Tuesday, October 22, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Music infinity
Sin increases, and grace overflows all the more.
I had it in mind to write about passion and purity today, but then I heard Wynton Marsalis playing his trumpet and that triggered two or three, out of hundreds, memories of musical epiphanies in my own life … and I thought better of it. Passion and purity tomorrow – today’s gift sounds out from a big brass band.
Yep. One of those epiphanies came late one summer evening at Champaign’s Virginia Theater, when Centennial High School’s band marched down the aisles toward the stage, stunning us all in The Music Man’s final triumphant scene. We jumped out of our seats into a standing ovation, and I’ll never forget it.
In The Sound of Music, Maria taught her soon-to-be-adopted children to fight off storms and nightmares by remembering their My Favorite Things, then took them to town in their new curtain fabric jumpers and lederhosen to learn to sing themselves, starting at the very beginning with Do-Re-Mi. But the tragic-then-triumphant heart-stopping moment for me comes when the kids struggle to sing after their new-found friend and mentor leaves at night. “Why don’t I feel better?” But as they sing the song in a minor key rather than the uplifted major key she taught them, they hear her voice chiming in. Maria has come back, this time to say. My Favorite Things never had it so good.
What comes to your mind? What songs, and scenes, and melodies, and lines? So many come to mine. Very very very nice house, watchin’ the clouds roll away, on the sunny side of the street, take my place on the great mandala, after midnight we’re gonna let it all hang out. And then there are the gospel songs. Swing low sweet chariot, I’ll fly way O glory, I traveled the banks of the river of Jordan to find where it flows to the sea. There is only one river …
No doubt about it, music swells in heaven and bounces off angel wings, then returns to break our hearts and lift our spirits high. In the Prime series House of David, soap opera competes with bloody battles until David plays his harp and sings his psalms; all other action stops while the characters (especially King Saul) and the audience (at least me) look up toward heaven riding, the smooth sad sounds.
I announce your justice in the vast assembly;
I do not restrain my lips, as you, O LORD, know.
Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
May all who seek you
exult and be glad in you,
And may those who love your salvation
Sing forever, “The LORD be glorified.”
… Here we am, Lord; we come to do your will.
AARP (American Association of Retired People) lobbies in Washington (even in these dark days) and I am grateful that its magazine shared a story of how music transformed subway stations and nursing homes, renewing life in isolated, traumatized dementia patients, commuters, care-givers and receivers, children and grandparents. I found the story at midnight last month and couldn’t stop reading until there was no more.
My excitement kept me from sleeping for awhile. Hope abounded, assuming the best, knowing how close God is when the music plays, and also knowing how alone I feel when the music dies … awake through all of that, until with a refrain of the Lord’s Prayer (yours is the kingdom and the power and glory forever and ever) and the Rosary’s final couplet (holy mary, mother of god, pray for us sinners now at the hour of our death), I dropped off happy, dreaming, skipping down the street, whistling a happy tune, then weeping, then laughing again.
Once ten years ago or so, sitting up on my bed at Stritch Retreat Center in Mundelein (its new name is the Joseph and Mary Retreat House), I strummed my guitar and sang the first two chapters of Galatians. I imagined that Martin Luther listened while he wrote his commentary proclaiming freedom. Melody seemed to easily fit the words, and important phrases repeated themselves into refrains. I knew how close the Holy Spirit was, riding in on a white horse, singing at the top of her lungs …
And in the end the love you take … is equal to the love … you make.
How much more does the grace of God
and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ
overflow for the many?
(Romans 4, Luke 1, Matthew 5, Luke 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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