So we have a general music thread, and a mantra thread, but no thread for music that moves the soul. So I thought Iād make one.
This is a place to post music with spiritual themes that isnāt a mantra. So stuff like hymns, bhajans, chalisas, honkyokou, etc.
Hereās my favorite Ave Maria
And this is Honshirabe, the first honkyoku a shakuachi player learns. Itās simple, but beautiful.
Great performance of a powerful hymn / praise song.
I was part of a Kairos Prison Ministry team about a decade ago, and one of the pastors in our group absolutely loved this song. It inevitably made it into every one of his sermons. And for good reason. Itās about the sacredness that you can find in brokenness and suffering. As Rumi said, āThe wound is the place where the light enters you.ā
Dont know many songs like this but think this is a brilliant thread.
Posted this in mantas, but more appropriate here:
(A+ sounds, I only wish I could edit out the one guy who makes random āhoā sounds, like he stubbed his toe and is in pain. lol, its really distracting from the harmony.)
I am a big believer that the sacredness of a song is not so much whats in the lyrics, but how much heart is behind the vocalizations.
No clue what is being sung, but you feel it in your bones:
āLord of the Starfieldsā by Bruce Cockburn.
āOh Love that fires the Sun, keep me burning.ā
Yahoshua Beauty Way by Rafe Pearlman.
Yahoshua is a name for Jesus, sung in the style of the Native American Church.
A few years ago I was invited by a Native friend to attend a Native American Church peyote meeting, an all night ceremony in a teepee. At one point in the night they began singing a Jesus song and I had a vision of my Christian grandmother, who at that time had passed into Spirit, dancing around the teepee to the Jesus song. She was really getting into it!
The best of old school Christian rock.
dc Talk was the band. None of the modern Christian rock bands have ever been able to match their brilliance.
Very bhakti song. I love the message in the music video too. Love is freely available to us, like oxygen. But because of fear we cut ourselves off from it and then, love-starved, we look for it in the wrong places. If we just let go, take down our barriers, weāll see that we already have all the love we could ever want. The universe provides it for free.
Posted this some songs from this album before, but worth the repost. I was given the CD as a gift from a spiritual friend, first Christian rock band I ever jammed out to:
Thank you @Bucket a second time for reminding me abouit those memories and these songs 
One of my favorites from the album, the title I think is referencing the Trojan War:
Nice synchronicity with this and the WW1 song:
ālet my love be proof of your loveā
Found this one today, really love it:
@NightHawk999 Definitely better than the average Christian rock. I was in High School in L.A. when the whole Christian rock thing started with the āJesus freaksā and I was involved with that scene during my teen years in the early 70ās. I grew up in an Evangelical Church and prior to that it was all very boring 19th century hymns and gospel songs. Then the whole Jesus freak thing started happening and I started going to their concerts and church services, including at Calvary Chapel (which is portrayed in the film āJesus Revolutionā that came out a couple of years ago.) I played guitar so I started my own little Jesus freak band that played at our church. In retrospect, I think a lot of the hippie kids got burned with the whole drugs and free love thing and were finding solace in something more traditional and moral, and bringing their rock music with them. But I was moving from my Evangelical upbringing towards being more hippie. We met somewhere in the middle for my teen years. My brother is now a minister in a multi-racial church in L.A. and they have a rockinā band. Seems like any evangelical church worth itās salt these days has to have a rockinā worship band. But that all started with the Jesus freaks in the early 70ās. As for me, I now seem to be the pagan in the family 
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This is a full length documentary of Aretha Franklin singing gospel music at a church in L.A. in 1972. Unfortunately they recorded the sound track separate from the visual film and then had technical problems with synching the visual with the sound track, so the film was not released for many years. Finally with todayās computer technology the film and sountrack were able to be synched. If you look carefully you may catch a glimpse of Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones in the audience. They happened to be in L.A. recording an album and heard that Aretha was doing this, so decided to go hear her.
@_mbready. I like the rawness of Leonard Cohenās original version.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
Thatās how the light gets in.
This song is from his final album. An interesting story about this: Cohen had gone off to a Zen monastery for a few years in the 90ās and lived the life of a monk. He left his finances to be managed by his financial manager while he was off being a monk, so he didnāt have to think about it. After a few years of being a monk, he decided to retire to his home in L.A. He never thought he would tour as a musician again. But when he got home he discovered that his financial manager had embezzled his life savings and he was broke. So he decided he needed to write one more album, record it and go on tour. And this song came out of that.
Stole this one from @Bianca_Aga , really love it, its worth a triple or quadruple repost.
Your post reminds me of a movie a friend was telling me about. How chruches in CA started seeing lower turn outs, and one of the solutions was to relax their iron grips and open their doors to the hippies of the times.
I have been to these churches with a band a few times, and it really made me check my prejudices on the concept. it was a very powerful experience, the music was good, but more importantly you could almost taste the āholy spiritā in the air, the emotional tone of the large room was so positive that words dont do it justice. Just look at the reactions of the people in the audience in the above video. You can see how those vibes hit people deeply and powerfully.
I dont doubt there were many Jews in Jesusās time who considered him a pagan too. āDont let the turkeys get to youā 
This is my favorite of Hallelujahs, first heard it in the movie Shrek. The others posted are really good as well.
I guess that goes to show you are are āSacred Chords thatā¦please the Lordā
So many permutations of the same song, and they all hit home
