Music has a profound influence on us. We remember the words that we sing more than the books we read, TED Talks or sermons we listen to.

Music has the power to evoke the full range of our emotions. It can change our mood and mold our musings.

It can’t be neutral. Nothing that powerful ever is. So, I believe care must be taken to use it in ways that promote our mental, physical, social, intellectual, and emotional well-being.

I love how prominent the power of song is C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. Aslan creates Narnia with a creation song in my favorite scene from my favorite book in the series, The Magician’s Nephew. In The Silver Chair, the evil witch casts her evil enchantment with a song (this enchantment prevents all of her enslaved minions from singing their songs. When she is defeated, the slaves sing and dance–it’s such a powerful reversal. Then when they finally escape from the dreary underworld, Jill encounters a group of Narnians who are making beautiful music and dancing:

They had not only got out into the Upper World at last, but had come out in the heart of Narnia. Jill felt she could have fainted with delight; and the music–the wild music, intensely sweet and yet just the least bit eerie too, and full of good magic as the Witch’s thrumming had been full of bad magic–made her feel it all the more.

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 192.