Saving Western Civilization

"Beauty will save the world." Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Four of my daughters sing in the Catholic Youth Choir in our city. The magician, I mean, director, has the uncanny ability to take my four older children (ages 10-15) and make them sound like angels. Having watched The Sound of Music at least 300 times in my childhood, plus spending years in choir and band, I always hoped my children would love music. I didn't realize they would all surpass my talents before they were ten years old. We may or may not have had to make rules about the nice way to tell Mom that she is flat, sharp, or inadvertently changed key again.

Music education has so many benefits which include the development of discipline and teamwork, not to mention fine motor skills, brain development, and even some seemingly unrelated skills. Until he heard my children hammering out a piece in the back room before performing for my parents, my husband commented that he had no idea that choral singing was a contact sport.

These are all fabulous reasons that justify the time and money our family spends on music. But the primary reason that we prioritize music in our home isn't to turn our children into little Einsteins, it is to bring beauty into the world that otherwise wouldn't be there. My own experience of listening to my children's renditions of "Wedding Day at Troldhaugen" while doing dishes, or Bach's "Bourree" while cutting  my toddler's hair has enriched our family's life in ways I will never fully understand.

A couple of years ago, a friend and father of seven daughters told me as he indicated his own child's violin next to my daughter's, "We're saving Western Civilization, you know."

I know.

Pope Benedict wrote a few years before he became pope about an experience of musical beauty that struck him profoundly.

"When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: 'Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true.' The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration." (From: Cardinal Ratzinger on the Contemplation of Beauty).

The beauty of music can transform any moment, but especially sacred ones. Recently, we all celebrated my daughter Lucy's First Reconciliation. She, of course, celebrated it first, but we all joined our voices to sing praise to God as she emerged with her glowing, happy face. "Let Heaven Rejoice," we sang together.

Yet the moment seemed richer than even our spontaneous singing and prayers could express. My eldest told me that they felt they should sing a song they had studied and prepared from their Catholic Youth Choir. I could not record the moment, which was too intimate and exquisite for video, though I did record a version of it later (they were disappointed in how it turned out because I gave them no time to warm up, but you'll get the idea!) We just experienced the poetry of the psalm and our children's sweet harmonies expressing my heart's joy at my little daughter being lifted in the arms of the Good Shepherd and forgiven as fully and tangibly as her heart could have desired. "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need" they sang, and my spirit soared.

As a baron queries in The Sound of Music, "Is there a more beautiful expression of what is good in this country of ours than the innocent voices of our children?"

I think not. Sing on beautiful ones. Sing on. You'll change the world before all is said and done.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
               Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." John Keats