Amazing Grace 5: The Sound of Being

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

John’s statement sounds metaphorical—“God is like a Word because Creation began with a divine pronouncement.” But in a more nuanced, more accurate interpretation, the Word is not an announcement about creation: It is the very act of creation. It is the Supreme Being expressing itself, it is the primordial movement from silence into presence, it is the primordial vibration by which the universe becomes present at all. In short, it is the self-articulation of eternity into experience.

Please note: Nothing here is meant to imply that divine Being depends on creation for its perfection; rather, creation is the field in which that perfection is expressed, encountered, and participated in through time. Everything I’m about to say in this final talk is really just the last implication of what we’ve already been hearing all along.

Before there were atoms or light or time, something was resonating. It was not yet “doing,” not yet “creating” in any temporal sense, but it was Being in a way that contained within itself the possibility of all Becoming.

Modern physics, approaching the mystery from another angle, says something surprisingly consonant—and equally difficult to wrap one’s mind around.

It appears that at the deepest level, reality may not be built from particles at all but from one-dimensional vibrating strings. In what is known to physics as string theory, strings are filaments of pure energy, each vibrating at a particular frequency.

I offer this not as settled physics—because it’s not. While not refuted, string theory remains contentious. 

I am using it as a suggestive analogy: one way our best theories imagine reality as relational, dynamic, and structured rather than inert.

In string theory, the differing vibration patterns of the strings generate quarks and photons and leptons and sleptons (!), and from those come atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, and you and me.

If this is even roughly true, then  the universe is a kind of orchestral composition; it is music turned into structure. Pythagoras heard this two and a half millennia ago when he said the planets sang. The Book of Proverbs hints at it when Wisdom dances beside God at creation (Proverbs 8, especially vv. 22–31). John puts it in a single phrase: the Word was God.

Vibration may be the divine mode of existence itself: the Word rendered as waveform. What theology calls Logosand what physics calls energy might be likened to what Britons call a lift and Americans call an elevator, or you call a wrench, and I call a spanner. They are one and the same. That the Word is both with God and is God is the dynamic that sustains every oscillation from the birth of a galaxy to the firing of a neuron.

A guitar string has a near infinity of notes inside it— but only one note sounds when it is plucked. Creation may be something like that: not a beginning in time, but a potential vibration made actual, plucked into being. In that light, Alpha and Omega are not the starting and ending points of history. They are the two gestures of a single eternal act—the plucking and the damping of the divine string. Alpha is the moment of self-excitation; Omega is the gathering of vibration back into stillness.

To us, bound as we are in time, this appears as expansion followed by contraction, birth followed by death, creation followed by destruction. But to the Eternal, outside of Time, they are one unbroken resonance.

Perhaps its easier to think of it not as a single note but as a great chord laden with harmonics. From within the chord, you hear its individual tones rise and fall. But from outside, you hear just the chord, the whole chord, and nothing but the chord.

In eternity, the distinction between nothing and everything dissolves. The unstruck potential note and the full, realized chord are the same event seen from different sides. The arithmetic of the Divine is not linear, not A leads to B and B leads to C, not cause and effect; it is non-dual: A is B. What we call zero already contains the whole. From our point of view, 0 and 1 are opposites; from God’s point of view, they may be the same gesture.

In that paradox lies the essence of the Divine— the union of Being and Becoming, of stillness and motion, of cause and effect, of grace and gravity.

Each one of us is a partial tone in that endless vibration. We are participants in the music through which eternity knows itself.

Grace, in the moral life, is harmony restored; gravity, in the cosmic life, is coherence sustained. From grace to gravity, the Word continues to vibrate.

So if, as I believe, the universe is vibration, then consciousness is its echo—awareness turned inward upon the sound, the echo, of its own becoming.  To perceive anything is to resonate with it. The caveman perceived the echo in the cave, and discovered a world within his world—or his world within a world. They are the same thing. Every act of knowing is an act of attunement. The mind is not a spectator standing outside creation. It is one of its frequencies. It is a harmonic within the greater chord. We don’t simply hear the world; we are part of what the world sounds like when it hears itself.

Perhaps this is why listening, in every tradition, is treated as a sacred discipline. “Hear, O Israel,” begins the Shema—and the call is not merely to obey but to resonate. To listen deeply is to find the divine frequency—the Word—and let it sound through us until the distinction between source and echo disappears.

The mystics of many faiths have intuited as much: Think of the Quaker waiting in silence, the Sufi Dervish whirling in ecstasy, the Zen monk following the breath until breath and world are one. Each practice, in its own way, is an exercise in tuning to the resonant frequency of true Being.

What we call worship may be less the praise of a distant deity and more the tuning of consciousness to coherence. When voices cohere in chant or song, their unison is not only social; it is ontological. It is Being and Becoming moving together for a moment— it is the individual note recognizing that it belongs to a larger chord, like the caveman and his echo.

The thrill of transcendent harmony comes from that moment of brief recognition: the self forgetting itself in order to vibrate with everything else. The sound does not rise toward heaven, like Wagner’s Valkyries; it radiates in all directions, like Messiaen’s birds; instead of trying to defy gravity, the sound returns the universe to awareness of its natural order.

Seen in this way, ethics becomes acoustics. We discussed the morality of music last week.  To act justly is to be in tune. Cruelty introduces dissonance, disharmony, discord. But compassion, humility, and patience are not merely moral virtues. They are tonal necessities, modes of keeping the larger music in harmony. The Golden Rule—Christ’s command to love God and one’s neighbor—is a call to stay in harmony with the rest of Being.

Science, again, offers faint corroboration. The same principles of resonance that bind molecules also bind minds. Neural oscillations synchronize in conversation. Heartbeats align during empathy. Even biologically, understanding is vibration shared. We feel another’s pain because, quite literally, our frequencies overlap.

Perhaps the highest form of listening is practiced when, subconsciously, we recognize that there is no “outside” to the sound; there is no boundary between the hearer and the heard. In that moment, “the Word becomes flesh,” not only as doctrine but as realization: That Being and Becoming, that sound maker and sound, are one continuous process.

The universe listens to itself through us, and what it hears, it becomes.

If we are tones within a potential chord, then creation itself may be the ongoing attempt of that chord to resolve. What we call evolution—of any kind: biological, cultural, or spiritual—might be the universe seeking consonance with itself.

Every new form, every new consciousness, every new insight adds another overtone to the great resonance of Being. Think of a choir warming up. At first, the sound is scattered. Gradually, the tones begin to align. The chord hasn’t resolved yet, but it knows where it’s going.

The impulse that drove the first atoms to cohere is the same impulse that drives us to comprehend. Matter seeks meaning as sound seeks harmony. We are made of matter and sound.

In music, dissonance is not always error, not always a bum note. It can represent tension yearning for release from a perfectly symmetrical but otherwise static and lifeless chord. Dissonance provides motion; contrast provides understanding.

The universe works the same way. Its dissonances—the gravitational asymmetries that allow galaxies to form, the moral struggles that shape compassion—are part of its movement toward coherence. A world without tension would be a world without Becoming, and a world without Becoming is a world without Being.

To the Creator, Alpha and Omega are one (Revelation 22:13: the pluck and the damping simultaneous, the whole chord already complete. But what is one act in eternity, in time unfolds as a process, a sequence. We hear only small fragments of the full harmony. Each of us dwells inside a single overtone, knowing by intuition that there exist others who vibrate beyond our range.

Death, then, may not be silence but the widening of hearing—the moment when the whole chord finally comes into range.

The longing we call spiritual is not an escape from the world but a participation in its resolution. The artist, the scientist, and the saint may each play in a different register, but each tries to make dissonance intelligible, to turn chaos into pattern,  and pattern into meaning.

The melody of history may never cadence—may never be resolved—in our brief hearing of it, yet every act of understanding moves it fractionally closer to completion. Creation continues through comprehension; the universe evolves by listening to its own echo.

To speak of redemption in this context, as Christians in particular seem wont to do, is to speak of cadence, of harmony restored. Sin, in the oldest sense, means to miss the mark, like an arrow failing to hit its target; musically, we may think of it as missing the pitch, as falling out of tune.

Grace is the restoration of pitch, the gentle correction that brings the wandering tone back into key. It’s an endless process. because this music is eternal. And yet, the song of Being never repeats; in Becoming it is forever resolving toward its Being.

When we sense beauty—in music, art, nature, in the compassion of the Good Samaritan—we are hearing echos of that resolution. They afford us a premonition of the consonance that is still unfolding.

A sunrise, a symphony, a single act of kindness: each is an overtone of the resolving chord, glimpsed for an instant through the noise and discord. The experience moves us because, for that instant, the note we are, and the whole of which we are part, sound together.

If the universe is still sounding, then the human task is not to master the music. It is simply to join in. We are instruments already in motion, but unlike strings or stars, we can choose how we vibrate.

Awareness and free will give us a kind of agency within the score. They give us the power to listen, to adjust, to harmonize… Or not. Free will is simply the freedom to tune ourselves.

The Being, the Creator, the Way is perfectly aware of itself; free will allows the creature to participate… or not… in its Becoming. Through our ability and willingness to perceive—our ability to hear and our willingness to listen, the structure of the divine presence becomes perceptible, and intelligible to an extent. It becomes intelligible enough for us to understand that to live ethically is to live aesthetically:

• that Justice is harmony extended to society,
• that Compassion is resonance extended to the heart, and
• that Art is listening made visible.

The measure of a life might then be how clearly it vibrates in sympathy with what surrounds it. The saint and the scientist differ in method but not in aim: both seek coherence—the saint through love, the scientist through law.

Even the skeptic, questioning every doctrine, contributes by keeping the tone honest. Discord, as we’ve noted, has its place. Without it, the music would stagnate. A world without disagreement would be a world without counterpoint. A world without Wagner, might be a world without Messiaen.

To worship, understood in this light, is simply to attend, to pay attention—to listen deeply enough that the boundary between hearer and heard, between sound and listener, between creature and Creator, begins to dissolve.

In worship, liturgy, meditation, music, dance, and even simply the quiet awe we feel when confronted by beauty: all of these are forms of tuning.

We love to anthropomorphize but the Being need not be a person to be present; The Being is presence itself—the vibration, the string underlying every particular, every molecule, every atom. To sense it is to fall (however briefly) into tune with the totality.

Eventually, every sound separated from the divine vibration must fade, but fading is not failure. The note that ends completes a phrase. What we call death may be such a cadence—the merging of one frequency back into the field that sustained it all along. From the standpoint of eternity, nothing is lost. The energy that sang through us returns to the continuum. The melody changes, but the music remains.

Alpha and Omega are one and the same eternal act, and our lives are moments within its duration—small arcs of awareness in the endless oscillation of Being and Becoming. The Being plucks and dampens itself endlessly, and through that rhythm reality renews itself. Each life, each thought, each act of kindness or cruelty alters the timbre of the whole. We inhabit a cosmos that has spirit; a cosmos that answers back.

And so my series of talks must end as the music began—not with Wagnerian certainty
but with Messiaen-ic resonance. The last vibration is not an answer but a question sounding in the air: Can we, finite and time-bound, hear ourselves as part of that infinite chord?

To listen for the answer is already to begin it. The rest is silence that hums. Don’t you think?

Kiran: When you think about it this way, you realize how united all religions are, and how united all people in the world are—including scientists, atheists, religious people, and non-religious people. You realize we’re all one. That gives me more comfort than almost anything else.

I was also thinking about how, when you talk about Eastern religions and Western philosophy, people often describe them as cyclical versus linear. But what if they’re actually the same? If you look at a wave from one angle, it looks cyclical—you’re going up and coming down and going up again. But if you look at that same wave from another point of view, it’s a straight line.

Dr. Weaver used to talk about a story from India where six blind men are trying to figure out an elephant—one thinks it’s a snake, and so on. What if we’re all part of a wave, and each of us, from where we’re standing, is seeing it differently?

If that’s the case, how beautiful it would be to tune out all this noise and lock into the signal that connects all people in the world. But then the question becomes: how do we tune out the noise? The noise-to-signal ratio is different for different people—different ethnicities, different religions. I kept thinking about that. How can we make the signal strong enough?

Don: I think one of the things that makes what you’re saying true—and what David is saying true—is the recognition that God is the God of all humankind. If God is the God of all humankind, then the resonance we’re talking about, despite the differences, must have some kind of common thread.

Carolyn: Dr. Weaver mentioned that we all have a resonant thread, but that some of us are still babies and some of us are children—we listen differently. You know how you look at a child and say, “Look at me. Listen to me.”

God has a way of reaching us in so many marvelous ways, as David has noted—through nature, art, and music. We have to grow, and sometimes, in order to share with others, we need to recognize that we’re not on the same playing field. If we can get to a playing field we both agree on, we can work from there.

Donald: As is my custom, I always try to take something complex and apply it to real experiences. Yesterday, two things happened that I think relate to this conversation.

First, we’re trying to sort out what is the common denominator between human beings. I had my annual physical yesterday. They told me to lie back, and then they put all these connections on my chest to measure something. I believe they were measuring electricity, which is vibration as well. You could do that to every human being and come up with a summary. The machine produces a chart that suggests how that person is doing. We could all lie back, be hooked up, and the machine would spit out a little graph that describes something about each one of us. But we’d all fall somewhere on that graph, between the top bar and the bottom bar.

The other thing that happened yesterday was that, before going out to a concert, my wife and I went out to eat. We were sitting in a quiet restaurant, not too busy, when this cheerful young woman came up and welcomed us, describing what was available. She was charming—an African American young woman—and my wife and I were both taken by her. She went away, and we talked about her for a bit.

Then she came back to the table, and my wife said, “We want to adopt you!” which of course started a conversation. It ended up with us sharing pictures on our phones and all kinds of things. What I’m trying to say is that this kind of thing happens in music as well. You can listen to a lot of music, but then suddenly there’s one moment where something happens and there’s a connection.

I don’t know if any of you had the opportunity to watch that Kevin Costner production last week, but for me it was remarkable. There were moments where I thought, “Okay, I’m listening. This is normal. This I understand.” And then there were key moments that were just striking—you choke up. What is it about human beings? We navigate through life, but once in a while there are these moments where harmony takes place between you and whatever environment you find yourself in.

I don’t know if that speaks to what David is talking about, but it does to me. On the one hand, we can all be represented by an electrocardiogram, which is electricity. On the other hand, we bounce around from person to person, but all of a sudden something happens and you realize it’s a key moment, and it locks into your brain while everything else becomes blurred. Maybe when music harmonizes, or when our lives sync with something else, those are really special moments—fabulous moments.

Carolyn: I agree. Yesterday I was perusing my phone and all of a sudden it started playing Verdi’s Requiem, which happens to be one of my favorites. I just let loose, thinking, “Oh, this is wonderful.”

I think if we can have these “aha” moments with music, it’s even more important that we can have “aha” moments with one another. My whole idea is that little thread we’re all connected by. God has given us a thread to everyone we meet, but we meet people at different stages of their lives and of our own lives. It’s up to us to let the Lord put it together.

Sharon: For me, the harmony of life can be emotionally described as love—whether that’s God’s love, filial love, love in our relationships, or intimate love. You can’t separate vibration from love and grace, or from what Jesus has done in total acceptance. There is such harmony in sitting with someone and feeling 100 percent accepted. There is peace. That peace itself is a vibration.

You can’t separate the intimacy you feel, even in profound musical moments that touch us deeply. Each of us has different genres of music that speak to us in deeply personal ways. But for me, it all boils down to this: the harmony of love transcends all human characteristics. It transcends language and culture. It doesn’t matter the context—when you feel completely accepted, without condemnation, in a clean and unconditional way, there is harmony. There is a soul-grabbing peace that transcends even death.

I want to give a testimony from my own walk with Jesus. I can’t tell you how many days I hum almost all day long. If I’m not in a meeting or actively doing something, I’m humming. That humming is amazingly comforting through all the stress and challenges I’m facing.

What’s profound to me is that it feels like my divine connection. I’ll suddenly think of a song and start humming something I haven’t heard in years, and it will be exactly the song I need in that moment. There’s this miraculous, abiding relationship I have with my Divine Creator. He sends me these little musical nuggets—not physically present, not touching me—but touching exactly where my heart or soul is hurting, bringing me back into unconditional acceptance. He uses music to keep me abiding in His unconditional grace and love. Praise God.

Kiran: If you only play one instrument, no matter how beautiful it is, it can become somewhat boring. But when you mix two or three instruments and add vocals, you get something far more beautiful and enjoyable.

That brings me back to the question of why we seem to have the same signal—maybe not exactly the same, but related—in different religions. Is it like an orchestra? Are we all trying, in our own ways, to perform a melody or harmony that is much bigger and more beautiful than any individual part?

I also keep thinking that in every religion, no matter where we go, there is some notion of renewal. So if this beautiful harmony represents divine goodness, how do we define evil? Is it the absence of music, or is it some other kind of music, some other vibration?

Reinhard: I think we can look at this through the lens of music. Music is a beautiful art. It stirs feeling through sound, within God’s creation. I think God wants us, as individual people—as individual notes—to play our parts within this grand musical performance.

The vibration from God must be accepted by us, and we have to play the right tune ourselves in order to receive grace. We have to respond. In physics, vibration creates wavelength and frequency, and they are related—the higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength. I think the same idea applies here. We have to respond to God’s vibration in the right way, in the right tune.

It’s similar to how we relate to other people. If we are on the same frequency, we are in harmony, and we have good relationships. With God, when we play the right tune, unfortunately, in this world, some people do not. They move away from God’s presence, or they refuse the grace God gives.

To play the right music is to respond properly to the Creator. We are creatures, and we need to play the right tune in response. When we do, we can relate to other people, and harmony is created. Life can be beautiful, just like music. It gives us good feeling when we play the right music in the right way.

Don: What is the right music for me? The right music for me might be very different from what it is for my grandchildren. In fact, I know it is different, and sometimes theirs doesn’t even seem musical to me, even though there is clearly sound and vibration.

That brings me back to a question we discussed a couple of weeks ago: who is the music police? Who decides whether the music is harmonious or discordant for someone else? I think the great challenge is figuring out how we can let you have your music, let Sharon hum her music, let me have my music, and not be judgmental about it.

Reinhard: The right music ultimately comes from God. God, in this sense, is the conductor of the orchestra we are all playing in.

If we look at Moses—one of the earliest mentions of music—there is the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32. In that song, the first priority is praising God through lyrics. The second is obedience. The song was taught to the Israelites so that, in remembering the music, they would remember the law of God.

Psalm 104 has two key elements of following God: meditating on His Word and singing praise to God. In life, I believe our relationship with God rests on those two things—meditating on His Word and praising Him, even through humming.

When we have those components, that is the music we need in life. Then we can relate to anyone, and we can worship God in the right way.

Don: In what way does culture have an effect on what David is talking about?

David: That is something that, indeed, I missed in this series. In fact, for my closing remarks, I was going to mention that next week, Reinhardt and Kiran will add a coda, as it were, to this series of talks in which they will look at how their cultures play and approach music. I don’t think it changes the inherent message of this series, which is, as Kiran and Don noted at the beginning, that God is the God of all mankind. 

Certainly there are different cultural approaches to music and to God, but at the same time, we’re all seeking the same—we’re seeking to harmonize with the same divine vibration.

Carolyn: I’ve always been taught that for everything God gives us, Satan has a counterfeit. I have a similar question to Kiran’s. I’ve never worked with psychedelics, so I don’t have the vocabulary or experience there.

But I do feel that Satan offers counterfeits—things that make us question in ways that pull us away from serving God. Sometimes it feels good, but it’s not leading us in the right direction. I wish I had better words for it, and Dr. Weaver, I wish you would weigh in, because I need that sense of connection—the string that links one person to another.

Music covers all our moods and emotions. I don’t fully understand why, but I remember years ago, maybe in my twenties or thirties, when people talked about playing records backward and finding disturbing messages. There were concerns that Satan could inject harmful things into music, disrupting the beautiful vibration between us and God.

I love the idea of singing and humming—it’s part of my life too—but I also believe we have to be discerning. We don’t want to be judgmental, but we do need discernment.

Reinhard: I just want to mention again the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32. When it comes to cultural music, especially in the West, we tend to play within the same octave, though with different tastes.

If music is not played in harmony, it won’t sound good to the ear. I think the same applies to our relationship with God. The goodness that comes from God, if channeled in the right way and with the right mindset, allows us to respond to the right vibration. In that way, we can produce the right tune and the harmony we want in life.

David: I said that my series of talks must end and thus implied that this talk was it. But you may recall that last week Donald raised questions for Reinhard and Kiran about their cultural experience of music, so I was asked to help put something together for next week with those two gentlemen. So they will be presenting a sort of coda, a concluding section added to a piece of music. 

The purpose of a coda is not to advance the main argument, but to reflect on it and let it resolve more fully. In music, a coda allows what has already been played to settle, echo, and be re-heard in a new light.