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Unlike painters, who work with space, musicians work with time, with note following note as second follows second. Listen! say Vivaldi, Brahms, Stravinsky. Listen to this time that I have framed between the first note and the last and to these sounds in time. Listen to the way the silence is broken into uneven lengths between the sounds and to the silences themselves. Listen to the scrape of bow against gut, the rap of stick against drumhead, the rush of breath through reed and wood. The sounds of the earth are like music, the old song goes, and the sounds of music are also like the sounds of the earth, which is of course where music comes from. Listen to the voices outside the window, the rumble of the furnace, the creak of your chair, the water running in the kitchen sink. Learn to listen to the music of your own lengths of time, your own silences.

Literature, painting, music — the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.

Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Diapsalmata

Praying can be difficult. “I’m so busy with other things. I get tired, preoccupied and distracted, and very often I don’t feel like praying, and when I do my thoughts wander incorrigibly.” See if you can guess whom I am quoting.

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither and when they are there I neglect God and his angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door. I talk on in the same posture of praying—eyes lifted up, knees bowed down—as though I prayed to God. And if God or His angels should ask me when I last thought of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterday’s pleasures, a fear of tomorrow’s dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in my ear, a light in my eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain. It troubles me in my prayer. So there’s nothing, nothing in spiritual things perfect in this world. I turn to hardy and earnest prayer to God, and I fix my thoughts strongly as I think upon Him. And before I have perfected one petition, the spirit of slumber closes my eyes and I pray drowsily.

That’s John Donne, the great poet and rock-star seventeenth-century Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral—St. Paul’s was standing room only when Donne was in the pulpit—in a funeral sermon. If John Donne had difficulty with wandering thoughts, there is hope for us.

“The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to confession to a priest: be brief, be blunt, be gone. Be brief, be blunt, forget. The scrupuland is a nasty specimen.”

— W. H. Auden, via Ayjay

To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.

Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint;
     preserve my life from dread of the enemy.
Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked
     from the throng of evildoers,
who whet their tongues like swords,
     who aim bitter words like arrows,
shooting from ambush at the blameless,
     shooting at him suddenly and without fear.
They hold fast to their evil purpose;
     they talk of laying snares secretly,
thinking, “Who can see them?”
     They search out injustice,
saying, “We have accomplished a diligent search.”
     For the inward mind and heart of a man are deep.
But God shoots his arrow at them;
     they are wounded suddenly.
They are brought to ruin, with their own tongues turned against them;
     all who see them will wag their heads.
Then all mankind fears;
     they tell what God has brought about
     and ponder what he has done.
Let the righteous one rejoice in the Lord
     and take refuge in him
Let all the upright in heart exult!

   Praise to the Holiest in the height,

and in the depth be praise;

in all his words most wonderful,

most sure in all his ways!

   O loving wisdom of our God!

When all was sin and shame,

a second Adam to the fight

and to the rescue came.

   O wisest love! that flesh and blood,

which did in Adam fail,

should strive afresh against the foe,

should strive, and should prevail;

   And that the highest gift of grace

should flesh and blood refine:

God’s presence and his very self,

and essence all-divine.

   O generous love! that he who smote

in man for man the foe,

the double agony in Man

for man should undergo.

   And in the garden secretly,

and on the cross on high,

should teach his brethren, and inspire

to suffer and to die.

   — John Henry Newman (1801 – 1890)