What We Want and What We Need – Part 2: Music

As my family vacations at Disney World, I’m treated to the richest fantasies the world has to offer. At the same time, I feel I’m getting a peek behind the curtain. No, not the curtain of Disney magic – I’ll leave that one closed. I’ve been warned that to expose those secrets is to risk expulsion or banishment from the parks. Not willing to risk that!

But I have seen these past few days that the deeper truths that guide our existence are usually little more than a step away from our imaginations. In this series, I’m sharing some stories about my experience here, and some of those truths that I’m seeing peeking around the corner of imagination.

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We are riding the Rivers of Pandora ride – a gentle boat ride through an alien world. Strange plants pulse with fluorescent light. Tentacled creatures glow with their own bioluminescence. Dog-like beasts roam in the distance, and six-footed tree dwellers scamper across the giant leaves overhead. Sights and smells unlike anything we’ve ever known surround us, and otherworldly screeches and howls reach our ears from a distance.

If you didn’t know better, you could really believe you have been transported to another planet.

In the distance comes the faint rhythmic pounding of drums. Off to one side, on a ridge, the silhouettes of humanoid creatures run in single file, holding spears. The drums increase in volume. Now these alien people are on both sides, keeping pace with our boats. There are voices behind the drums, chanting in an unknown language. The forest creatures are noisier now as well. It is a cacophony of intermingled drums, howls, chants, and chirps.

We round a bend, and there before us is one of the Navi, the citizens of Pandora. A blue-skinned giant that walks on two legs, with a face the blends cat and human. This one sits cross-legged, moving its arms in graceful circles as it… sings.

It sings.

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Here on this alien world, there is music. Imagine that. Across the vast reaches of space, we might find a people not so unlike ourselves, and just like us, they would speak the language of music.

Pandora is pure imagination. The Navi do not exist. It is animatronics, screens, and sounds and scents pumped in by machine. I know this, but in the moment of the journey down the river, I suspend my imagination enough to believe that this is real. It is the music that catches me, though.

In a universe without God, this makes no sense. Why should we find a particular combination of tones and words and beats to be beautiful, inspiring, encouraging, wistful, solemn, heart-wrenching, or joyful? And if, as the evolutionist will say, we evolved music because it provided some cultural benefit that gave our ancestors a leg up in the survival game, then why would we imagine an alien people on an alien world to have come up with music as well? Of all the myriad possibilities that evolution sets forth, why do we imagine that music is still an essential part of intelligent life?

It is because music is essential, because music is a language that found its voice at the dawn of time, at creation itself. God wove music into the universe, and any astronomer will tell you that the stars and planets themselves sing. We sing too, as the first man did when he saw the first woman and couldn’t help but break out in song.

Music defines so much of our lives because it is a language that transcends speech, and that is why we sing to the God who made music and put into us the ability to appreciate it. Music is a divine delight, one which God himself brings out of the angels and the saints he has called home. Music will be a centerpiece of our lives in the hereafter, where we will sing God’s praises for eternity.

So we sing here. And we imagine that anywhere there are people whose lives have significance, they sing as well. Music is part of the beauty that makes us human and points us to God. We need it, because it brings out the emotions we often cannot put to words. We need it, because it evokes in us the traits that allow us to carry out God’s purposes. We need it, because it doesn’t come from us in the first place. It is God’s, and we need him.

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