it takes a deep, precious reality and then, like the setting of a diamond, immerses it in a form. It is poetry with rhythm, tone and timbre. For many, poetry is encountered first through music. It is sound art.
Music touches such a deep part of my soul, often one that gets buried under the muck and mire of circumstances and surface emotions. I absolutely LOVE when I hear others connect with pieces of music that I find profound resonance with - it feels such a 'meeting of souls', beyond words or expression, when this happens.
When I was a teenager, music composition on Sibelius was like my 'video game' - I was obsessed by it and it was my main artistic outlet, much more than visual forms of art, which I had not learnt to appreciate at that point. However, I had a ridiculous, elitist bias against anything that wasn't orchestral, which took encountering contemporary music at Cliff College in worship settings, and meeting Nomi, to shake out of me. Even then, I siloed myself into certain genres until from year to year sometimes a different genre would 'break in' to my consciousness and I would encounter a beautiful depth in it.
This is deeply personal and feels even strangely vulnerable to open up this to others, but here are a few pieces of music that have a wondrous resonance with me, in a few different genres, with a few reflections as to why they mean so much to me. Don't worry if you don't like them or relate to them - I just share this to encourage others to explore music in its incredible diversity more - and I would love to hear from you what pieces of music touch the depths of your soul, and especially if you have had amazing encounters with God through them!
No particular order here - and many others could be added to the list below!
JESUS WEPT - Sia
I used to listen to this walking around the wreckages of the wooden jetty structures on the River Avon in Bristol, near the harbourside, and felt I deeply identified with their brokenness... Here Sia uses a gloriously modulating chord sequence, to express freedom from addiction as Jesus walks with us through the 12 steps to freedom... For me, this was 12 steps of freedom from addiction to sin and the suffocating dark thoughts of my mind. I know He can walk with me right until the end of this desperate journey, even as He weeps with my struggle... There will be freedom at the end, when day breaks and shadows flee away...
NESSUN DORMA - Luciano Pavarotti
The last word of this intense cry of victory is "Vincero!" - "I will be victorious!" - and the expression on Pavarotti's face of triumph is so fitting... I once danced around the study room at Cliff College lip syncing to this - before I was usually willing to do this kind of thing!
When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
NARROW ROAD - Taya
"'Cause You and me on the narrow road Is more life than I can ever hope to find... anywhere else"
I absolutely love these songs that you can tell have been written out of moments of deep love and communion with Jesus - they are like poetic snippets of spiritual autobiography, where we are graciously invited to share the experience of the artist. Here Taya speaks of the 'Narrow Road' (Matt. 7:13-14), what seems like a hard path to have followed with Jesus, but it also being the place where He has drawn so close, and carried her so lovingly, and borne her burdens so that the very narrowness leads to nearness which leads to His burden being light, because He carries it with her. And so - and I can testify to this too - that in the hardest and bitterest of 'narrow road', we find life in Jesus in such blazing sweetness that is found nowhere else in the shallow experiences of the 'wide road' of this world. There is more life in following His way than we could ever hope to find anywhere else - everything else truly seems like rubbish in comparison (Phil. 3:8)...
GLÓSÓLI - Sigur Ros
This is much more symbolic and reflective from the Icelandic band, and I think is best with their wonderful music video, where the beautifully pure, untainted, unmixed love of childhood - like the love of siblings we are called to have for one another, "in all purity" (1 Tim. 5:2) - leads this band of friends through hauntingly beautiful landscapes to soar into the sky, unrestricted even now by danger or gravity...
He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:2-3)
PSALM 51 (Aramaic) - Seraphim Bit-Kharibi
This is a staggering rendition of Psalm 51, that was so formative in my years of guilt and struggle with God's forgiveness feels like a cry from the depths of the soul for mercy from our God, in a mysterious holiness and wonder (inherent in the Assyrian Eastern Orthodox tradition) as to the beauty of the compassion He pours upon us in response.
It brings to mind this from St. Augustine's Confessions:
Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!
(Here is the version with English subtitles to follow the meaning of the Psalm)
FOREIGNER - Jen Ledger
Genre: Rock
I discovered this when exploring more of the rock/metal genres and this piece was so incredibly relatable, speaking about feeling an overwhelming sense of the darkness of the world and how it could never be truly home, so full intense desires for beauty and goodness and love that are so continually disappointed. The concept of fernweh in German captures a bit of this. It it like a homesickness for our 'forever home' with the Lord, a yearning for the renewal of all things that He promises so beautifully in the final two chapters of Scripture, Revelation 21-22.
Hebrews 11:13-16 speaks in this language:
All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
FEAR OF GOD - Brooke Ligertwood
This piece expresses a deep and profound truth that the "fear of God" spoken of as actually a source of delight and refuge for His people - and a exhilarating, awestruck wonder at the soon-to-come return of Christ (I love the sheer delighted joy Brooke puts into the line, "In the blink of an eye and a trumpet sound // We will be changed"). There is a sublimity and fearsome joy and an awe-struck encounter with the infinite vastness of God found here, a trembling, overwhelmed, surrender that is so utterly satisfying that makes all the crippling anxiety of the circumstances of this world fade into insignificance before His coming...
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom..." (Proverbs 9:10)
"...he will delight in the fear of the Lord." (Isaiah 11:3 - prophesying Christ Himself)
STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA - Bruce Springsteen
On the streets of Philadelphia?"
SET APART THIS DREAM - Flyleaf
Genre: Rock
I discovered Lacey Sturm and Flyleaf's music after listening to her 3 autobiographies on Audible and being amazed at her profound faith in Jesus. Oh my, the longing this song ignites in me is indescribable, especially these lines:
"And no one cries screams or shouts // Oh set apart this dream"
"Set your thoughts on a world far off // Where we only cry from joy"
When the pain of this world is unbearable, and the future in this world seems filled with bitterness, we long so much for our home with God, painted in words so heart-achingly beautiful in Revelation 21:2-4 -
I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
My siblings in Christ, if we dare to believe His words, this is our beautiful destiny - so much greater than any dream, so Lord, set apart this dream for us!
BROKEN - Patrick Watson
This is what I would consider a true lament, a lament as to the brokenness and bitterness of the lives of so many precious human beings all around us. The streetlights and night car journeys of the video, on the rain-glistening tarmac, express this so poignantly, with the faces fading in the background, numb with circumstances and grief... I feel this paints the bleakness of this broken world that we are called to look into the eyes of, face-to-face, and let this encounter with hopelessness turn us to cry out to the only One who can make everything new...
AWAKEN LOVE - Lacey Sturm
Poetically this song is wondrous and when I first began listening to it (and to this day) I can barely listen without tears, and that is not something that comes easily to me in music, and indeed something I missed for so long. This is inspired by a combination of deep reflection on the love of Christ and His people symbolised in marriage (see e.g. Ephesians 5:25-33), through an 'entering into' the love story of the Song of Songs - a celebration of romantic love between lovers that points us to the endless love for Christ for His Bride the Church - together with our foretaste of the 'marriage supper of the Lamb' in Holy Communion. That might sound like nonsense to some, but it is a "profound mystery" (Eph. 5:32) that has inspired the people of Christ through the ages to this day, a depth of closeness that is staggering and wondrous, and which Lacey writes about again and again in her autobiographies and expresses through her lyrical art here:
Alleluia, Alleluia.
Give rest O Lord to your handmaid, who has fallen asleep."
THE DECREE - Lacey Sturm
Genre: Heavy rock / metal
I never listened to music of this kind before, as I had always dismissed screaming as a form of expression. But then at a time of life recently where my emotions became oppressive to me, and I felt devastated at life but couldn't even cry, the concept of something being so strong, so desperate, so raw, so painful, that the only vocal expression of it is a scream, took on a whole new meaning. This piece is full of this kind of scream, which is a desperate cry to God for help at the state of the world, a longing for the 'decree' of God's new life to become a reality in lifeless and hopeless surroundings. I found this kind of music - which begins with a scream out from the depth of her soul - finally felt like it took how messed-up the world is seriously rather than just singing dismissively light and superfluous reflections on it. So it was for me an acquired taste but nothing short of a great breakthrough to have found musical art of this character, that takes both the sickening brokenness of the world and the infinite power of Christ to fight this with new life seriously.
Let the fire not go out...
I kept a place in my heart safe for you"