www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology What would saints say about "losing yourself to the music"?

I'm sure we've all had some sort of experience where it's almost like we zone out and lose ourselves in the moment. I just had it happen while listening to some metal in fact. What I'm wondering is what would our mystics say about that, especially considering watchfulness and stillness. Something tells me they'd have a problem with being (what amounts to) tranced out by intense, loud, and rhythmic music like rock, metal, pop, electronica, dubstep, dance... basically all the modern music that's exciting. Reminds me of pagan tribal music actually, and didn't rock have its roots in African music?

It's interesting that there are two extremes here, which is the Christian watchfulness and the pagan trance. Ecstasies we do have, but they only trance someone out because they cause total focus. They don't cause a person to essentially pleasurably black out.

I might add that Benedict XVI said himself that rock music was inappropriate for Christian worship for this very reason.

"On the one hand, there is pop music, which is certainly no longer supported by the people in the ancient sense (populus). It is aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal. “Rock”, on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe. The music of the Holy Spirit’s sober ine­briation seems to have little chance when self has become a prison, the mind is a shackle, and breaking out from both appears as a true promise of redemption that can be tasted at least for a few moments." --- [The Spirit of the Liturgy, (SF, CA: Ignatius, 2000), p 148]