NEWSLETTER INSERTS - ON THE POWER OF MUSIC TO LEAD US TO FAITH

As the Fleadh Cheoil begins next week here in Wexford, we offer a few inspirational quotes for newsletters on how music can lead us to faith and attunement to the dynamics of divine love.

‘The inner and the outer man are harmonised in a kind of music. The mind of Christ is the controlling influence that inspires us to moderation and goodness in our behaviour’.

St Gregory of Nyssa

‘To the Trinity be praise! God is music, God is life that nurtures every creature in its kind’

St Hildegard of Bingen

‘How I wept during your hymns and songs! I was deeply moved by the music of the sweet chants of your Church. The sounds flowed into my ears and the truth was distilled into my heart’.

St Augustine, Confessions

‘Think of a musician tuning his lyre. By his skill he adjusts high notes to low and intermediate notes to the rest, producing a series of harmonies. So too the wisdom of God holds the world like a lyre and joins things in the air to those on earth, and things in heaven to those in the air, and brings each part into harmony with the whole. By his decree and will he regulates them all to produce the beauty and harmony of a single, well-ordered universe. While remaining unchanged with his Father, he moves all creation by his unchanging nature, according to the Father’s will. To everything he gives existence and life in accordance with its nature, and so creates a wonderful and truly divine harmony’.

St Athanasius.

‘We need to savour the beauty of music, a spiritual, hence universal, language and a particularly suitable vehicle for understanding and union among people and peoples. Music is a part of all cultures and, we might say, accompanies every human experience, from pain to pleasure, from hatred to love, from sorrow to joy, from death to life. We see that in the course of the centuries and millennia, music has always been used to give a shape to what is impossible to express with words, because it awakens emotions otherwise difficult to communicate. It is not, therefore, by chance that every civilization has given importance and value to music in its various forms and expressions’.

Pope Benedict XVI

‘Music, great music, relaxes the mind, awakens profound sentiments and is, as it were, a natural invitation to raise one's mind and heart to God in every situation of human existence, both joyful and sad. Music can become prayer’.

Pope Benedict XVI