It's Too Beautiful - A Reflection on Music at First Parish
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 22 May 2011 01:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
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This hour is as much about teamwork as it is about music, a celebration of our First Parish worship team, these professionals on our staff who meet each Monday morning to plan worship on your behalf, to make this hour worthy of your presence here, the words, song, silence and prayer of our community together. And while Beth and I have great cause to celebrate our own seventeen years of worship collaboration, we lift up all on this team today: Jenny, Pam, Margie, Craig, and Faith, and all those who have preceded them in my twenty-three years here. “Oh, it all fit so well together this morning,” one of you will say to me going through the line back there, and I am thinking, “not without a lot of work it didn’t!”
Though Beth never really taught me to clap on the right beat, she did guide my feet in musical ways, always choosing the right hymns, finding the anthem that matched up so well against my sermon theme, learned my body language up here in this pulpit, cheered me on. And these choirs have been for me my spiritual guides, my comfort, and my center. I have joined them for most of their Sunday rehearsals for years now, sitting there by 8:15, watching them warming up, and then hearing them singing like angels, and I believe in angels. And I am thinking in those glory days to come when the organ is finally dedicated, and the labyrinth is replaced, it will also come to pass that the alto section will find the right pew for seating and go directly there.
Anne Lamott, in her book Traveling Mercies, writes of her introduction to church. “If I happened to be [at the flea market] between eleven and one on Sundays,” she says, “I could hear gospel music coming from a church across the street. It was called St. Andrew Presbyterian, and it looked homely and impoverished, a ramshackle building with a cross on top. But the music was so pretty that I would stop and listen. I knew a lot of the hymns from the times I’d gone to church with my grandparents. Finally, I began stopping in at St. Andrew from time to time, standing in the doorway to listen to the songs.
“I went back to St. Andrew about once a month. No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying. I always left before the sermon. But [eventually] it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open. I could sing better here than I ever had before. As part of these people, even though I stayed in the doorway, I did not recognize my voice or know where it was coming from, but sometimes I felt like I could sing forever. The singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone’s very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.
“Something inside me that was stiff and rotting would feel soft and tender. Somehow the singing wore down all the boundaries and distinctions that kept me so isolated. Sitting there, standing with them to sing, sometimes so shaky and sick that I felt like I might tip over, I felt bigger than myself, like I was being taken care of, tricked into coming back to life.”
This is what singing means to me. I am there with Anne Lamott, in the doorway of the church, waiting to come in. There is something about singing that I know splits me wide open. Now I either cannot sing or have been told so often that I cannot sing that it is true, but I sing nevertheless, stepping away from the microphone. I have occasionally sung a line or two in the midst of a sermon and when I have done that, I am always terrified. There is something intimate about singing.
There’s a vulnerability about singing for so many of us non-musician types which may account for those of you who stand with all the rest and never sing, maybe never even open the hymn book. I sympathize, but at some point, I decided to plunge in. I sing because I love hearing the voices near me: Jenny’s voice, the voice of the young person who might be reading that day, the child’s voice coming from the front row. To cover my embarrassment, I used to sing the hymn descant with the choir, in one fine falsetto, just to make those near me laugh. Now I just sing, which may be temptation for laughter enough.
“In some ways,” A. Powell Davies says, “the soul is never lonelier than in a church service…Yet it is a loneliness that has strength to it. The innermost solitude of the human heart is in some paradoxical way a thing that can be shared--that must be shared--if the spirit of God is to find a full entrance into it. We all have the same yearning,” he said, “the same spiritual loneliness, the same need of assurance and faith and hope. We are brought together at the highest level possible. We are not merely an audience, we are a congregation.”
We are not an audience, but a congregation, not choir and congregation, but congregation, one and all, these companions of souls, brought together by a common need of assurance and faith and hope. That is why we sing or try to sing. We are singing for our lives. “Everyone singing together, it’s too beautiful, this marvelous sharing. I wonder at such moments why this cannot be the rule of everyday life, instead of being an exceptional moment, during a choir. When the music stops, the choir is radiant, their faces all lit up. It is so beautiful. In the end,” Muriel Barbery writes, “I wonder if the true movement of the world might no be a voice raised in song.”
Beth and all of you in the choir, thank you for all you have meant to me. It’s all too beautiful.