Or: “And yet…”
Revd Darren McCallig’s sermon from Music Sunday.
“Music is what language would love to be, if only it could.” – John O’Donohue
Reflecting on Music Sunday, Darren explored the unique power of music to communicate truths that words alone often cannot express. Drawing on writers including John O’Donohue, Anthony Trollope and Nick Hornby, he suggested that music opens us to mystery and wonder, helping us to engage with reality in ways that go beyond literalism, reductionism and simplistic certainties.
Using the contrast between the rigid Obadiah Slope and the music-loving Septimus Harding from Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles, Darren argued that music resists both religious and secular forms of fundamentalism. Music reminds us that there is always more to reality than can be captured by facts, arguments or explanations alone, and that mystery is an essential part of faith.
The sermon concluded with Francis Spufford’s moving account of hearing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto after a bitter argument. In that music, Spufford heard both the truth of human failure and an “and yet” of grace, beauty and mercy. Darren suggested that music can rescue us not only from narrow certainties but also from ourselves, offering glimpses of a peace we do not have to create for ourselves but which is freely given.
“Where there is no music there is no mystery, and where there is no mystery there is no God.” – attributed to Septimus Harding in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles