ABSTRACT
If it is the duty of music to ask unanswerable questions, then perhaps nowhere is this more germane than in a discussion of the relationship between music, spirituality and faith. For those that have a Christian faith, this usually represents a personal relationship with God and the belief, even the certainty of absolute truths: that Christ is the son of God sent to redeem humanity from sin through his death, and that by his death and resurrection humanity is also granted salvation and eternal life. For Christians, the answers to the age-old questions of fate, destiny and the reasons for suffering in the world are answered in the empty Cross that symbolizes and celebrates, as the theologian Alistair McGrath puts it, a ‘divine juxtaposition of despair and hope’ that is continually renewed, and that forms ‘the basis of Christianity’. 1 That this sign (the permanent intervention of the secular) would replace as much as resound the divinity ironically denotes that human means were not God’s end.
