Music is Miracle
(AI created this photo with prompt “Music is Miracle.”)
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
written by Rev. Dr. Michael Hegeman
I heard music that had no traceable source. It happened one night back in 1992. I was giving a tour of the church where I worked to a friend I knew from high school. It was about 10 o’clock at night. The church was empty at this point in the day. I said, “Come listen to the acoustics here in the narthex.” Now, the church was built in the 1920s (in downtown Phoenix) in a Spanish Renaissance style. The narthex had arched, stone vaults, like a medieval cathedral. As we stood in the narthex, I sang a short line from the opening of a Renaissance mass, “ky—ri—e e–lei—i–son,” just to show off the reverb. A couple of seconds after I finished singing this line, and after any echo had died away, a voice sang a comparable line, “Ky—ri—-e e—lei—i—son….” It wasn’t exactly what I had sung, but it was in the same style. My friend looked at me, and she said, “How did you do that?” “I didn’t do that,” I replied. And we both stood there staring at each other. There was no one else around but the two of us. The voice was male. My friend is female.
Not able to explain this phenomenon, we just moved on, thinking, “Well, that was odd.”
We climbed the staircase to the balcony, so we could overlook the whole sanctuary. When we got up there, admiring the architecture, suddenly we heard organ music coming from the organ chambers, filling the room. We could see that there was no one at the organ console. And again my friend asked me, “How are you doing that?” I said, “I’m not doing that.” We were both mystified.
We came down the stairs and walked out onto the sanctuary floor. We approached the organ console and could clearly see that no one was playing the organ. We walked up the chancel steps and approached the organ chambers. The closer we got, the more the music seemed to be coming from somewhere else. And it no longer sounded like organ music. It was more like a symphony, and more like a far-off, ethereal orchestra. Wherever we went in the room, the music seemed to be coming from somewhere else. We even opened a door to the outside. We did hear music outside, but it was far away and was more like a festival or carnival music, very different from what we were hearing inside the church.
The music didn’t stop. It kept going. Without ever finding out the source of the music, we had to leave because it was getting late. My friend and I never really talked about that experience.
I have, after all these years, no way to explain to the rational mind what occurred that night.
Shortly after this, I went away to seminary. I wrote about this experience in my seminary application, in fact, and they let me in anyway, not ascribing me to a psychiatric ward. Later, during my doctoral work, I wrote about this experience in the context of “the contextualization of inspiration.” What does that mean? Well, let me explain:
After hearing this ethereal music, which had no perceivable source, I sought to write music that captured the timelessness and ephemeral qualities my friend and I had heard. (Now I have no idea what she heard; I only know she heard something she described as music.) What I tried to achieve was creating music that takes place in time and space, but mimics music that is beyond all constraints of our experience of time and space. I am not sure I achieved this ever, but the closest I got was in my Songs of Heaven, which are seven songs for soprano and piano, with texts taken from the Book of Revelation in Latin, where I play with timelessness and ecstatic, improvisational performances. (When I heard Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians performed on Pinnacle’s Concert Series last May, I again recognized a quality of timelessness and out-of-body-ness that I experienced 34 years ago, late at night in a downtown church.)
So, back to “contextualizing inspiration”: in my attempt to create a musical experience that paralleled the ethereal music I heard, I had to use all the physical means of meter, rhythm, pitch, etc., to achieve the meta-physical (beyond the physical) experience of timelessness.
Using theological imagination, consider how the Divine Word, which exists beyond all physical and mental perceptions, beyond all linguistic constraints (vocabulary and semantics), is able to communicate to human minds and hearts.
What is it that God actually said, in the beginning, from the place of eternity, that we record in human language as “Let there be light!” (which the Bible records as יְהִי אוֹר “Yehi ohr!”)?
The divine word, from timelessness, had to enter the created sphere and into human language. This is the simplest way I can put “contextualized inspiration”: that which is eternal enters the finite world of creation and human experience.
God not only speaks, and that speech is heard in human ways and in human understanding, but God also entered the physical world from eternity in the form of Jesus Christ. Jesus was born in Roman-controlled Palestine, a Jew, whose family would have spoken Aramaic. This seems to me to be the ultimate contextualization of inspiration: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” God’s eternal hymn became a walking, breathing love-song that we could hear and even touch. Jesus spoke of heavenly things in human terms. Jesus was the physical manifestation of the which is meta-physical.
In every piece of music is some spark of the eternal. It may not always be easy to discern, but I believe it is there. I would hope that any piece of music I write not only carries that divine and eternal spark, but in some way gives those who hear it a foretaste of what heavenly music is. Our earthly music, bound by all the physical limitations of vibration, rhythm, audibility, tonality, cultural expectations, etc., offers us even still so much, through its transportative powers, that we just might hear God’s Word resounding and angel choruses singing, not only in Bach’s cantatas, but in Chopsticks and “Jesus Loves Me.” Music is miracle.