The Music and the Mystical

by Larry DeBruyn  
Music engenders mystical experiences. This can be discerned from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera and lyrics from The Music of the Night: “Night time sharpens heightens each sensation / Darkness wakes and stirs imagination / Silently the senses abandon their defenses / Helpless to resist the notes I write / For I compose the music of the night / Softly, deftly music shall caress you / Hear it, feel it secretly possess you / Open up your mind let your fantasies unwind in this darkness which you know you cannot fight / the darkness of the music of the night.”[1]
Subject to the individual impulses, tastes and delights of composers, artists and consumers, there is much about music that is creative, experiential and ethereal. But as every genre from military marches to love songs indicate, music possesses a mysterious, if not occult, power to sway the soul. The only question for Christian believers becomes, do their musical preferences, acquisitions and experiences hinder or facilitate the Holy Spirit’s work in their souls (see Eph. 5:18-19)?

In an internet article former rock musician Tom Beaudoin makes statements that connect rock music with mystical “spirituality.” Consider the following: the “digital environment of the CD” he writes, “is the plastic, virtual ‘enclosure’ today in which younger generations taste and hear . . . the grandeur and intimacy of God”; he refers to “rock’s inherent religiousness”; he says, “both rock itself and religious experience may yet be open to further transformation”; he states that, “the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ (Gal. 5:22), are often experienced through rock music”; and that rock music is a “form of religious experience” [and] “capable of mediating religious experience and knowledge.”[2] But what religion is inherent within the rock medium? To me, it sounds like the beat of mysticism. Click here to read more of this article.

Also see: Getting Rapped Up in a Purpose