Musicians Prayer Quotes

I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter. In some way, in some form, my God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him.

This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we--even our poets and musicians and inventors--never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials to build from. All we can know about the act of creation must be derived from what we can gather about the relation of the creatures to their Creator

It's like this when you fall hard for a musician. It's a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You're interested in relics -- guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It's not just about the music. It's about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.

Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they make things out of something, they have materials! But a written work can be done with nothing, it can begin in the soul! A musical piece begins with a harmony in the soul, a sculpture begins with a formless, useless piece of rock chiseled and formed and molded into the thing that was first conceived in the sculptor's heart! A painting can be carried inside the mind for a lifetime, before ever being put onto paper or canvass! And a prayer! A prayer is a thought, a remembrance, a whisper, a communion, that is from the soul going to what cannot be seen, yet it can move mountains! And so I believe that these five things are interrelated, these five kinds of people are kin.

My eyes had been closed for a few minutes when he said it: "I love you," he muttered, so quiet, like a prayer whispered into my neck. "Hmm?" I was nearly asleep myself, edges blurring; I was one hundred percent sure I'd misheard. "I love you." He said it again, clearer this time, right into my ear, breath tickling. I felt like a hydrogen bomb. I tried to be very still, but I knew he could feel my entire body tensing, a runner ready to begin a race -- Get set-- Go. I opened my mouth, shut it again. Oh God. I did love him, is the awfulness of it. I'd loved Sawyer since the seventh grade, when Allie and I began keeping a list of the places we spotted him. I loved his quick, blistered musician hands and the honest soul he kept hidden safe under all his bravado, and I loved how I was still, every day, learning him. I loved his silly, secret goofy side and the way he had of making me feel like I was a tall tree, just from the way he looked at my face. I loved Sawyer LeGrande so much that sometimes I couldn't sit still for the fullness of it, but when I opened up my mouth to tell him so, nothing came out. I could do anything for him, I realized suddenly. I could give him anything. But not that. If I said that to him, I knew I could never get it back. "Go to sleep," I whispered, and he didn't say it again.

The Lord calls each one of His children, no matter what his occupation—lawyer, doctor, maintenance man, carpenter, accountant, athlete, musician, teacher, homeschooling mom, and so on—to have a real prayer life.

Josie examined the booklet, candelabra on the cover, a program. Brahms, and then Psalm 16, Psalm 32, Bach. A prayer, the Mourner's Kaddish, in the flamelike Hebrew, followed by an English pronunciation, a translation. At least she would not clap in the wrong part. She remembered that night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Michael so handsome in his iridescent thrift-store suit and green silk tie, she in her Lana Turner black lace and spike heels. How they peered down from their seats in the top balcony at the horseshoe of musicians with their stands and instruments. When the music stopped, Michael caught hold of her hand. Lacing his fingers in hers, he tenderly bit her knuckles. She would have been the only one applauding.

The Greeks were so committed to ideas as supernatural forces that they created an entire group of goddesses (not one but nine) to represent creative power; the opening lines of both The Iliad and The Odyssey begin with calls to them. These nine goddesses, or muses, were the recipients of prayers from writers, engineers, and musicians. Even the great minds of the time, like Socrates and Plato, built shrines and visited temples dedicated to their particular muse (or muses, for those who hedged their bets). Right now, under our very secular noses, we honor these beliefs in our language, as the etymology of words like museum ("place of the muses") and music ("art of the muses") come from the Greek heritage of ideas as superhuman forces.

WORSHIP IS …not just a song, it’s a way of life. It’s not just for musicians and good singers, it’s for everyone. It’s not just 20 minutes once a week. It’s an ongoing daily attitude that reminds us of His greatness and our dependency upon Him.

Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical man is here invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levels of the world. Thus he may become aware of the universe which the spiritual artist is always trying to disclose to the race. This amount of mystical perception—this “ordinary contemplation,” as the specialists call it—is possible to all men: without it, they are not wholly conscious, nor wholly alive. It is a natural human activity, no more involving the great powers and sublime experiences of the mystical saints and philosophers than the ordinary enjoyment of music involves the special creative powers of the great musician.

What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence—a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer.

Mary was proud of her husband, not merely because he was a musician, but because he was a blacksmith. For, with the true taste of a right woman, she honored the manhood that could do hard work. The day will come, and may I do something to help it hither, when the youth of our country will recognize that, taken in itself, it is a more manly, and therefore in the old true sense a more _gentle_ thing, to follow a good handicraft, if it make the hands black as a coal, than to spend the day in keeping books, and making up accounts, though therein the hands should remain white--or red, as the case may be. Not but that, from a higher point of view still, all work, set by God, and done divinely, is of equal honor; but, where there is a choice, I would gladly see boy of mine choose rather to be a blacksmith, or a watchmaker, or a bookbinder, than a clerk. Production, making, is a higher thing in the scale of reality, than any mere transmission, such as buying and selling. It is, besides, easier to do honest work than to buy and sell honestly. The more honor, of course, to those who are honest under the greater difficulty! But the man who knows how needful the prayer, "Lead us not into temptation," knows that he must not be tempted into temptation even by the glory of duty under difficulty. In humility we must choose the easiest, as we must hold our faces unflinchingly to the hardest, even to the seeming impossible, when it is given us to do.

Psalm 61 Assurance of God’s Eternal Protection To the Chief Musician. On aa stringed instrument. A Psalm of David. 1Hear my cry, O God; Attend to my prayer. 2From the end of the earth I will cry to You, When my heart is overwhelmed; Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. 3For You have been a shelter for me, †A strong tower from the enemy. 4I will abide in Your btabernacle forever; †I will trust in the shelter of Your wings. Selah

I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant. Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like "Eat his body! Drink his blood!" It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility.

The months of June and July passed. The monsoons were tardy this year—the nights hinted rain constantly with an aroma in the air, a cooling on the skin, soundless lightning across skies. But when morning came, the sun rose strong again, mocking Agra and its inhabitants. And the days crawled by, brazenly hot, when every breath was an effort, every movement a struggle, every night sweat-stewed. In temples, incantations were offered, the muezzins called the faithful to prayers, their voices melodious and pleading, and the bells of the Jesuit churches chimed. But the gods seemed indifferent. The rice paddies lay ploughed after the pre-monsoon rains, awaiting the seedlings; too long a wait and the ground would grow hard again. A few people moved torpidly in the streets of Agra; only the direst of emergencies had called them from their cool, stone-flagged homes. Even the normally frantic pariah dogs lay panting on doorsteps, too exhausted to yelp when passing urchins pelted them with stones. The bazaars were barren too, shopfronts pulled down, shopkeepers too tired to haggle with buyers. Custom could wait for cooler times. The whole city seemed to have slowed to a halt. The imperial palaces and courtyards were hushed in the night, the corridors empty of footsteps. Slaves and eunuchs plied iridescent peacock feather fans, wiping their perspiring faces with one hand. The ladies of the harem slept under the intermittent breeze of the fans, goblets of cold sherbets flavoured with khus and ginger resting by their sides. Every now and then, a slave would refresh the goblet, bringing in another one filled with new shards of ice. When her mistress awoke, and wake she would many times during the night, her drink would be ready. The ice, carved in huge chunks from the Himalayan mountains, covered with gunnysacks and brought down to the plains in bullock carts, was a blessing for everyone, nobles and commoners alike. But in this heat, ice melted all too soon, disappearing into a puddle of warm water under sawdust and jute. In Emperor Jahangir’s apartments, music floated through the courtyard, stopping and tripping in the still night air as the musicians’ slick fingers slipped on the strings of the sitar.

The archduke candidates lined up facing the shrine, as the musicians and sword dancers had, then knelt to touch the stage. “We are those who offer prayers and gratitude to the gods who have created the world...” they began, and no sooner were the words intoned than a magic circle appeared

When the organ peals out its melodious tones, but the heart is not in the singing, do you think that God has ears like a man, which can be tickled with sweet sounds? Why have you brought Him down to your level? He is spiritual! The music that delights Him is the love of a true heart, the prayer of an anxious spirit! He has better music than all your organs and drums can ever bring to Him! If He wanted music, He would not have asked you, for winds and wave make melodies transcendently superior to all your chief musicians can compose! Does He want candles when His torch makes the mountains to be great altars smoking with the incense of praise to the God of Creation? Oh, Brothers and Sisters, I fear that it has been true of many who externally appeared to be devout, [that] ‘when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God!’ Weep over your sins; then have you glorified Him as God! Fall on your face and be nothing before the Most High; then you have glorified Him as God! Accept His righteousness. Adore His bleeding Son. Trust in His infinite compassion. Then you have glorified Him as God, for ‘God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.’ How far, my dear hearers, have you complied with that requisition?”–1892, Sermon 2257

The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryos of great artists, painters, or musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of which we now have ample supply.5 —Frederick Gates, 1913 Director Of Charity Rockefeller Foundation

Really? How does one become tired of music?” She flipped the water off and dried her manicured hands. “When the noise is used to conceal your thoughts, and you no longer can hear the one voice that will help you survive.” I shuddered as I thought back to the small window that shook and vibrated as music rose from the bars below. They couldn’t hear our screams, they couldn’t hear our cries… they couldn’t hear the pain in our prayers. All because the music concealed the truth. Because that’s what music does; it removes us from reality and loses us into the melodies and words that resonate with us, or don’t, but either way, we hope to find some form of truth in the songs. I never found truth in the often-melodramatic country songs—I hated it all. I hated the optimism, the way the musician would take heartbreak or pain and guarantee a positive outcome. Meanwhile, we were right there, hovered in the dark—shaking, bleeding, aching… Aching for them to stop singing. So maybe then, someone, anyone, could hear us. But they never did…

the normal translation of koinōnia is “fellowship,” but that coin has worn smooth with long use. It can mean “business partnership” too; that is part of it, but again it doesn’t get to the heart. And the heart is what matters. When our words run out, we need images: the look of delight when a dear friend pays an unexpected visit, the glance of understanding between musicians as together they say something utterly beautiful, the long squeeze of a hand by a hospital bed, the contentment and gratitude that accompany shared worship and prayer—all this and more.

Similar to the Rodrigo in form, “La Catedral” has a slow, atmospheric introduction, followed by an episodic, rhythmic dance. It is constructed around a simple figure, an arpeggio that Barrios pushes through a series of chord changes: a small gesture, undistinguished in itself, yet full of musical possibilities. I set the music stand aside and play it from memory. The first finger of my left hand holds a bass note while above the theme sways with a tentative rise and fall. My left hand feels secure and steady, the ground on which the music builds. My fingers make swift, pulsing motions that gain weight and mass when the sound is larger, louder. The arpeggio grows increasingly insistent and agitated. I feel every note, not just in my fingers but along my arms to the elbows, where the fingers’ motions begin, and into my shoulders, neck, chest, and back. Everything is connected. My ear, my muscles, my flesh, these notes, and this wood and string—all are parts of a single vibrating structure, communicating their movement to each other. Playing feels different now. For the first time this cathedral is really dancing. It's built on a questioning anxiety. But the structure develops a kind of reassurance, like pleading that becomes a prayer. This feeling is not notated on the page. It is something that takes place within the notes, or between them, and within my body, within the guitar's body. I first played this piece in my third year at the Conservatory, just about the time I bought my church door guitar. With so fine an instrument in my hands, I suddenly heard an unexplored dimension latent in everything I played, as if the guitar knew things I had never dreamed of. It was a moment of great promise for me. The guitar offered a quality of vibration beyond anything I had imagined before, bringing greater forces into motion than just the strings. But in those days I couldn't play it. I was braced too tightly. Playing now feels somehow simpler. I'm not practicing a fantasy of the guitar or of myself, but this instrument, this wood, these strings; I'm playing this music, letting these notes dance. It's easy to forget how simple music is. I'm like a soundboard, whose job is to communicate excitement, to balance tension. Building the instrument and learning to play it involve complicated physics. But music is about vibration, about allowing myself to be moved.

My brothers and sisters, you are called to be so much more than a machine that spits out three to five popular worship songs on a Sunday morning. You were born to be so much more than a pretty voice or a skilled musician. You are called to be a house of prayer; a living, breathing, human being, who through the power of the cross and the spilled blood of Jesus, are now connected to God the Father and have become a walking encounter with His presence.

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence, though, for the use of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was the fact that it was the best-loved hymn of Wallace Hartley and had been introduced to the Bethel Chapel by Wallace’s father, Albion Hartley, when he was choirmaster. A friend from Colne told the British Weekly: “It was the custom of the Bethel church choir leader to choose the hymn or chant after prayer and Mr. Albion Hartley often selected ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ The hymn was also a great favourite with his son, the bandmaster of the Titanic, for a cousin mentioned that he would often be kept waiting for Wallace to go and play cricket because he was practicing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ in variations on the violin.

Sufi mystic and musician Hazrat Inayat Khan once said, “Someday music will be the means of expressing universal religion. Time is wanted for this, but there will come a day when music and its philosophy will become the religion of humanity.” Khan continued, “The knower of the mystery of sound knows the mystery of the whole universe.” The nature of reality is vibration. Mantra is a Sanskrit word composed of two other Sanskrit words, man, meaning “mind” and tra, meaning “to cross over.” Therefore, mantra is “mind protection,” allowing us to free ourselves from the habitual, unconscious patterns of the thinking mind. When the mind is at peace, then yoga can begin. Sacred music assists in the healing and uplifting of the soul.

Someone has likened prayer to being on a rough sea in a small boat with no oars. All you have is a rope that, somewhere in the distance, is attached to the port.

The Talmud recounts that King David’s harp would play itself at midnight. And the Jerusalem Talmud comments that in the verse, “When the musician would play music, the hand of God would be upon him,” the word for “musician” should be read as “musical instrument” instead: the instrument would play by itself. Why do our sages insist on conflating musician and musical instrument? The answer is that when a person attains the perfect level of prayer, he himself is an instrument playing music spontaneously; he has become the instrument of song, of prophecy, of prayer. The melody is his, and his entire being is none other than an instrument expressing that prayer.

Would that I could make musicians out of stone, and dancers out of the sand of the lake, and minstrels out of the leaves of all the trees in the mountains, so that they might help me glorify the Lord-and so that the voice of the earth might be heard amidst the choirs of angels!

Ending the Year in Praise Praise the Lord! Praise God in his heavenly dwelling; praise him in his mighty heaven! Praise him for his mighty works; praise his unequaled greatness! Praise him with a blast of the trumpet; praise him with the lyre and harp! . . . Let everything that lives sing praises to the Lord! Praise the Lord! Psalm 150:1-3, 6 What a way to end the year—praising the Lord for his mighty works, his unequaled greatness. This psalm, also called the last hallelujah, invites us to join the praises to God in the holy place. The praise is not half-hearted; it is full-force praise with musical instruments—tambourine, stringed instruments, the lyre, the cymbals—and dancing, praise from everyone. When we offer God praise, we’re doing what we were created for, even if we’re not the best musician or dancer. All of us can raise our voices singing hymns, choruses, and new songs to the Lord. How has God blessed you, your family, friends, or church this year? What mighty works has he accomplished? What progress have you made in an area in which you’ve struggled? What prayers has God answered? What new attributes or aspects of God have you discovered or experienced in the past year? Lift up your voice or whatever instrument you play, and praise the Lord for these specific things as you pray this psalm aloud.   LORD, I join those in your heavenly dwelling to worship you for your mighty works. I praise your unequaled greatness. I praise you with my whole heart for how you’ve sustained me in the year that is ending, for your faithfulness, love, and provision. Thank you for how you’ll be with me each day in the new year. Let everything that lives sing praises to the Lord!   TO THE EAR OF GOD EVERYTHING HE CREATED MAKES EXQUISITE MUSIC, AND MAN JOINED IN THE PAEAN OF PRAISE UNTIL HE FELL, THEN THERE CAME IN THE FRANTIC DISCORD OF SIN. THE REALIZATION OF REDEMPTION BRINGS MAN BY WAY OF THE MINOR NOTE OF REPENTANCE BACK INTO TUNE WITH PRAISE AGAIN. Oswald Chambers (1874-1917)