The song of Soul

In Phoenix, Arizona, there is a wonderful museum called the Musical Instrument Museum with musical instruments from all over the world dating back many centuries. One is able to see what singer and comedienne Anna Russell called the three basics of an orchestra—“the bang, the blow, and the scrape”—in creative stages from a single-stringed instrument bow, perhaps originally inspired by the bow and arrow, to a polished Steinway piano. You might see how a horn, made from a bamboo shoot, evolved into an elaborate pipe organ, or how oil barrels that washed ashore in Trinidad were made into large drums. The theme posted on the wall reads: “Music is the language of the soul.”

Long before I concluded my walk through the museum from country to country, and culture to culture, I began to sense a commonality, or oneness, among all cultures throughout all time. It was not just in the love for and connection to music, but in the actual need for its expression in human lives. I began to see each instrument as a tool for the expression of music in infinite variations of sound, creativity, and beauty.

Soon I was thinking of God and two of the synonyms used for God in Christian Science: Soul and Principle. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “The influence or action of Soul confers a freedom, which explains the phenomena of improvisation and the fervor of untutored lips” (p. 89 ). Elsewhere in that book, she wrote, “Principle and its idea is one, and this one is God, …” (p. 465 ).

In Christian Science, man is understood as the compound idea, or expression, of God and is therefore at one with Him. This source and expression is infinite, established, everlasting, with no beginning or end. The same is true of music, which is an expression of Soul and can be endlessly discovered and expressed. 

Music can be endlessly discovered and expressed.

In the movie Amadeus, when Mozart was asked if his close-to-deadline composition was ready, his answer was that it was already written; it only had to be put on paper. I think he, as someone who had faith in God, was illustrating the inherent completeness of the piece and noting that a power beyond himself was the originator. He simply had to compose, or formulate, it in a way that could be heard and played by others. Just as that composition was already established, so all of God’s creation, including His ideas, is already established, or “finished” (see Genesis 2:1 ). As with music, the substance of God and His ideas is not material, but spiritual, and experienced and expressed through the spiritual senses. Neither music nor song is in the sheet music, the instrument, or the performance. If a piece of sheet music is destroyed, an instrument disassembled, or a performance stopped, this doesn’t in any way affect the existence of the song and its constant readiness to be expressed. So it is with the real, spiritual man.

The mortal, material sense of man might appear to be lost, damaged, or discordant, but the idea, the “song,” man, remains forever intact. And, just as the instrument does not define the performer, so the physical body does not define the pure, spiritual man.

Jesus demonstrated this point—the powerlessness of materiality—through his many healings, including through his crucifixion and subsequent resurrection. We read in Science and Health: “Because of the wondrous glory which God bestowed on His anointed, temptation, sin, sickness, and death had no terror for Jesus. Let men think they had killed the body! Afterwards he would show it to them unchanged. This demonstrates that in Christian Science the true man is governed by God—by good, not evil—and is therefore not a mortal but an immortal” (p. 42 ).

That day at the museum left me with much to think about. Our life as God’s “song” originates in Soul. When we clearly understand and simply appreciate the usefulness of a musical instrument, or even the human body, and keep focused on expressing that spiritual song that praises divine Soul, we gain dominion and are on the right track. Then, with the Psalmist, we declare with joy, “I will sing a new song unto thee, O God: upon a psaltery and an instrument of ten strings will I sing praises unto thee” (Psalms 144:9 ).