Music expresses thoughts- feelings- what's inside- that we haven't named yet . . .

Music of Doubt, Grief and Transformation; a dialogue between Meredith Lake and Sister Maeve Heaney, ABC Listen, 'Soul Search', 3 November 2022.

Sister Maeve Heaney: Music stretches our attentiveness and suspends our conclusions.

We are embodied beings--all of our life is embodied. Music hits the part of us that is embodied . . . Music in our house changes the shape of the room. It changes how we experience things, so music enables us to walk more embodied through this world.

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MH: My journey into faith was one of questioning.

My community was born in Spain and is quite a wordy community. It was born in the 60s, when the Catholic Church began to awaken to the fact that the word of God was more important than we thought it was, and that all the baptized were called to teach and preach.

I dedicated quite a few years to learning to speak and speak well, during which I think I neglected music a little bit because I was kind of focused on words and understanding and communication and the importance of verbal communication It was a few years before I began to realise 'Ok. Words only mean so much and therefore I need to think more broadly.'

I began to ask, 'When words don't reach, what spaces do?' And that was when I began to think of silence and aesthetics and beauty, and I returned to music more consciously and fully as a space that could open other spaces.

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MH: I noticed that faith spaces that were alive always had music, so that gave me permission to look more consciously again at my music-making, my singing, to write music, to record it. It was there that I began to record my music and use it in spaces so it was about faith communication and understanding of life and therefore I returned to make space in my life for making music. I sing and compose more than I play anything, but yes, I play a little bit of keyboard and guitar and I open spaces for events and performances that would allow music to do its thing.

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MH: The space of the arts and music in Christian faith and the Catholic faith (and you know as well as I do that historically they are intertwined), music is much more central to our faith than we in the past 200 years have realized. Theology and doctrine was birthed alongside social music and vice versa. A lot of our best thinkers have been relating to music. We haven't always been this dualistic.

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MH: Of Vatican II: To me the signature document is Dei Verbum, On the Word of God, and that document shifts understanding of how God communicates with humanity from discourse to personal. God reveals Godself. It's an opening to a relationship that describes faith as our response to that. You are talking about dialogue, you are talking about conversation, you are talking about how we make sense of things. And you open the door to precisely what I am working on, which is that we of humans make sense of things, we ask questions. My wonderful father was taught that you don't question, that faith means that you don't question, and it did him no good because he was always a thinker and a questioner, so you are trying to refute part of what it is to be human, whereas a document that allows us to think of God and dialogue with humanity is an understanding of faith that allows us to recognize the questions we have with trust, because God is God and God is Love and that's ok . . .

This document laid the foundation for our understanding, that we have known at times but at times we've lost sight of, that the world is good-- yes, it's fallen, we're all fallen; let's face it, we're all a bit cracked-- but the world is good. It's made well and therefore the Spirit poured out into our world, we can look at the world and find goodness in all that it has to offer, as well as challenges, but goodness. Therefore there's a dialogue with the world, and with musicians and composers and art.

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ML: The gift of music to theology. Is it something to do with beauty, or with transcending words and language?

MH: For centuries we thought of ourselves as rational beings. Currently theology would talk about human beings as symbolic beings, because we make sense of things not only through words and theories, we make sense through loving, through affect, and also through the arts and the symbols. Culture--an awful lot of it is unconscious-- but it's symbolic. But I do think that the one of the gifts of music is precisely that it's not discursive, it's not a language.

Music helps us get in touch with what's inside that we haven't named yet.

So, for example, when I compose, sometimes I'll take words and put music to them, because they mean something to me, but more often than not I will not think of words, but I will go inside and make music and try to express what I'm feeling or what I'm thinking or what I don't even know that I'm feeling or thinking through sounds, through chords, through a riff, and it often brings to the surface things I didn't know I was thinking. Then I look for the words that resonate with those feelings so I think music helps us access stuff we're not conscious about.

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If I were to sing and you were to listen, it's not a message; it's an experience.

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We need to understand what music means in human life and therefore think, 'Ah. That's what's important in the liturgy.' We need to think, not just what song has the right words but what song fits in this moment in the liturgy? A liturgy is like an event, a performance. What style of music helps us enter? What style of music helps us pray after communion? What style of music does this community need at this moment in time?

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ML: You place emphasis on music as meeting us in our doubt. Why connect music with doubt in particular?

MH: Because music opens a space that isn't a conclusion. A lot of our living and breathing come from that space that is symbolic and pre-conceptual. Music doesn't answer everything for us. It opens a space for us to experience it, and therefore to hold. It reaches for Truth without naming it, and that's why I'm very conscious in the songs that I write; I don't try to take all the answers and put them to music. Music can leave us in a space where we're just experiencing, or we're just asking, or we're just enjoying or we're just feeling or we're just crying or whatever it is we're doing. It can hold a space where we're reaching for Truth but not naming it yet. So I think it does allow a space to move, and space to experience, even beyond what we know already.

My hope is that music might help people to listen for and hear how God surprises human worlds. In naming the Trinity, we tend to put the Spirit last, but I believe that the way God reaches out to our world goes in the opposite direction. I think the Spirit floods the world and floods human beings. I think we're all made in the image and likeness of a loving God and therefore we're all capable of that Spirit and our human breath: I think God mingles with that human breath even if we don't want to know a Christian God, even if we've never heard of such a thing as God. I think the Spirit is the living breath that inhabits all things and I think here in Australia it's a gift of the indigenous and aboriginal communities that they have this sense of Spirit, life spirituality, way before or beyond the Christian, even though some of them would . . . and identify those things. I do think that when we are authentically open to ourselves and open to growing and loving that God can become present in that space, pre any official announcement of Christ or of God, and actually I'd go further . . . and say that sometimes it doesn't work because we are unaware of that space because we try to put into words into spaces that haven't been prepared, that haven't been opened in the Spirit, and that therefore we are speaking different languages. We don't respect the rhythm of the Spirit in the world. The best definition of preaching that I've ever heard is to name grace neither too soon nor too late. So the Spirit and music have a part in that pre-space but also beyond that I think that where there is quality listening to music and to the arts, something authentic can happen and therefore the Spirit of God can become present.

ML: So it's a kind of revelation? Without words.

MH: Yes, without words.