Article September 16, 2013 Issue

The song of Soul

Sylvia Messner

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).