When I am sad, I sing, and then others are sad with me.聽
That reminds me of a tongue in cheek remark my oldest brother made when I told him that when I was portraying Judas in the Passion Play, some members of the audience were moved to tears. 鈥淏ad acting,鈥� he implied, 鈥渃an have that effect on people.鈥澛�
After silence, music comes closest to expressing the inexpressible.聽
I remember singing through all the Mother Goose nursery rhymes to try to keep a grandchild content when he or she was in that state between hunger and restlessness.聽
It strikes me that just as the author of the Mother Goose rhymes gives us hope and direction to live the good life and succeed in virtuous strife, so also God gives us music to cheer and inspire us.聽
Recently as I started preparing the evening lunch, I picked an old favourite disk to accompany me. I ended up delaying supper so I could hear the next Air Supply tune.聽
Art can express the inexpressible. One word in a favourite hymn moves us to tears and gives credence to the saying: 鈥淥ur sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.鈥� Percy Bysshe Shelley.聽
When our hearts are young and brittle, we find love songs to soothe us. The deeper experiences of life are expressed in opera or symphony. Music imitates real life and expresses what words cannot say.聽
鈥淲hen two lovers meet in Mayfair, so the legends tell, songbirds sing, winter turns to spring.鈥澛�
And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.聽
Music has the power to transform us when we are down. It is impossible to frown and whistle a tune simultaneously. Here is an example from real life: 鈥淚 turned onto the street where my father lives. The closer I got to the house, the more I dreaded seeing him. Since Mom died and he lived alone, Dad was often angry, and lately he was getting more and more confused. Today promised to be worse than usual. He had a new aid named Liuda, from our home country of Lithuania. The presence of a stranger was bound to make Dad even more irritable.鈥澛�
The story goes on how Dad started to complain: 鈥淭his new girl doesn鈥檛 know anything.鈥� Liuda put a Lithuanian folk tune on the turntable. Dad started to sing. Liuda smiled. When the music stopped, they started chatting in Lithuanian. (Audrey Razgaitis 鈥� from Angels on Earth).聽
Another example of the power of music comes to us from Felipe Camacho whose story begins as a confused teen in Philadelphia in the 1990s. He played video games and shared a life with friends who ended up in jail, dead or just failures in society.聽
One day he was playing a video game that required him to discover a page of piano music. The 20-second musical clip moved him to tears. He played it over and over.聽
In his last year in high school, Felipe selected a music elective and found that the 20-second musical clip of Beethoven鈥檚 was part of a much greater composition. Today Dr. Felipe Camacho is a pianist, oboist, classical composer, maestro, chemist and pharmacist.聽
鈥淢usic is one of the fairest and most glorious gifts of God, to which Satan is a bitter enemy, for it removes from the heart the weight of sorrow, and the fascination of evil thoughts鈥� 鈥� Martin Luther.聽
