The Difference a Song Makes

I'm grateful to be part of a rotation of faith leaders in my town who take turns writing a column titled "Voices of Faith" in the local weekly, The Concord Journal.  Here's my latest installment.

The Difference a Song Makes

On a recent Sunday afternoon, my parish choir and the choir of the West Concord Union Church presented a concert of seasonal music for choirs of voices, hand bells and brass. The music ranged from Tallis to Bernstein and the hour-long program was truly a tonic for souls waiting through the damp, gray spring that has been ours in these parts.

As our music director always does in a concert, he included several hymns in the program for the audience to sing. While we were singing This Is My Song (Stone’s lyrics set to Sibelius’ Finlandia) I became aware of something I so often and easily take for granted. We were more than a hundred people standing and singing together and I thought of the many people who seldom, if ever, gather to sing with others. Communal singing is something people of faith do on a weekly basis when they gather for worship but not even all people of faith come to Sabbath services.

We live in culture where music is available everywhere. With iPods and ear buds we no longer need to rely on larger equipment to listen to music - and even to sing along. But I’m thinking here of what it means to gather with others and to sing with them. Singing in the shower may be a joy for you (if not for your housemates) but singing with others is an experience of a very different kind.

What would my life be like if I seldom or never gathered with others to sing, to make music, to nudge some notes to jump from a printed page into a sound to be heard and shared and to echo not only in the space where it finds its voice but also in the hearts of those who make it?

It strikes me that there’s a deep connection in the ways we speak of making music and making love and making peace… Something of the divine is to be found in each and apart from the divine there is no music, no love, and no peace.

In singing together we experience a real form of communion, one more universal than what believers find in the bread and wine of the sacrament. Here is a musical communion, a unity with, that comes of mutually giving ourselves to a common task and finding in the giving that we are one: from many voice and many parts come one sound and one song. This is the communion: a harmony of pitch and tone shaped in shared measures of pulse and tempo. And carried upon these blended sounds are a poet’s words: music and lyrics enjoying their own communion, sealed on singers’ lips.

Any singers might understand what I’m suggesting here because it’s precisely the natural communion that music offers that draws people in every age and place and culture to gather in song. This is a beautifully human experience not limited to faith nor diminished by faith’s factions.

Certainly for those who sing in faith; for those whose song rises up from and is offered for communion with others and with the divine; for those who see the fingerprints of the divine all over nature’s beauty; for those who lift their prayer on the melodies they sing, the music they make: certainly all these know a communion in singing together that is itself a sacrament of God’s presence.

Those who worship on the Sabbath and sing the Lord’s song throughout the year learn to pray through singing with others. Their hymns and psalms give voice to praise and pleas their own efforts might fail to match. In their community’s song they pray what their hearts know and there comes to speech what otherwise might have languished in silence. Through the music of faith’s seasons and holidays there is an annual recounting of what we believe, what sustains us and what gives us hope.

Through singing together I learn that I am not alone in any season and that in my own times of sorrow the joy of others’ song is there to lift me up.

Even those who come to worship on the Sabbath but who don’t join in the singing can’t help but be awash in the sound, the harmony, the beauty and the prayer of those around them. Even when I am silent while others sing, my heart knows the communion that’s offered to me in my neighbors’ chorus.

In my own faith tradition we pray that when we sing our voices will blend with the song of angels and saints in heaven… Indeed, we aspire to a high communion but it’s good to know we needn’t depend solely on ourselves for the beauty of our song. God shares our desire for communion and so the voice of all that is divine can be heard in the songs we sing.

I suspect it’s not by chance that this reflection began for me while we were singing a hymn titled This Is My Song…

On whatever day you name as the Sabbath, in a house of worship near you, people gather to sing and in the prayer of their song they are making communion with God and with one another. There’s a place for you in that chorus of believers. It’s your song as well as theirs and the music they make, the song they sing, the prayer they offer, the communion they share is less for your absence and will be more in your presence and for your voice.


 
Subscribe to A Concord Pastor Comments