Spirituality through secular music...

Can God use secular music to heal our wounds?

Sometimes Christian music is, well, annoying. And often not very good. I don't feel compelled to listen to it exclusively. Actually, I am often surprised when I do find some Christian music that I enjoy, that moves me, that elevates and transports me.

I suppose I am often more "comfortable" in secular music. While it rarely elevates my soul, it often stills the turmoil inside. It deals more on the emotional level, rarely, if ever, on the level of the spiritual. It can get the soul to a place where it longs for the spiritual but I don't view such music as a "spiritual" event though it comes close. Only after having had "spiritual" experiences can I render such judgment as prior to such experiences what I felt while listening to music was as spiritual as I had known to that point so I can't take that away from the experience. It was spiritual in that sense but it was not transcendent (escapist or elevating perhaps, but not transcendent).

I'm at work, again, listening to Deep Dish's Yoshiesque set, a set I've known about forever but only recently obtained. It is an incredible mix and it took me right back to the time when I discovered techno music. It's got a sweet sound, a few familiar tunes, and a dreamy soundscape that instantly transported me back to that time of deep searching when techno music was, to me, spiritual, salvific even, the trance sound taking me away, losing me in the beats, my head lost in the sounds of the mix.

I went right back to that time, a time of relative freedom, of experimentation, of the thrill of wonder and the freshness of the unknown. Those long nights of pondering, trying to figure out what everything means. Hard to imagine that this album (and most of my experience with techno) came after quitting drugs.

So it ends and bleeds into Moby's Little Idiot disc offered as an extra to his Animal Rights album. It's the sad, dreamy, melancholy music Moby excels at, turning electronica into emotional catharsis.

I am transported back to the time of self-exploration, when I truly began to face my demons, to really understand that I needed healing.

For whatever the reason, it internalized me in a good way, not as afraid to look inside as I was then, seeking escape, distraction, numbness, those things that all drove me to various addictions since a very young age.

Rather than run to the distraction, I paused, felt the presence of God, and was stilled. Stillness. So very, very difficult. No intention, no abstractions, no longings, just stillness. So very necessary to healing.

I must face whatever it is that seeks to destroy me.