Directing a church choir has forced me to look at this question in greater depth, since it's part of my responsibilities to foster a sense of devotion and solemnity to the music we make. But I have found that parishioners are very rooted in music that does very little to anyone in regards to inspiration. In some ways, I believe that they are only attached to this music because it represents their comfort zone, and is just what they're used to. It's "pretty" to them, but not exactly profound. But trying to nudge them out of this safe territory into more interesting repertoire is incredibly difficult, and it becomes an issue of politicking and negotiating, which only gets in the way of the work we're supposed to be doing.
As a result, I started to think about several questions. What actually determines the beauty and efficacy of a piece of worship music? What makes something "religious?" And how do you instill people with a sense of adoration for something entirely intangible?
"What actually determines the beauty and efficacy of a piece of worship music?"
In order to answer the first question, I actually turned to the Tree of Life, and looked at what Beauty is influenced by. Of course, "Beauty" is the name of the central sephira Tiphareth on the Middle Pillar, so it receives and exerts a number of influences. Most importantly, it receives direct influence from Godhead in Kether, the Crown. But it also is shaped by the masculine and feminine archetypes of Chokhmah and Binah. As such, it represents on a fundamental level the balance and harmony between all kinds of force, but also the interrelationship between force and form. It is at once passive, active, and fluid, and also represents the union of drive (Chokhmah) with purpose/form (Binah).
It also receives influence from Chesed and Geburah (Mercy and Power respectively), so Tiphareth is constructive and destructive equally. It is a therefore a perfect representation of creation or Life in manifestation, and it can be conceptualized as a snake that moves in a given direction through undulation, or the endless flow back and forth between positive and negative. Life is based on the same principles. Remember that Tiphareth is represented by the sun, and the sun can be equally generative and destructive. It burns away what is unnecessary and cultivates new life from the ashes. Tiphareth is therefore also associated with the phoenix.
Tiphareth emanates Netzach (Victory), Hod (Splendor), and Yesod (Foundation) and from here we start getting a definite sense of form in the literal sense. The first is connected with Venus, the second with Mercury, and the third with the moon. Netzach is almost primal, natural, raw, ecstatic, and lusty, whereas Hod is regimented, logical, analytical, and focused. Yesod is an interesting amalgamation of all the above influences, which produces an astral double or imaginary image of the created idea. Yesod is fantastical and illusionary, and therefore sometimes misleading. It is the source of our subjective subconscious, the shadow self of Jung, and a part of our personality that acts automatically and reflexively. The first major step in the process towards initiation is overcoming Yesod by wedding it to the light of the True Self as expressed consciously in Tiphareth.
To summarize all this, Tiphareth, or Beauty, must be a perfect balance of inspiration and understanding, benevolence and suffering, emotion and intellect. The importance of Yesod in all this is that I believe by participating in adoration balanced by the above principles we can work to regulate our subconscious. We do this by showing it the existence of something greater than itself. Living under Yesod's influence with our subjective consciousnesses grounded in Malkuth, we often act out under the misguidance of Yesod, and disregard the clearer, more beneficial advice of Tiphareth. If the quality of our worship and praise music matches that of Tiphareth, then we are more apt to gain for ourselves the healing and rewards of Tiphareth. If we worship with mediocre methods, then the actual religious effect will be greatly diminished. Choosing pieces simply because they're easy or because "that's what we've always done" is misguided.
"What makes something religious?"
I believe that we can answer this question simply by looking at basic aspects of human religion around the world. The form a religion takes is through its ritual praxis. Ritual gives us a kind of art piece to look at and contemplate, but the real importance of that piece is the artist's intent behind the actual images. In other words, ritual is an abstract performance art. It exists on a stage-like field and even suffers from "fourth wall" syndrome. While this is not absolute, oftentimes ritual is set up with the dichotomy between initiates and uninitiated in mind, the former directly participating and the latter simply observing. Initiates are allowed to actually practice the ritual because they supposedly understand the deeper significance of it. They see the ritual from the level of Tiphareth, whereas it is expected that the audience sees it from the perspective of Yesod. In fact, this is very often the case seeing as religious ignorance abounds in much of the world. The people who have attained any amount of initiation are relatively few, and it is highly likely that whole congregations of people gathered for the celebration of a specific ritual have absolutely no idea what the ritual is trying to express to them on the allegorical level. In some ways the ritual becomes a kind of taunting game - even though it's right in front of our faces we are unable to penetrate behind the veil of images. (Of course, penetrating the veil requires spiritual nerve and courage - something many people unfortunately lack, particularly in America.)
The purpose of this, however, is not only on one level to mislead people (for the Mysteries must be given and protected simultaneously), but also to create a space that is alien to the audience. The everyday world is dominated by false images created by Yesod and Malkuth, even Hod and Netzach. But the truth behind events and images is revealed in Tiphareth, which is the source of these experiences in the first place. Therefore a real sense of religiosity must exist on the level of Tiphareth, outside the sphere of normalcy.
I also think it's important to turn to Victor Turner's model of liminality to unpack this question. Turner was writing about medieval pilgrimages and was trying to get at the heart of their appeal to medieval laity. I'd like to summarize his model for you here.
1.) The pilgrim begins at home surrounded by what he or she knows. Home for them represents the sum total of what they know to be reality. Obviously there is a lot more of the world out there to explore, but for the medieval man or woman the world was incredibly small and confined to their immediate surroundings. The individual then decides to take a pilgrimage to a given shrine for any number of reasons. Perhaps they feel they require penance, or they are looking to be healed from a sickness, or maybe they simply want to go for the thrill of traveling on "vacation." Whatever their reason they begin their journey.
2.) The pilgrim joins other pilgrims while on the road to their particular shrine รก la The Canterbury Tales. They share resources and hopefully help each other to survive the arduous and most likely on-foot trek to their destination. Along the road the pilgrims encounter a number of other shrines with relics. They stop at these locations to pray, seek the aid of the patron saint, and are simultaneously introduced to symbols, pictures, and allegories in the form of religious artwork. Oftentimes there are certain motifs that are replicated at other shrines along the pilgrimage road so that by the time the pilgrims have reached their ultimate destination, they have been bombarded by the same symbols many times through different artistic interpretations.
3.) At this point the pilgrim has been exposed to a number of experiences outside of the realm of the ordinary. Most importantly, the pilgrim is physically in what Turner calls a space of "liminality." Approaching this space of ultimate spatial/chronological/psychological distance from what the pilgrim considers "normal," they become much more pliable. They experience a kind of "death" and are in turn made more susceptible to the religious experience - witnessing of miracles, visions, ecstasies and lamentations, etc. By the time the pilgrim approaches the final pilgrimage site, the individual has been forced to discard their precepts of normalcy and thereby enter the liminal space of the miraculous. One becomes much more prone to experiencing the presence of God - that which is greater than ourselves. The pilgrim is literally overwhelmed by the experience and is thus transformed by it.
4.) The last step is reintegration. The pilgrim must return home to their original space of normalcy after having experienced something entirely unique, foreign, and life-changing. The person can never quite deal with their original place of normalcy in the same way they used to ever again. Those who surround the pilgrim do not understand what they have experienced, and there grows an inevitable and unsurpassable gulf between the individual and their peers.
While Turner's model has been recently given a fair amount of criticism, I believe this general model is very helpful to us as we try to track down what the religious experience is all about, especially since the process of individuation is very much a psychological pilgrimage. Our psyches are vast worlds of which we only know a small portion. Thinking this is all there is, we remain stagnant, uninspired, ignorant individuals. One thing is clear: the religious experience is absolutely abnormal, and involves a kind of death of the normal. Following this there is a psychological "resurrection" which leaves the person forever changed and more enlightened about their personal condition."Religion," therefore, must consist of the individual's confrontation with greatness. The "pilgrim" so to speak must be overwhelmed by liminality to the point of metaphysical death. The greater the liminality the more profound the religious experience.
"How do you instill someone with a sense of adoration for that which is entirely intangible?"
This might be the trickiest question of all because everyone has a unique relationship to the Divine. "Every man is the master of his own temple," and therefore the Law is different for each of us. It is quite difficult for one person to determine what will fill another with a sense of adoration. But if we base our answer on the answers to the previous two questions, then we might say that it all has to do with encouraging people to move into the space of liminality. The hierophantic or pastoral duty becomes one of adhering to the general framework, but adapting it to fit the needs of a given person. Presumably, everyone who is participating in a religion has chosen it because it is the method of attainment that they believe is best for them. We must not assume, however, that this is accurate. An individual might make a much better Buddhist than a Catholic, but until circumstances force the individual to actually reappraise their beliefs they will not be allowed to grow in this direction.
Central to all of this is the idea of death. Religion is that which deals explicitly with it both through mythology and ritual praxis. Much of religion is focused exclusively on the sacrifice of the "lower self," that part of our being that considers our physical condition to be the only aspect of our total condition. Living our lives from such a rigid perspective inevitably leads us to cultivating redundant habits and ignorant world-views, all of which contributes to the handicapping and stunting of society and culture at large.
Therefore, from a psychological standpoint, religion of any respectable tried-and-true form is crucial for the development of any human being. The details of the religion are largely irrelevant, as what matters is the formula of attainment it follows. It must be capable of instilling in someone a sense of reverence for that which is greater than themselves, but to do that one must first get a sense of what "that which is greater than themselves" is actually like. One does this by setting Tiphareth as the goal of their worship and thereby opening themselves up to the experience of death. Death under these conditions is sweet, benign, and even beautiful.
Perhaps this is even why the average person shuns the religious experience by preferring watered-down, ineffective, bland forms of worship - because these represent a world they can easily understand, one that is very similar to their own mundane, normal sphere of existence in the here and now. But as we have talked about, God transcends the mundane and is also outside of it. You cannot expect to be transformed for the better, to experience or understand God's benefits, without first enduring the death of normalcy, and we all know how much humans want to reject death of any kind. Until one's consciousness has been pried open by the recognition of something greater and more powerful than itself, then that person's consciousness will perpetually perceive reality as a mixed jumble of non-related events and "accidents" that God may or may not have rewarded or punished them with. This view of reality becomes a license to stop growing, to remain clueless about responsibility, to take things for granted, and to do no real work on one's person. The individual stops functioning as a source of life for the world around them and instead becomes a source of death.
Christ tells us, "For whoever loses his life shall find it." Religion teaches us that death is the necessary complement to life, but also that religion itself is about Life, capitalized so as to represent summative existence, the flux between life and death. He who rejects the religious or spiritual impulse rejects themselves, and emits the signal to their True Self that they are wholly uninterested in who they are in totality. He who believes they are complete without initiation, without surrendering to the Mystery that is Self, suffers from vanity. And vanity, being the cause of Original Sin, is ugly.
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