Music, Harmony and Heaven

Imagine how beautiful it will sound when we can all hear the music of the universe.

When I was in Catholic High School at Rosary, Sister Mary Paul laid out an idea that I found baffling.  It wasn’t that I disagreed with it.  I often disagreed with Sister Mary Paul.  I often agreed with her, too, but that’s another story.  This idea just confused me.  I couldn’t get my head around it.  The idea was this: People were the ones who would make “Thy Kingdom, come”.

It took me years, decades actually, to understand it.  Heaven isn’t a place where people get sent.  It’s something we make.  Living well isn’t something you do in order to get a prize at the end.  Living well helps turn the world into heaven.  That is our job as people and as a species.

I finally understood this idea when I finally made the connection between music and the universe.  Everything is in motion.  We know that.  The entire universe is in motion.  Motion creates vibration.  Vibration creates sound.  Therefore the entire universe is making noise.  We see the beauty of the motion of the stars, the changing of the seasons and other wonders of the natural world.  Therefore we imagine this noise to be in music, harmonious music.  We hear the phrase, “The music of the spheres.”

“If that is the case,” my reasoning went, “Then evil must be discord.”  Evil is evil because it throws the music of the universe into discord.  I immediately had an image of a cosmic guitar player tuning his instrument.  The image immediately inspired a vision of the Big Bang.  I saw this young male guitar player jumping up on the stage in his garage and strumming out a beautiful power cord while his band mates and their audience of parents and neighbor kids looked on.  {Yes, I imagined God to be a long haired, lead singer of a heavy metal garage band – you got a problem with that?}

So the universe is a beautiful guitar solo into which some disharmony has crept and God is surreptitiously tuning his guitar to bring it back into harmony.  We are part of that music and we honor God most when we are in harmony.  How do we know we are in harmony?  It has been my experience that if you let yourself come to a quiet place of stillness and you open yourself up with meditation/prayer, music, trance work and other methods of ‘zoning out’ you can hear the music of your Self and you can hear your own harmonies and disharmonies.  Then we can set about the business of ‘tuning ourselves’ by changing our live and our actions to bring ourselves more into

Today the part of God will be portrayed by a young James Hetfield.

harmony.

So God is a heavy metal guitarist.  The universe is the music He plays.  Evil occurs when the guitar slips a little out of tune and God has to tune it.  Goodness is everything that brings the universe more into harmony.  Evil is that which further slips it out of harmony. When everything is in tune again, that will be heaven.  This metaphor makes so much sense to me, I am baffled why I didn’t think of it before.  It fits my Catholic faith like a glove and it fits my pagan beliefs the same way.  It is why “man is not saved by faith alone.”  And it is why recycling and trying to live in tune with Mother Earth is a sacred responsibility.

The reason we do this is because if all of human kind can come into harmony at the same time.  Even if it just for a nanosecond, we might be able to hear that which we have only heard the faintest of echoes of so far.  If we can create that harmony we might be able to hear, in all It’s Glory, the music of the Universe.  If we can do it, that nanosecond will be heaven and it will last an eternity.

*** The use of the male pronoun to describe God/dess does NOT indicate a belief on my part that God/dess is male or has any other human limitations.  It is merely the image that came with this metaphor.