• Hearing God

I remember buying my first CD player in 1985, convinced that the precision of the digital recording technology would produce music of incomparable fidelity. After all, vinyl records still used the same basic analog recording technology pioneered by Edison over one hundred years earlier. Mechanically or electronically amplified sound waves moved a stylus that etched analogous patterns into a soft medium. These patterns could be copied onto disks that were easily damaged and could suffer just from frequent playing. And the need to limit the spacing of the grooves imposed a corresponding limitation on the dynamic range of the recorded sounds.

To prove what I expected to be true, I purchased the highest-quality vinyl recording I could find - RCA Red Seal 1/2 speed mastered of a Tchaikovsky symphony played by the London Symphony Orchestra - and the same album on compact disk. I started the CD and album as closely to the same time as I could, turned my back to the stereo and asked a friend to switch the output between the two recordings. I would raise my hand when I thought what was being fed to the speakers was the superior sound. To my great amazement, puzzlement, an disappointment, I had chosen the vinyl recording over the CD each time.

But those recordings were unfamiliar to me. Maybe if I compared music that I knew well and  listened to closely and often in the past would I be able to make a much better distinction. Off to the record store to find CDs of Hendrix's Electric Ladyland and Santana's Abraxas. Both albums had songs with passages that would blow the back of your head off even at normal volume levels and without the influence of drugs.

To eliminate room acoustics as a factor I used a high quality pair of headphones and queued up All along the Watchtower. Two minutes into it I felt the hair on my head stand on end as Jimi made his guitar moan. Same as it ever was. Now for the CD and what I hoped would be an out-of-body experience. I braced myself and at the big moment...nothing. It was like the difference between looking through a pane of fine crystal and a sheet of transparent plastic. How could that be?

Fast-forward twenty years. I'm listening to a performance of bell-ringers during a church service and I hear the answer.

CDs - or any digital recording, for that matter - include only the amount of  the recorded audio that the engineers who designed CDs decided was adequate to capture the range of audio frequencies the the human ear can hear. So, about 44,000 times per second the sound to be recorded is sampled. When played back, we hear only those samples converted back into sound waves that approximate what was originally recorded. The engineer's thinking went if the ear can't hear it then it won't be missed if it's not there.

But when the bell ringers struck their bells, the crystal-clear sound waves propagated off those instruments in a wide range of frequencies and faded from loud to silent in a progression of infinite steps. It was not music carved up into discrete portions that rose and decayed at a fixed rate. It was the type of sound that could only be produced in a manner intended by God. If God is infinite, then I was listening to the echoes of heaven. And even though Jimi Hendrix's guitar was highly amplified and processed before it was recorded as grooves on a vinyl disk, those squiggles were direct paintings of vibrations of the air created when he plucked his guitar strings. There was a direct relationship between those etched vinyl patterns and the waves coming off his guitar. Nowhere in the process were the vibrations converted to binary numbers representing the parts of the music deemed "good enough".

In our search to be like God, at best we can only ever come close; something is always missing.

No Faith in Belief

I draw as strong a distinction between faith and belief as I do between religion and superstition.


Lord, keep us from The Believers.
The faithful give me hope.
Believers terrify me.
Believing is easy. Faith is not.
Belief requires convincing but faith does not. Faith, like love and prayer, is self evident and requires no proof.
Having Faith requires a change of heart.
Belief is a change of mind.
Believers are easily deceived. Those with a true faith are not.
I believe in the power of faith but I have no faith in belief.
People who have faith in the Holy Spirit are saving the world.
Believers are doing their best to destroy it hoping for a shortcut to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Believers fear the truly faithful because the truly faithful fear nothing but God.
Believers live in fragile bubbles threatened by anything contrary to what they believe.
The Faithful delight in the world's mysteries The Lord has created for them.
Baptism in the Holy Spirit does not make you a believer.
The heart and spirit cannot lie or sin. The mind can and does.
Actions follow faith. Abraham had such unqualified faith in God that he was willing to sacrifice his beloved son.
God hoped that by providing Moses with inflexible laws that people’s obedient behavior would maintain their faith. It did not happen. King after king reverted to sinful ways.
I can recite the Apostle’s Creed with sincerity because I have faith in its essential truth.
Prov. 14:15   A simple man believes anything, but a prudent man gives thought to his steps.