Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugene 2025

The Role of Music and Chanting in Religious Worship and Spirituality
World religions and religious studies

There’s this mosque a few blocks from my apartment where, if the wind is right and the night is quiet, I can hear the call to prayer. It's not always clear—it slips between the sirens and late-night laughter like a secret—but when it lands, it lands deep. Not in the ears. Somewhere closer to the ribs. Like being reminded that you used to believe in something, or that your heart is still trying to sing even if you’ve forgotten the words.

That sound—half-mournful, half-celestial—wrecks me.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe music in religious worship was never meant to make us feel good. Maybe it’s there to crack us open.

Because here’s the thing: faith, in its rawest form, isn't polite. It's not a PowerPoint presentation with bullet points on “moral clarity” or “spiritual development.” No. Faith is weird. It stumbles. It hums in wrong keys. It screams in Latin or Sanskrit or tongues no one understands anymore. It’s trembling lips at funerals and toddlers banging tambourines in Pentecostal pews. It’s off-beat clapping. It’s chanting until your mind dissolves. It’s a kind of holy disorientation.

And music—more than doctrine, more than dogma—is the language of that disorientation.

Sound Before Sense: Music As Pre-Verbal Prayer

Let me back up. Or start over. Or spiral inward, whichever direction faith likes best.

Before there were creeds, there were cries. Long before theology calcified into textbooks, people made noise. Groaning, chanting, drumming against bark or bone. Trying to connect with something beyond themselves. Or maybe just trying not to be so alone in the dark.

This is the heartbeat of religious music: its ability to bypass the brain and speak directly to whatever broken or burning thing lives underneath. You don’t have to understand Hebrew to feel something rise when the Kol Nidrei is sung on Yom Kippur. You don’t need a degree in Sanskrit to be wrecked by the low, looping Om in a candlelit yoga studio. You don’t need to be Christian to know that when a Black gospel choir hollers “Take me to the King,” they are not asking. They are demanding deliverance.

These songs and chants do not merely describe the sacred. They invoke it.

Sometimes I wonder if the only true definition of “sacred” is anything that makes the body remember it’s more than flesh.

Ritual, Rhythm, Rupture

Let’s talk about repetition for a second. About the hypnotic, rhythmic quality of chant—the way it pulls you under.

In Buddhism, the mantra is not a performance. It’s a practice. A vibration. You repeat it until the syllables lose shape, and your ego goes with them. In Hinduism, kirtan involves call and response, voices overlapping, building, dissolving boundaries between self and community. In Christianity, the Gregorian chant was designed to anchor the monk’s breath to heaven’s pace. And in the psychedelic chaos of Sufi zikr, dancers whirl as they sing divine names—until they disappear into ecstasy or nausea, depending on the night.

Repetition in music is not laziness. It’s transcendence by attrition. You wear away the self with sound.

I once attended a Taizé prayer service—French monastery, dim lights, votive candles everywhere, and these soft chants sung over and over in a dozen languages. I went in skeptical. I came out crying. Something about hearing “Ubi caritas et amor” looped fifty-seven times while strangers knelt around me like lilies at a funeral—it broke past my cynicism.

Ritual doesn’t require belief. It just requires presence.

And rhythm is what carries you when belief falters.

Sacred Noise, Secular Bodies

I know, I know—“music in religion” sounds like an academic paper nobody reads. Like I should be citing Durkheim or talking about “communitas.” But that’s not what I’m after.

I’m interested in the feel of it. The gut-punch. The rawness.

Because even in secular spaces, the religious residue of music clings to us. Raves and concerts and protest chants—these are liturgies too. There’s a reason people raise their hands in both church and Coachella. A reason bodies move differently when the beat drops. A reason we still sing “Amazing Grace” even if we’ve never stepped into a pew.

The line between spiritual and secular music isn’t solid. It's porous. Like skin. Or like that veil people say separates heaven and earth—thin as breath on glass.

I once saw a street preacher scream Bible verses over trap beats downtown. He was terrible. And also—I couldn’t stop listening.

When the Voice Breaks

Not to be dramatic, but the most spiritual thing I’ve ever witnessed was an old woman singing off-key at a funeral.

She was maybe eighty, hunched over, voice wobbling like an old cassette tape. She started “How Great Thou Art” too high and had to drop an octave midway through. She cried halfway through the chorus and wiped her nose with the same hand she held the mic with. It was, objectively, a mess.

And it was the holiest sound I’d ever heard.

Because there was no performance there. No polish. Just a desperate human voice trying to touch the eternal through a melody her body could barely carry.

There’s something unbearably beautiful in a voice that fails to hit the note and keeps going anyway.

That’s faith. That’s worship. That’s music as testimony.

A Brief, Incomplete Theology of Noise

Let’s get theological for a hot minute. Or poetic. Or both.

Maybe God is not a voice, but an ear.

Maybe the Divine doesn’t speak in thunder but listens in vibration. Maybe we sing not to get answers, but to announce our existence to something vast enough to hear everything and still say yes.

“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” the Psalm says. Not a beautiful one. Not a well-rehearsed one. Just—noise.

Which is good, because that’s mostly what I have. Broken noise. Doubtful humming. Half-remembered lullabies. Screams under my breath.

Still, I think it counts.

What About Silence?

Let me contradict myself for a moment—because isn’t that half the fun?

Sometimes, silence sings louder than any hymn. The Quakers knew that. So do the monks in Chartreuse. So do those who’ve ever sat in grief so thick it swallows all words. Silence can be sacred, too. Sharp as broken communion wine.

But here’s the secret: even silence has a hum. The body buzzes. The room breathes. The absence of sound becomes its own strange song.

Music and silence are not enemies. They’re siblings. They hold hands when we’re not looking.

The Longing Beneath the Melody

Okay, I’ve said a lot. And none of it is conclusive.

But maybe that’s the whole point.

Because religious music—chanting, singing, moaning, drumming—isn’t about clarity. It’s about longing. About reaching. About the ache that lives under language.

And maybe that’s what binds all world religions together, underneath the schisms and denominations and theologies. That mutual, bone-deep ache for something more. Something sacred. Something other.

And music is the cry that rises from that ache.

Sometimes it’s disciplined—chants measured out in neat phrases.

Sometimes it’s chaotic—a Pentecostal scream or a Hindu tabla solo.

Sometimes it’s just humming alone in the shower and pretending it means something.

But always, always, it’s a form of prayer.

Even if no one is listening.

Even if God is on mute.

Even if the song is ugly or weird or off-tempo.

Because the point is not to sound good.

The point is to sound.

To let yourself be heard—by someone, something, the void, the silence, the sky.

To break the air with your longing and hope something breaks open in return.

One Last Note (And Then I’ll Shut Up)

There’s a church down the street where no one sings on key, but everyone still shows up.

They clap too early, forget lyrics, sway out of rhythm. It’s chaos. Beautiful, blessed chaos.

And when I walk by on Sunday mornings, coffee in hand, hangover in soul, I pause.

Because they sound—honestly?—terrible.

But they also sound like people trying.

And that, to me, is holy.