About Music
By St. Varnava Nastic
(From a letter to the sisters of Jazak Monastery)
First of all, I want to tell you about music in order to tell you something about the sweet-sounding speech of God in this world and in all the worlds of God. In the early centuries, people, speaking of music, argued that in the Universe some mysterious, marvelous music was constantly heard, which with its divine sounds fills the whole boundless expanse of space. They thought that a star was whispering to a star the words of eternal love in a language known only to the stars, and that language, beyond any human language, could only be music, a melody of notes written not by the human hand and invented by an limited, drowned out human soul. These are symphonies, our ancestors thought, which only angels could sing, only their enlightened souls could write and transmit to the stars so that they would whisper through the dark, inaccessible stellar distances. And they whispered, spoke the language of music, the only possible way.