Praying Through Music

If there is one thing that I have learned from my piano teacher, (and it is definitely not counting; Lord grant her patience in dealing with my terrible counting!) it is that playing can become a prayer, and that it can come straight from the heart.

I am not exactly sure why I decided to take piano lessons, seeing as it was never an instrument that particularly interested me, at least not until after I started learning it! I think that when I was little, I had an issue of taking things up only because the people I knew and loved were doing those things. Then, after a short time, I would get burnt out on it because it was not something that I actually enjoyed doing. Perhaps this was initially the case when I asked to take piano lessons, but as time went on, it definitely proved otherwise. I think that God, in His infinite mercy, took the result of a fault of mine and reshaped it, so to speak, into something much more beautiful. Unlike all of my other endeavors which had (and still tend to have) personal gain as the goal in some way or another, I can offer up every note to God, even if it is a wrong one.

Prayer is the raising of our hearts and minds to God. Our hearts are a very deep and personal place, as the Catechism says, it is the “...hidden center, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others; only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and know it fully.” It is often hard to put the things on our hearts into words, either because we can’t find the words to do so or because we simply do not desire to reveal those things to others in a comprehensible way. Music, however, can be a way of expressing those things in our hearts in such a way that it is not necessary to provide an explanation for what it means. I find that for myself, a song without words can be a prayer of any kind, which differs depending on the state of my heart. When words are added though, it expresses prayer of a more specific kind, which I find helpful when I have trouble putting my prayer into words of my own. Having said that, I don’t think that we always need to use words, and that with our music, we can just direct our hearts and minds to our Beloved Lord, which is a prayer in itself.

What I have also learned from this is that it is possible not only to turn our music into prayer, but to turn all that we do into prayer. All of our gifts and talents come from God and are meant to be used for His glory and praise, which is exactly what it means to pray through music and anything else that we do. I am really bad at this, but having been taught that we can pray through music, and having experienced that myself, gives me encouragement that it is possible and that perhaps I will one day be able to turn all that I do into prayer.

So, when I started taking piano lessons, I think that our Lord offered me a means of prayer and a way that I can fulfill the vocation that we all share: to give glory and praise to His Name and to proclaim His eternal goodness! I feel inclined to make it clear that I am not at all an expert in any of this and that I am not a very remarkable pianist, though my counting is remarkably bad. And by giving us the gift of music, God has blessed us with a universal method of prayer. We are told to make sacrifices of praise (Hebrews 13:15), which is best done when we turn our hearts and minds completely to Him. By lifting our hearts and minds to God through His incredible gift of music, we can offer each song, whether it is a complete symphony or a simple tune, as a sacrifice of praise.

I’ll leave off with a few words on sacred music from St. Augustine. I have trouble wording myself, so I’m not sure if anything I’ve said has made sense, but he knew exactly what he was trying to say!

“I feel that our souls are moved to the ardor of piety by the sacred words more piously and powerfully when these words are sung than when they are not sung, and that all the affections of our soul in their variety have modes of their own in song and chant by which they are stirred up by an indescribable and secret sympathy.”

 -Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X, chap. 33, MPL, XXXII, 799ff.