The divinity in music

I have been given the gift of musical voice, and I’m still not sure why. My family discovered that I had an incredible talent for singing when I was just two years old. Throughout my childhood years I cultivated this talent until it became clear to me and those around me that this was something I needed to pursue beyond a casual hobby. “You were born to do this,” they all seemed to say. “Your voice is a gift from God.” I listened to these people, and I tried to listen to God for a revelation. It has always been a shadow that I knew followed me around for a powerful and undeniable reason, but I’ve never quite been able to discern that reason.

As I grew up I could feel how passionate I was about singing. I could feel the effect that it had on me and other people when I sang. I had sung at churches, retirement homes, hospitals, cancer hospices, elementary schools, and prisons. I could feel the power of God moving when I used this gift for good—to help others heal and to help me heal. My life in high school was almost entirely about singing and performing, and I was affirmed for every endeavor, every performance.

It is not surprising, then, that I went to undergraduate school for music. I knew I would pursue a career in music, in some form that I struggled to determine. But over those four years, I lost my zeal for performing. I never lost it for singing, but I knew that whatever drive I had to pursue a career in vocal performance was gone. It is possible (and maybe likely) that I made up my plight in my own head, but the moment I started studying music, it became more about the effectiveness of the product than the joy of the process, and the music was lost on me. I repelled the competition, the politics, and being told what, when, and why to sing. It felt like my gift had been taken from me to be sold for someone else’s use. It wasn’t mine or even God’s anymore; it wasn’t a precious gift anymore; it was an automaton, jerked and twisted this way and that. Music used to be my solace, my gateway to the transcendent, my reason for existing. Now it was my burden, the cause of my emptiness. So, I dropped the Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance and chose, in my opinion, a more liberating degree: a Bachelor of Arts in Music. It gave me the time and freedom to explore other facets of my passions. I was able to study British literature and theatre in a semester abroad to the United Kingdom, add a fascinating minor in Latin American Studies, and be a part of a formative program called Exploration of Vocation and Ministry. This decision to change my major was a refreshing and revitalizing change of course. I could finally admit to myself and my loved ones that my long-held dream of being a performer had collapsed; that I was abandoning the life that I had so vividly sought after for years. This admission of truth lifted a long held burden off of my shoulders.

Despite the negative emotions that I came to associate music with during these four years, it is the curious shadow that never leaves me and that I wish to remain always. As I transition from my college life of studying and making music daily to a life of isolation and quiet living at home without the presence of those to make music with, I feel the void that the absence of music has left in my life. I crave the community, oneness, and transcendence experienced with those who know the power of music the way I do.

I have never felt the presence of a spirit more than when I am making music with others. I have felt this in worship services, from cathedrals in England to straw huts in India; professional rehearsals and casual jam sessions with friends; in concerts with choirs of 100 people and ensembles of four. There are unexpected, goose-bump inducing moments when I am singing with others where I am taken outside of myself and the presence of a familiar spirit fills my lungs, and I just know that God is there. I know that the voices lifted up are being made beautiful by the work of God.

In the summer of 2015, I worked for Passport Camps as a Community Life Coordinator. The main responsibility of this position was planning and leading worship. This was the first time I was able to combine my passion for making music with my growing interest in Christian leadership. I discovered that I had the temptation and tendency to micromanage every element with anxiety for possible glitches in my carefully planned structure. But no amount of planning prevents the Spirit from bursting in and surprising you beyond the limits of your imagination. There was a transcendent moment during a service when we sang “It Is Well with My Soul.” Something from outside of me prompted me to suddenly cease playing the piano and have us all sing the final verse a cappella. As I looked out at closed eyes and hands raised to the heavens, and I listened to the unified resonance of impassioned voices, I wondered if I was meant to bring people together under God through music. Throughout that summer I asked God: “What do I do with this feeling? Where do I go next?”

It is both a blessing and a heavy cross to have a gift that you don’t know what to do with. The gift that I did not request and was freely given allows me to explore both passion and burden. The passion comes from the inseparable nature of the gift from myself; like a mother with child, it lives in me, so I inherently love it and know I must nurture it. But the burden comes from the endless and mostly fruitless inquiry of how to carry it with me.

I carry on with what I do know: my voice is a gift from God, and I was born to make music as long as I live. No amount of people in my life telling me this will ever convince me; this is between me and God. I have had to come on my own to accept my partial clarity of what music means for me. I tell this not because it is a succinct and conclusive story of evolution: beginning with my musical nurturing, then losing my way, to finally a grand return to my musical roots. Life is never so simple as that, and my journey with music has no destination that I must reach.

This story’s conclusion is that music is an inseparable part of me. While I will continue to struggle to find music’s place in my eventual vocation, that search is not to find the music in me but to find the divinity and revelation within the music. It brings enlightenment to the verse:

Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12). I rest in my faith that God moves where I cannot see.