LYRICS TO LIVE BY : What my children are listening to.

My teenagers love music. Anand's taste runs to Aerosmith, Moby and Bon Jovi, while Cathleen prefers Savage Garden and the Backstreet Boys. The tapes are almost as available in India, where I live, as in Boston or Brooklyn. Both of them would have this music on full blast, twenty-four hours a day if it were permitted. It isn't, but it might as well be the way their songs work their way into my brain and stay there. I know that from generation to generation, it is the responsibility of parents to despise the music their children love, but I don't. I often actually like it. The beat is strong, insistent. It makes me want to move, or at least sing along. But then I listen to what I am singing and I realize it's the lyrics I can't stand.

And unfortunately, the lyrics are what I carry around with me. It is disturbing. I have always thought that I was a person of some depth, but lately whenever I pause to listen to what is going on in my head, I hear things like "My friend's got a girlfriend and he hates that b--"or, "Come on, leave me breathless, can't fight this feeling..." Even if one consciously rejects the messages of free sex, hatred, and violence that so many of these songs celebrate, the cumulative effect of repeating them over and over and over the way one does with a catchy tune must be considerable.

It was with this in mind that I began a little music therapy for myself. I banned the children from playing their tapes on the car stereo and began listening exclusively to Handel's Messiah while driving. I was amazed at how quickly it filled my thoughts and how appropriate certain songs can be when played at just the right moment.

One very hot morning, for example, I was driving through the town's most congested area (the road there narrows precipitously--the locals call it "Suicide Alley"), weaving the car through a maze of buffalo carts, bicycles, trucks, buses, rickshaws, cows, and hand-pulled carts when suddenly the voice of the tenor rang out: "He was cut off from the land of the living, for the transgressions of thy people was he stricken." And the next moment, the consolation: "But thou didst not leave his soul in hell, nor didst thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption."

Seeing it like this in black and white, without the gorgeous voice or the stirring music, I can hardly believe how moved I was when I heard it or how comforting that assurance was, creeping through Suicide Alley--hell indeed in 110-degree heat. Over the next month I listened to the whole oratorio many times, and each session revealed something new.

Hearing Jesus described as "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" brought me close to tears. I think it was the final s in sorrows, more than anything else, that made me realize, as I never had before, his humanity. Not sorrow in the abstract, but sorrows, individual hurts and sadnesses. And the choice of the word "acquainted"! How mild, how sweet a word to describe the terrible suffering he had experienced in his life.

Kiri Te Kanawa is the soprano in the recording I have, and the first time I heard her sing "I know that my Redeemer liveth" I felt that if I could just go on hearing it I would never have a doubt of its truth--for it is impossible not to believe in the atmosphere her voice creates. I suppose I must have read all these passages at some point or other. But set to music, emphasized, repeated by voices almost unbearably beautiful, they become majestic and stirring, powerful enough to change a life.

It is a sharp drop back to earth to walk into the house and hear one or the other of the children's favorite songs reverberating from their rooms. I know I listened to stuff my parents disapproved of when I was growing up (one of my favorite songs was the forbidden "Cecilia" by Simon and Garfunkel--I loved the risque reference to "making love in the afternoon"), but from what I can recall, there was nothing truly dreadful.

That is not true today, but there are two things which give me comfort. One is the recitative right at the end of Messiah which promises us "we shall be changed in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet." And the other is that I still control the music in the car.