Born that way

Are we born with a desire to make music, or to find beauty around us?  Are we born with a thirst for God?   Where do these desires to make music or to connect with God come from?  And I note here that those two things are intertwined for many.

Several people sent me a video recently that makes me asks these questions again.  Children growing up in the slums of Paraguay built on a landfill have found ways to create beauty from garbage.  I’m not usually in the business of helping to promote a movie, but a film is in the works about these young musicians and the leadership that inspired them to turn away from gangs to making instruments from trash, and it is a story that needs to be shared.

http://vimeo.com/52711779

In Wednesday’s Washington Post an article about Sanskrit chanting known as kirtan tells of a self-professed atheist who had forsaken the Protestant church of her childhood, but found God as an adult in kirtan. The article’s author writes:

Kirtan — its pronunciation varies — may be the prayer of the spiritual-but-not-religious, America’s fastest-growing faith group — a way back to God through ecstatic experience rather than the passive intellectualism that institutional faith has become for many.

A Jewish leader is quoted in the article:  “There is something extraordinary that happens when you have prayer or chanting that is a deep, implied relationship between leaders and people who are singing back and forth to one another. In that relationship, there is a profound sense of connection and interconnection that is transformational. That’s the experiential thing with kirtan.”

A self-proclaimed “Buddhapalian” (and family friend), Grace Ogden, notes that “Human beings need ecstasy. And this is like taking Holy Communion. It has the quality of evoking joy”.  She has been participating in kirtan for years, but says she doesn’t know the translation of every chant, finding that the power is in knowing simply that the words she is chanting are ancient and holy.

 
We have here two examples of the ways that people have come to realize that neither music nor God can be separated from us.  We thirst for both, and if we are cut off by poverty –  financial or spiritual – from either we can be made whole again when we find ways to act upon that inborn need to make music and to connect with God.