Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence
Interior view of Emanuel Swedenborg’s summerhouse in Stockholm, including his wooden pipe organ
THE THRONE ROOM OF HEAVEN
Swedenborg narrowly limits his massive writing to only five of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament: the four gospels that begin the New Testament, and the Book of Revelation that ends it. These five books tell the full story of Jesus Christ, with the gospels depicting his earthly birth, life, and death with a couple of fleeting glimpses of a post-death resurrected self. But then when you skip to the end of the Bible in the Book of Revelation Jesus continues in his biography as the narrative shows him in heaven where he continues to work for a redeemed cosmos. And his first appearance in that last book is in the scene we read. And what’s going on? Jesus is jamming to soaring music in in the throne room of heaven. They’re rockin’ in heaven, baby.
SWEDENBORG THE CLOSET MUSICIAN
One of the least commented upon dimensions of Swedenborg himself is that he was quite a musician. He was good enough as college teenager to be the backup organist in the Uppsala Cathedral where his father was Dean of the Cathedral. He came from a musical family as his father produced one of the most important hymnals in the history of the Swedish Lutheran church. And Swedenborg owned an organ in his home the last four decades of his life. He apparently played it often, and you can still see it today because his homestead has been turned into a public museum in southern Stockholm with his large spectacular garden and home restored. Additionally, Swedenborg designed an advanced version for that time of a music box, which he described as a universal music machine that even the most unskilled in music can play all kinds of harmonies and musical sounds.
SWEDENBORG THE NEUROSCIENTIST
Swedenborg was a neuroscientist before he became a theologian formally, and he is somewhat renowned in neuroscience history, credited by Princeton University cognitive scientist Charles Gross as shaping the first basically correct brain localization theory. Swedenborg studied brains directly in Paris, the only place at that time where vivisection was permitted: that is the study of bodies right after death. And he was the first to correctly deduce that specific functions happen in different regions of the physical brain.
Swedenborg also has a lot to say about the five physical senses and how they stimulate inner experience. And of the five physical senses, he notes sound as the one by far the most powerful for the affections of our spirit. Sound transmits directly to the heart, to our emotions. You don’t pack stadiums of people rocking to the smell of bread or looking at a Jackson Pollock painting or receiving Reiki touch or even downing delicious chocolate mousse together. The other four senses have their crucially important correspondences and their profoundly important uses, but sound is by far the most powerful physical sense for stimulating emotion, and just as importantly, sound is the physical sense that is experienced on a timeline in a process way when it is in music. Music happens on a timeline, and there is a process and a story going on in a methodical way with sound, music, and hymns.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EMOTION AND FEELING
Daniel Levitin, a professor of cognitive science and neuroscience, in his now legendary book, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, says “[Brain neuroscience now clearly establishes] that the thrills and chills of intense musical emotion is involved in reward, motivation, and arousal via specific regions of the brain: the ventrial striatum, the amygdala, the midbrain, and regions of the frontal cortex.” He details exactly what is going on when music we love stimulates emotions in us. The late great neurologist Oliver Sacks, claimed, “Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician – but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment’s hesitation.” (1)
For our purposes here, it is important to distinguish between emotion and feeling. Even though those two words seem to mean the same thing in casual speech, in cognitive science, which takes in the full scope of the spectrum between pure biology on the one end and pure psychology on the other, these two terms are distinguished precisely by that spectrum. Emotion is associated with the physical stimulation of sound, and feeling is associated with states of the heart arising our perception about something. Emotion starts physically, and then grows into some kind of inner experience. Feeling starts with intellect and develops through what feels really true in our perceptions.
So on the emotion side, hearing often produces emotion. You hear a loud pop that sounds like a gun, and intense fear results. You hear the voice of a friend you haven’t talked to in years, and a warm fuzzy grows. There’s great science behind the power of positive emotions, and music has been found to be overwhelmingly effective in producing positive emotions that have physical effects on us. When we’re moved by music, our heartrate and even our body temperature changes. Strong emotions stimulated by music cause our brains to release dopamine, the happiness biochemical.
Feelings, however, in cognitive science are associated with the other end of the spectrum in thoughts. These are heartfelt events resulting from our perception of things. How many times have you been through the experience of having some strong feeling about something factual you believe is true, only to find out that the reality is very different, and your feelings do a 180? That can work either way: from love to fury, or horror to tenderness. My first real job was a paper route in 6th grade for a summer. Dad was keeping track of what I was making. My parents anniversary was in September, for which I bought a really nice vase in an antique store. In late September Dad discovered a lot of my money was gone, and he was angry. He asked me where it all went, and as I said a couple of things I mentioned the vase. His demeanor transformed in two seconds. So, that is an example of a mental perception creating a strong feeling, and when the perception changed, the feeling changed.
This distinction between emotion and feeling is crucial for the power of hymns because with conscious ability to pray with hymns we access both channels of moving the heart: raw emotions arousing us and feelings that are stimulated by powerful wisdom insights.
Swedenborg was Lutheran, by the way, and Martin Luther changed forever what music is like in church. Before Luther, sacred music consisted of restrained and meditative chants and chords, but Luther seized an inspiration for a new way and use of music in worship. He believed the popular melodies in folk culture elicited emotions one should feel in church. So it is Martin Luther who began what we know today as the powerful realm of soaring hymns, heart-tugging melodies, long communal participation in song—songs that are coupled with powerful spiritual insights via the lyrics. Long is the list of great singers today who grew up singing in gospel choirs.
A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE OF PRAYING THROUGH HYMNS
Studies have consistently shown for quite a while that the most popular Christian hymn in America is “Amazing Grace” by John Newton the former sea captain and slave trader who had a religious experience on the high seas that caused him to despise what he was doing and to move into church work, becoming an Anglican minister in Olney, England where he helped produce one of the best known hymnal collections in history called the Olney Hymns in which he first produced in 1779 the hymn we now know as Amazing Grace but at in Olney Hymns it was issued under the title, “Faith’s Review and Expectation.” Beloved, those powerful lyrics of being saved from horrible mistakes with this title and its original melody hung around largely unsung for a half-century without gaining much traction. In the early 1830s, however, an American Baptist composer and song leader, William Walker who was called Singing Billy, shaped the melody that we have now and given the title “Amazing Grace.” It is the combination of the strategic emotion coupled with spiritual language of forgiveness and eternal vision of new life that has moved hundreds of millions of people to experience something profound.
I’m a believer in praying hymns. That we can shape a personal prayer practice using hymns. My second doctorate is in a field called spirituality studies, which mostly concerns itself with where the rubber hits the road in actual formation. And at Pacific School of Religion, I have taught a class called “Spiritual Disciplines” four times, as well as numerous other courses that engage spirituality from different interdisciplinary angles. I have shaped a lot of spiritual practices for myself, and even though I’m a terrible singer and have been losing my hearing for four decades and now test below severe in what they call profound loss, I still hear music loudly in my inner mind. And hilariously though I sing off-key something ferocious, in my own inner hearing I’m on pitch.
It came to me a few years ago to do something explicit with my love of hymns, and so I began doing it, and it is my favorite spiritual practice now because of the neurospirituality of music on my emotions coupled with the profundity of the lyrics of the hymns I use. I have about 25 that are in my keeper category. Songs that are not hymns can also be effective in a spiritual practice around music and singing since many songs with powerful melody lines that move you also have lyrics clearly enough about love that they can function as a hymn. For example, studies show that the most popular song in the 20th century in America was “Over the Rainbow,” and the reason for this song’s power lies in the way the powerful soaring emotion excited by the melody is paired with lyrics about transcending into higher states of being—somewhere over the rainbow where troubles melt like lemon-drops.
So, let me share the encouragement to use the power of music to move you spiritually any and every day such that you are refreshed neurologically through sound and pastored by deep insights from God to you personally. Here’s the very music-based spiritual prayer practice that I call “Praying through Hymns.”
First, find a comfortable spot where you are not likely to be disturbed for 5-10 minutes and make sure you have paper and pen if possible because ideally one keeps a journal for gathering insights because gathered insights can continue their effectiveness in futures times of spiritual reflections. You can also speak thoughts into a smart phone or tape recorder, if that works better. But retaining a fresh record of your insights in the immediate experience can be very valuable as a future spiritual growth resource.
Second, choose a hymn or song that has consistently moved you.
Third, in preparation for praying the song, remind yourself to be open to the wisdom of the words in their ability to speak personally to you, but also simply to look forward to enjoying the music’s emotional power.
Fourth, experience the hymn either singing the lyrics out loud or inwardly from memory or singing along or inwardly with a professional recording.
Fifth, plan to pay attention both to the emotion evoked by the melody and the feeling-state insights evoked in response to the words. Let the hymn speak to your personal life.
Sixth, after the song is over immediately reflect on where you went in spiritual reflection and any connections made to your personal life. It can be effective to stop in the middle of a verse if struck with deep insight and follow through with personal reflection right then in your journal. Write whatever comes out, no matter how extremely brief or how lengthy it might become. Just engage in what happens, if anything. Sometimes one simply has a good time with the song, and nothing needs to be drawn from that singing of it.
Seventh and last, express gratitude for the gift of music and ask for help in living forward with new insights in your spiritual life.
VI. Conclusion:
Music has a special power to activate and energize our spiritual center. Divine wisdom paired with emotionally poignant music across a timeline process experience can transport us spiritually into new insights and behaviors for our regeneration.
Let us give thanks that we are both neurologically and spiritually wired for the jam session in heaven’s throne room. Wherever we are and wherever we go, the Holy One is singing our song.
(1) Levitin, Daniel J.. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Dutton, 2006.
Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence has been an ordained minister in the Swedenborgian Church of North America for several decades, and has served in a variety of settings and ministries. He currently serves as president of the denomination, after many years as dean of the Center for Swedenborgian Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. Jim lives in Oakland with his wife and dog.