In yesterday’s post I wrote about how music can transport us into the past. I discussed how we never know when or how this is going to happen, and how once the experience is over, it’s impossible to stumble back into this “realm” on purpose.
Moreover, I wrote how any particular song that takes us there will never serve as a portal into that same experience again.
All of this jives with a line of thinking C.S. Lewis explored in some of his nonfiction books. In fact, it served as the thesis for his memoir Surprised by Joy. Lewis says in the beginning of Joy that he one day, as an adult, out of the blue, remembered a tin of flowers his older brother had collected when they were boys; he goes on to say that this quick remembrance ushered him into a realm he called “joy,” and he says that the flowers, for that brief moment, were the portal that ushered him into that realm.
In a post last year I discussed this book (SBJ), this idea, and how the idea has played out in my own life.
Lewis also seems to be tackling this idea in The Chronicles of Narnia, though he doesn’t speak directly to it; rather, he uses the wardrobe (and later a train station, and later still a picture… and on and on) as a metaphor for the “portal” into the realm he calls “joy.”
Yesterday I suggested that music is much like the wardrobe in that it can transport us from the present into the past, but that it can only serve as a portal once; afterward, that particular song loses its magic, much the way the wardrobe lost its magic for the Pevensies (save for Lucy, who experienced it twice) after they had all been to and returned from Narnia.
Lewis most directly takes on this idea as it relates to music in his book The Weight of Glory. In it he writes:
“The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through was a longing… For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
Thomas Merton, in his memoir The Seven Storey Mountain, likewise says:
“Books and ideas and poems and stories, pictures and music, buildings, cities, places, philosophies were to be the materials [through] which grace would work. But these things themselves are not enough.”
So for Lewis, this feeling about which we are speaking—this quick trip through the portal into joy, this transportation via music into the past—is a “longing,” and for Merton, music is a vehicle for grace. And for both men it’s not about the actual music, not about the actual “material,” but about the ineffable and immaterial toward which they direct us.
In his novel Chasing Francis, the writer Ian Morgan Cron depicts a very compelling scene where, upon the conclusion of an Italian orchestra, a musicologist submits that “there is a distinct relationship between beauty and the heart’s search for God.”
I am inclined to believe that Lewis, Merton, and Cron are together on to something.
It seems to me that when we are riding in our car, or listening to our I-pod on a treadmill, or sitting in our cubicle with the radio low, and then, poof, suddenly, inexplicably, we are living in the past—not remembering it, mind you, but actually living it—I believe that this is evidence that our hearts are on a search for, are longing after, are seeking grace from God.
And I believe the heady dose of nostalgia we feel when coming to from these experiences is in fact a foretaste of the joy that is one day to come.
I’m sure Ed Kowalczyk, while writing “Lightning Crashes,” was thinking about how I’d be contemplating all of this seventeen years later.
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