When the Melody Went Missing
On Music, Myth, and the Return of Sacred Sound

by P. Glenn

It was always about the music.
Until it wasn’t.

There was a time I could feel it—in the sway of hymns, in the quiet under a stained-glass light, in the way voices rose together and reached for something more than words. The lyrics meant something, but only because they had melody—tone, tension, harmony, ache. Without it, even the most sacred phrases began to feel hollow. Memorized. Managed.

In the aftermath of losing belief, I didn’t just lose a system or a structure—I lost the song.
And I missed it more than I expected.

I’m reminded of what Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, once said about the Pet Sounds and Smile albums. He called the music behind the lyrics “spiritual.” Not because it was religious, but because it resonated. It carried what couldn’t be said. For him, the sound was the sacred.

That makes sense to me now.

Because there’s a kind of music that exists beneath doctrine, beneath certainty—beneath even words. You don’t need to believe a story literally for it to move you. You don’t need a system to feel the pulse of presence. You just need a melody that still stirs the soul.

And that’s where myth and metaphor enter.
They don’t give us scripts to recite—they give us songs to live by.
They carry the deep music of being human.

Through image and story, they help us remember what it means to long, to love, to grieve, to hope. They help us find ourselves in the ache of the world—and in the beauty that still breaks through. They restore a sense of melody when the lyrics alone fall flat. They bring coherence not through certainty, but through resonance.

Sacred Imagination doesn’t hand out new doctrines.
It listens for the melody that lingers beneath the rubble of what was lost.
And it asks:

Can you still hear the music?

Maybe it’s faint.
Maybe it’s buried under years of silence.
But it’s still there. Waiting.

Waiting not just to be heard—
but to be joined.