The Power of Music

Before my children started school, I taught them our telephone number by making a jingle out of it. Advertisers have known this memory trick a long time.  After all, didn't we all learn our letters with the Alphabet Song? We are most conscious of the activity of the verbal, logical left side of our brains.  Music opens up the right side. When we learn by singing, we are setting our whole minds to the task.

I first recognized the power of music when I was in high school, long before I became a therapist. The movie MASH had just come out, and I really liked the theme song Suicide Is Painless. I played it everyday on my piano. Do you remember the lyrics? "Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes, and I can take or leave it if I try." Never very skilled at music, I was surprised to find with all my practice, I played it well enough to sing along. Until one day I noticed: I had become depressed, and nothing in particular had happened in my life to cause it. Then I realized that the cynicism of this little song had infiltrated my mind. I stopped singing it every day, and my depression lifted.

We recognize the power of music. We all know the stores put on the Christmas songs in November (if not earlier) to encourage our buying. We know how a favorite song from the past can revive our memories. Music affects us, more deeply than the adolescents in my family want to admit. (But you should see our family move on those  Saturday mornings when we clean the house to the beat of the Village People's YMCA! Try it at your house.)

Doesn't it make sense that we could put this power of music to positive use in our lives? Think of how it can stir our minds and set us moving! The question to ask yourself this week is:  How much do you consciously use music as part of your spiritual practice? 

When you come home from work, are you more likely to turn on the television, or the stereo? In your car, when you listen to your radio or tape player, exactly what are you feeding your soul? Are you hearing music, or noise?

This world is so full of noise. Even in the early morning in our garden, I can already hear the buzz of  traffic on a boulevard a mile away.  Carl Jung once said, "The Devil is not in the noise, he is the noise!" In his wonderfully funny and wise book The Screwtape Letters--in which Hell's bureaucratic Chief Tempter Screwtape mentors his nephew Wormword in torturing a Christian soul--C.S. Lewis refers to Hell as the "Kingdom of Noise." The opposite of noise is music, harmonic and ordered sound, and silence. The temptor Screwtape hates them both because they are the essence of heaven. "We will make the whole universe a noise in the end . . . The melodies and silences of heaven will be shouted down . . . But I admit, we are not yet loud enough, or anything like it. Research is in progress." How often I think: Screwtape is doing pretty well these days.

We are lifting for your consideration this week 11 Tips on Using Music for Transformation and Healing. For those of you who haven't heard it, we offer Paul Warren's Sweet Deliverance, a collection of songs from his own journey through depression into faith and joy. We encourage you to find ways this week to bring the healing resource of music into your life.