The Invitation

I still remember the smells of sweat and sawdust. In my West Virginia hometown the whole community came out when traveling evangelists brought their road shows to town. We worshiped in churches, at the park, or in tents outside of town. We worshiped with singing and shouting, with laughter and tears. No one watched the clock when we got together. No one could imagine a better place to be. What our religion lacked in sophistication we made up for with joyful exuberance.

But as I grew older this was not enough. I had too many questions, and my persistence in asking them made my elders uneasy. These 'revivals' were designed not to open my mind or expand my heart but to save my soul from the eternal fires of hell. I believe that my childhood religion was deeply rooted in a genuine faith, but it was too narrowly conceived to sustain the journey of a lifetime.

While I was quite young, and for reasons I still do not understand fully, I walked to a drugstore across town and purchased a recorded symphony. I could not even pronounce the composer’s name: Tchaikovsky. The symphony was his Pathetique. Closeted in my bedroom, I played it over and over on my sister's Decca phonograph. At first it made little sense to me, but soon I began to hear tunes, themes and particular instruments. The more intently I listened, the more the music revealed itself to me. It had come from another world, and it beckoned me beyond the boundaries of my life as I had known it until then.

This invitation to cross some unspecified boundary has become a frequent and welcomed visitor in the intervening years.  I heard it again in a loon’s call in northern Minnesota, in the plaintive horn of Louis Armstrong, and in the violent rush of spring waters down a New Hampshire mountainside. While walking alone amidst the ruins of Olympia, or preaching in an old Welsh chapel in Swansea, or walking with my children in the Badlands of South Dakota, I felt, like Jacob at Bethel, that “surely God is in this place.”

When dancers moved across the stage in a darkened Princeton theater, when an unknown woman played Brahms in a dimly lighted room in St. Galen, or when a single soprano heralded the Easter dawn in a crowed Siberian cathedral, I knew that I was part of a larger reality. Even in the dirty confines of a migrant laborers’ camp, or an NAACP-sponsored summer job corps office in Trenton, N. J., or by the bedside of a dying friend, I did not escape God’s presence. “Deep calls unto deep. At night, God’s song is with me.”

Much contemporary religion fails to do justice to the grandeur of God and the ambiguity of the human situation. Too often theology is reduced to clichés and mindless confessions. Religious communities are manipulated as mere political constituencies. A reverence for deeper things - what Aeschylus called “the monarchy of awe” - has disappeared nearly altogether. Yet awe veils a mystery, and from this mystery comes a summons. Humbling ourselves, we hear it.  Opening ourselves, we find answers to  questions we didn't know resided in our hearts.

(Badlands view from Norbeck Pass. NPS Photo by Shaina Niehans)

Singing

In my mind, I am a convinced rationalist. I honor God with words. Although precise verbal formulations never “capture” reality, words and phrases can evoke and reveal what might otherwise remain obscure. Words are our hypotheses, thrown before us into the abyss of the unknown. They are our bridges, linking soul to soul. They reassure us with their compelling logic. They comfort us with their illusory ability to name the unnameable.
 

But in my heart, something more is going on. Why is the worship of many African American congregations so moving? Why do I come away from the liturgy of a Russian Orthodox Church physically exhausted but spiritually soaring? From whence comes the thrill in my breast as bright Brandenburg cadences dance through the hall? From what well flow the tears in my eyes as the plaintive wail of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet engulfs me?

Words may be our bridges, but music is the rising dew, the meandering stream, the roaring cataract beneath -- now gentle, now ominous, now elfish, now raging, now sorrowful, now luminous, now full of dread, now full of mystery. Where words circle or suggest our reality, music draws us deeply into it. Where words are our hypotheses, music is our affirmation.

Singing, especially. Singing is to humans as roaring is to lions, as neighing is to horses, as chirping is to birds. The breath of creation flows through us as it blows through tree branches and tumbleweed. When we stop singing, the breath of life is blocked in us, and life itself begins to wane.

From times immemorial, we have sung -- at the hearth, in public arenas, around campfires, in the market place. We have sung old songs and new. We have sung at birth and at war, in joy and in fear. Our songs have linked generations. What will become of our world when that last real songs pass from our memory, if no new songs take their place, and if we are left only with I-Pods to fill the void?

Singing knows neither tomorrow nor yesterday, yet it links us to those who have gone before and those who will follow us. It gives energy, yields meaning, and invites commitment. It originates in the mysterious depths of life itself, and calls us into the Community of Life. It may be that my breath and your breath together produce the sound. But is that sound not waiting already on the lips of God, waiting for our breath to bring it to life in this world? When we truly sing together, do we not open ourselves to the breath of all life, the breath of all being, and let it sing its song through us?

Singing together -- in concert, as it were -- is one of the great pleasures in life. Whether the music divides us into parts or pulls us along from the beginning in some irenic unison, it fashions a community from the separate selves that we bring. As we give ourselves to song, does not the song give back to us? Although it depends upon our individual gifts, does not our singing transcend our individuality? It brings -- at least for the moment -- minds, hearts and bodies together with a common passion. My singing involves my commitment to life. Our singing together involves our commitment to share our lives in community.

We welcome the lilt and loveliness of our music. As its chords and cadences come to life among us,  we honor the songs we sing.