Pentatonic Pentecost: Music, Neuroscience & The Holy Spirit

A very old friend is staying with my parents.  Back in the 1970's and 1980's when I was growing up she was one of the linchpins of a vibrant community of Christians, so a sort of reunion took place on Saturday afternoon at our house.   My dad and his guitar led them all in some of the old worship songs, and I sat in to lend a little color with the mandolin.

At one point, as sometimes happens, a woman began to "sing in the spirit."

This is a beautiful thing to listen to, if the singer has any skill, and this singer had a particularly clear voice.  She was singing in English, but the words flowed fairly freely and extemporaneously, words of worship and adoration.

I don't get into things like that much anymore: I've found that the deeper the spiritual experience, the greater the resistance to thinking can be, so I don't trust that sort of thing for its own sake.  But I know and love these people, and so I played along on the mandolin.  It was a simple matter: really just some variations on the pentatonic scale in the key of G that harmonized neatly with what she was doing.  At one point we were in perfect agreement on the melody for several measures, though obviously we had never rehearsed this music that was flowing rather beautifully out of her throat.

Afterward, somebody pulled me aside and said, "Wasn't that the greatest evidence of the Holy Spirit?" 

Well...

Yes, and no.

It certainly was "spiritual," but what does that word mean?

I'm no expert (though I plan to do some serious reading).  But the music and our ability to just flow together in it seems to be "natural" enough.  As Bobby McFerrin so dramatically showed The World Science Festival, the pentatonic scale is not dependent on any particular theology or even experience of "God," as distinct from the world:

But on the other hand, there is what musicians call a "groove," one of the functions of some states of mind, that flows between people in such moments.  It happens in rock, jazz, classical music... everywhere people play together. 

I'm tempted to call it a state of faith, or even love.   Whatever it is, it pleases a lot of people. 

When I was playing, I wasn't particularly pursuing an ecstatic state or anything.  But when you play sometimes you do find a kind of joy.  Without that joy, music feels strangely clunky, however artfully it's done.  When you do hit your groove, whether you're in a low club playing hard rock covers or in a church, you do feel something amazing.

Woodstock was not so different from church.  Of course, church uses this experience of music to draw attention to faith, ethics, and shared experiences of the transcendent.  Woodstock used the same experience to draw attention to the Zeitgeist of freedom, sexual love, and shared experiences of the transcendent.

Perhaps the transcendent is a bit less particular about who experiences it than some think.

Is that the Holy Spirit?

Sure.

Why not. 

Comments

[Mark McNary]

Very well put. After many years, as you well know, of identifying the movement of the Holy Spirit so closely related to musical expressions of praise and worship; I have had a similar evaluation as you have written about so well in this article. For me, I am very thankful for those early experiences with God through the means of music and His people as they sang praise. But I found myself over time very limited in this experience of a God who must be considered mystery as well as Incarnate reality. I must mention that there are blessings that can be found in a very real experience with God through this means, for you will never hear me say that the Holy Spirit is limited to how and when He can express the reality of God.

But there is a danger to the "groove" as you so well stated. Perhaps I might call it a "rut" as well as a groove that tends to provide the means for the limitation of which I write. I am reminded of something Father Denny Roland said to me when I first met him and began exploring the first thousand years of the Church. He told me that as a worship leader and pastor I had been playing on a few pieces of playground equipment with joy. God wanted to show me that there were 100 more on which to play and experience Him with fear and love.

[Susan]

Really fascinating topic. I've had a few communal, transcendent experiences, some of which I interpreted as "spiritual" and some of which I received simply as a lovely thing in and of itself. Dunno what makes the difference.

I do think that efforts to maintain a critical distance would substantially change, even limit, a given experience. Not a criticism of the wisdom of maintaining that distance, of course--you'd be foolish to give yourself over to something/someone you didn't trust. I daresay the sober attendees of Woodstock may have been less enchanted with it than the stoned.