Wounds of Love

When encountering music as listener or performer, there are occasions when everything is right, as I have attempted to describe in the previous essays. The music is so perfect, so beautiful and strong, that for a moment it is as if we have passed from this life into the heavenly places; we have been pierced by a joy too intense for mortal flesh. And then, the moment is gone.

We may also encounter such moments of illumination elsewhere -- in Nature, in the fine arts, poetry, and literature, in human interactions where we are surprised by love and grace, and in the Divine Liturgy, especially in the Holy Eucharist (cf. St. Luke 24:30-32) and Choral Evensong. We would, like St. Peter, build tabernacles and dwell forever in these places (St. Mark 9:5). And we cannot. The performance ends, or comes unglued, or we lose connection with it.

We make recordings, seeking to capture the moment. But a recording is no more than a snapshot, a flower dried and pressed in a book. Music is a living thing and cannot be captured. By its nature, live music is gone as soon as it has sounded. And even though the recording is always the same, we are not; we never hear it again in the same way.

The great spiritual doctor St. John of the Cross warned us to cling to nothing of this earth. When I began reading his writings this spring, his calls to intense mortifications of the flesh and spirit struck me as wrong. It seems ungrateful to take no pleasure in the gifts of God. But in his “Spiritual Canticle,” he described these good gifts -- and most of all, these moments of illumination and delight which one finds in music, nature, and elsewhere -- as “wounds of love,” for they point us toward their Maker:

In the vivid contemplation and knowledge of created things the soul beholds such a multiplicity of graces, powers, and beauty with which God has endowed them, that they seem to it to be clothed with admirable beauty and supernatural virtue derived from the infinite supernatural beauty of the face of God.... Hence, the soul wounded with love of that beauty of the Beloved... sings as in the following stanza:

“Oh! Who can heal me?
Give me perfectly yourself,
Send me no more
A messenger
Who cannot tell me what I wish.”
(from “A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ,” Stanzas V and VI)

When we are deeply moved by a musical performance, or anything else, we must cling not to it, but to Him of whom the music is but a distant echo. If we insist on clinging to the music in itself, it becomes like the leftover manna, which “bred worms and stank” (Exodus 16:20).

The Moment passes. But if we receive it aright, we emerge from the cloud of glory and see Jesus only (St. Mark 9:8). And as we grow in grace, we may come to realize that the Moment has not passed from us at all; we see Him everywhere. He remains with us as He promised: “And lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (St. Matthew 28:20).