Every spiritual quality can be felt, nurtured, enlarged and intensified by singing: sweetness, tenderness, sympathy, love, aspiration, longing, joy, ecstasy, courage, determination, devotion, valour, vigour, enthusiasm, self-offering – all respond to the right song as a sunflower to the sun.
The key to bringing forth all of these qualities is love: the more we love a song and the more ardently we sing with selfless love, the more the song reveals and enwraps us in the very qualities for which we yearn.
When we long to express feelings that mere words cannot convey – whether in the secular or sacred realms – we turn naturally to song. Hence the most common theme of all songs is the one experience, the one emotion, the one realisation that most directly connects us with our heart and the mystery of the spiritual realm – love.
We sing a love song to express the inexpressible, the sense of oneness and the thrill of inner awakening to a truth beyond ourselves, a truth that transcends reason and understanding, a truth we can never own, only adore.
Yet we also sing a love song to awaken, enjoy and become the feeling and reality of love: a song can at once express, invoke and reveal love, whether love for a person, a flower, a football team, our nation or God.
As colour is light made visible, so song is love made audible.
As we love to sing, so we sing to love. In song, love is a fish in water, a bird in the sky. As bread and flour cannot be separated; as a flower and its fragrance are one; so a love song is not only a song of love, but love as song.
In love, we sing. In song, love we become.