“I just listened to a song that made me nauseous.”
You read that right.
As I told my wife that, she was looking at me with the one eyebrow much higher than the other, confused, and said, “Then why on earth are you smiling?”
Where it could physically be described as incredibly uncomfortable, in other ways it was the most joyful, absolutely pleasurable and euphoric of feelings. It was like a wild animal caged inside my ribs heard something that awakened it so, perhaps making it furious or ecstatic, and it suddenly tried to violently tear its way out. Please hear me out: this has never happened to me before. I have listened to a lot of music, and I have felt a lot of things as a result, emotionally (sad) , physically (crying) and spiritually (revived), but I have never felt anything like this.
Having said that, I am more than proud – I am unraveled, falling apart to pieces on the ground – to introduce to you: Josh Garrels.
Crank it up loud. Make it HD. Expand the screen as big as it can go. I hope you get sick.
Download Full Album Free | Website
So what happened to you?
If you shared anything close to my experience, I am sure you want an explanation. My guess? It’s not magic or an email forward of a hypnotic trick. It’s God.
C.S. Lewis said “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” That animal inside my chest? I believe it was my soul, churning, wrenching, and uncontrollably provoked at the sound of God’s voice speaking through Josh Garrels’s song.
And as for the nauseous feeling? I remembered, vaguely, an excerpt from a C.S. Lewis book about such a thing, and after some digging, I found my sensation explained by an English Naval officer/Parliament member more than 300 years ago: Samual Pepys.
“I went with my wife to the King’s House to see The Virgin Martyr, and it is mighty pleasant. . . . But that which did please me beyond anything in the whole world was the wind musick when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me and, indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife . . . and makes me resolve to practise wind musick and to make my wife do the like” (27 February 1668).
I read this a long time ago in C.S. Lewis’s book Miracles, in which he was explaining the existence of the supernatural realm using this excerpt from Samuel Pepys’s famous diary. How he uses this is very complex, and I won’t attempt to explain it, but I can try to account for my nausea. We, as humans, possess more emotions than there are physical reactions to express them. Therefore, each physical reaction we have must represent several human emotions. For example, I cry when I am sad, but occasionally, I cry when I am overwhelmingly joyous. Today’s particular physical reaction, this feeling of nausea, has occurred as a reaction to the emotion of feeling queasy most often, but occasionally has been used to represent the emotion of falling in love with my wife, and new to me as of today, has been used to manifest my soul’s lurching at the sound of my Father’s voice.
Josh Garrels’s entire new album, Love & War & the Sea In Between, is available for download for FREE here, on his website. Enough said.
The video you saw was produced by Mason Jar Music, a company making extraordinary videos of artists like The Wood Brothers and Alicia Keys.
Hasta pronto,
Daniel
The Daily Mixtape 