God Gets the Last Laugh

 Out of the many tragedies of coronavirus days — from lost lives to missed playdates, from broken marriages to unemployment — has been the silencing of music. While it certainly does not deserve to be classed with more major, life-altering events, music is one of those things that makes life worth living. But now Broadway is online; community theaters are shuttered; church choirs are disbanded in favor of cantors or — nothing at all.

Nor is this a trivial alteration, the cancellation of one sort of “entertainment” that can easily be replaced by another, as if knitting parties by Zoom could somehow sate the human spirit’s need for song. Music is unique: its presence in every culture, its uselessness, and its frequent employment in worship suggest that it answers a universal desire to express something deep in human nature, even something transcendent. Its unique role earns it a cameo in The Screwtape Letters, where C.S. Lewis puts the following sentiments in the mouth of the experienced demon instructing a junior tempter:

The whole house and garden [of a certain girl] is one vast obscenity. It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer made of Heaven: ‘the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence.’  Music and silence — how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since Our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise — Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile — Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end. But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything like it.”

Music and silence are, of course, the two modes that lift the liturgy into the sacred. In the traditional Latin rite the canon is silent or sotto voce; in the Eastern churches it is sung. Even today, the option to chant or speak quietly for the canon is present in the Novus Ordo, and adopted on solemn occasions like Christmas and Easter. (Now, if only more priests could treat every Mass as a solemn occasion!) And of course, congregational participation in hymn singing is a part of the liturgy for most Christian churches in America.

It seemed, therefore, like a particularly cruel joke from an infernal perspective that music got the ax early in coronavirus time. Multiple cases and two deaths resulting from a choir practice in Mount Vernon were followed by videos and expert testimonies about how singing might spread water droplets carrying the virus, infecting far more people than mere conversation. So the singing stopped, even in those places where services were still being held (distanced, with masks, etc., etc., etc.). It wasn’t as if Catholics were ever very good about singing in the first place; now, we might as well all be deaf and mute.

Read the rest at the Register: https://www.ncregister.com/blog/god-gets-the-last-laugh