This piece is featured in Issue No. 24: Music, the new issue of the Word on Fire Institute’s quarterly print journal, Evangelization & Culture.
Life is a wild journey, and one meets literally thousands of people along the way. Each person is so unique in themself, manifesting an element of the mysterious reality of their Creator through their uniqueness and creativity. Tollak is one of those guys. He is a professional blues and jazz musician from the USA currently living in Europe. Music has taken him all over the world, facilitating relationships with so many people. Tollak has a gift for changing lives. The freedom and spontaneity that governs his life is only possible because of some sort of deep gravitational pull within his soul. His eyes tell a story. The music he plays tells a saga.
I am grateful for the opportunity to have lived in Rome for four years while completing my theological studies. When not in the classroom or chapel, I often frequented the blues bars and jazz clubs of the Eternal City. Walking back to the seminary one day from the university, I saw an event flyer announcing that Tollak Ollestad would be in Rome later that month. As soon as I got back to my room, I looked him up online and sent an email. Three weeks later, we were spending the afternoon together. Those four hours literally changed my life.
It all began some six years earlier when my mother gifted me a small harmonica for Christmas. Every year, she gives us something new to learn. One year, it was crochet hooks. Another, it was mind puzzles. That year, it was a harmonica. Initially, I scoffed, but I gave it a chance, and I’m glad I did. That unique instrument helped me to more deeply understand my uniqueness, how the Lord has uniquely made me and intimately holds me into existence. My collection of harmonicas reached its peak at seventy-six. The journey of acquiring that many harmonicas was accompanied by a deep study of music theory and the history of blues and jazz. Music is a powerful thing.
That afternoon with Tollak was amazing. He spoke of the musical subconsciousness and how music is essentially the universal language. Little did I know, he was planting the seeds for what would be my final theological thesis: the study of music as the language of the soul according to St. Augustine and Benedict XVI and how the blues and jazz are the twentieth-century reliving of the exodus experience as recorded in the Psalms. We can unpack that endeavor another day. Here, I want to dive into the beauty and depth of the simple and humble harmonica and how it’s changed my life.
As I mentioned in the opening of this article, life is a journey. That’s not anything new. From the beginning of creation, God made us to be together and to travel. He made us to journey together. He made us for accompaniment. The story of salvation is nothing short of God rounding up a tribe, calling them to follow him and sustaining them on their journey. But to where? Of course, the Promised Land. Eternal Life. Heaven. The journey is always better with a friend. The journey is always better with music.
Allow the music to grab you. At the heart of it, you are allowing beauty to embrace you.
Music is our natural response to persecution and pain. Music is our natural response to freedom and liberation. The deepest human emotions cannot be expressed with any spoken language. Cultural verbiage always falls short. When words wane, music prevails. Words are only understood by those who speak that language, and only a portion of them will feel the gravity of the message. Music, on the other hand, will be understood by all who are touched by it. Music is truly the universal sound.
The journey of life is full of “inexpressible movements.” The birth of a child. The death of a loved one. The angst caused by deep depression. The joy of life. Words always fall short. I would argue that anyone reading this would be able to find a song that resonates with that moment of life.
Music is often used to distract us from reality. This is a terrible mistake. It shouldn’t distract us from reality. It should lead us more deeply into it. The late Pope Benedict XVI put it well in an address to artists in 2009: “The experience of beauty does not remove us from reality, on the contrary, it leads to a direct encounter with the daily reality of our lives, liberating it from darkness, transfiguring it, making it radiant and beautiful.” Freedom is only found in reality. The same is true about God. He is only found in reality.
As already stated, music allows us to continue preaching when words fall short. It is the natural response of the heart, mind, and soul in moments of persecution and liberation. Music is the cry of a voice that resides deep within us. The cry beckons and believes it will be heard. In theological terms, music is an expression of hope and faith. In the hardest, darkest moments of life, music accompanies. It serves as a salve for our weary souls. In the greatest, most joyful moments, it gives wings to our soul.
Let me be clear, music is not the most important thing. It expresses the most important thing: the soul’s thirst for God. Music is not the content but the means for expressing the essence of what lies in the heart. And as St. Augustine so aptly pointed out in the opening chapter of his Confessions, “Our heart is restless until it rests in God.” We are anxious, and the journey of life is nothing other than the search for that rest. Music doesn’t distract us from that journey. Music helps us keep our rhythm. Music reminds us that we are made for more, and it draws us to that “More,” who is our Savior.
After Tollak and I had coffee and talked about music, we went to the blues bar where he was scheduled to play a gig. I went with a few other seminarians. The show began at 11:00 p.m. and finished around 2:30 a.m. (Yes, we got permission from the seminary rector to be out so late.) What we talked about earlier in the day, I experienced as he played. Not a word was sung that evening. Only music. Guitar, bass, drums, and Tollak’s harmonica. The whole crowd was speechless. They too knew that words were not enough. God gave us music for the journey. The journey to the kingdom, to the place where words serve no purpose. Just glory and adoration.
If you are a music aficionado, you understand this. If you are new to music, this may seem foreign. Don’t overthink it. Start with what resonates within you. Maybe it is the rhythm, the beat, the melody, the groove. Find a genre, artist, or song that touches you. No. Not something that merely resonates within or touches you. Rather, allow the music to grab you. At the heart of it, you are allowing beauty to embrace you. When beauty holds you, one of the transcendentals along with the good and true, it will only carry you to the most beautiful, the most good and true. It will carry you to God. That is what the transcendentals do.
If we acknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence, the Mystery of which we are part; from this Mystery we can draw fullness, happiness, the passion to engage with it every day.1
Over coffee that afternoon, Tollak spoke of the musical subconscious, this inherent urge within us to express our soul with music. It didn’t make sense until I experienced it. The very notion he was trying to express fell short until it was personally lived. This is nothing short of our life of faith. This is what it means to be Catholic. We can learn so much through catechesis and evangelization—and they are essential—but it will only be grasped once it’s lived. That requires us to take a leap of faith. That requires us to drop our nets and follow the Christ. That requires us to sing.
The journey is always better with a friend. It is always better with a song. Come, follow me.
1 Benedict XVI, Meeting with Artists, November 21, 2009.