THE CRAZY AND WONDERFUL POWER OF SONG

Joan K. King

When I was a little girl, I remember, I sat in church between my grandparents. I remember their singing. My grandfather was completely tone deaf and my grandmother had a quavering small soprano voice. But how they sang those songs of faith and how they loved to hear others sing.

Now I sing in a congregation that has stood in one place for over three hundred years, surrounded usually by over three hundred other singers. Unlike in my home church, usually we sing without piano or organ, supported only by the strength of the community. The quality of the music is different here from that in the church of my childhood, where the organ often overcame the singing. Still the songs are often the same, and my grandparents are never far from my memory or my heart.

I have sung in my current congregation long enough now to hear the voices missing there as well. I miss the young man, his tenor voice silenced by cancer, yet some Sundays his 80-year-old father’s clear tenor sings on, affirming that "all is well" and making me stop my own singing to listen. I listen to the alto voice behind me, singing alone now for over five years since her dear husband died after being committed all his life to singing in this space. When they used to sing together, their voices would meet, then part, as their harmonies drew close and diverged.

I have watched us come together at the death of a child, faces drawn in pain. In those contexts the song is faint at first; those words of comfort and assurance ring false at first. But somehow in those times the songs sung long before we gathered here reach out across the generations and grab hold of us. You can hear it happening in the crescendo of the music, as the parts begin to clear, the bass line is heard, and slowly but surely that affirmation of faith becomes just that, an affirmation.

Never was the power of the singing as clear to me as the Sunday following September 11. When I stood to lead worship that morning, I looked out over faces filled with images of the week, of pain, of shock, of confusion. As a peace church we brought a set of questions to that Sunday morning that were particularly painful. What did it mean to follow Jesus’ way of peace in the face of a faceless enemy? How would we love the "other" when the other seems barely human? As we stood to sing, I sensed the ocean of emotion among us. Then the song began: Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, help me stand, I am tired, I am weak, I am worn; through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light. Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home. With each phrase more tears fell; with each phrase the song swelled, until finally it rang from the walls.

Did the singing change the world? Sometimes I wonder. What I know is that it brought those of us gathered there back to the place we needed to be, back to the place of struggle, back to stand before the face of God.

In her book Tender Mercies, author Anne Lamott talks about visiting a church in San Francisco and of the "singing splitting her wide open." When I sit in this place hallowed by thousands of Sundays of singing, surrounded by people as different from me as night from day—yet hearing what music we make together—I marvel at the wonder and the breadth of God’s grace.

Something magical happens in the middle of a song when you look down at the credit line and realize it was written in 1869, or in 1789, or even before, yet here you are in the middle of postmodern America finding God in the same words, the same harmonies in which God was present one hundred, two hundred, even three hundred or more years ago.

Some Sundays I arrive at church harried and frazzled from the life I lead, sometimes not even liking my daughters or my husband much depending on what the morning at home has brought. Then the singing begins Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me. Somehow the conflict over the outfit for Sunday morning or who will clean up the kitchen slides into its proper perspective, shoulders relax, and the Spirit flows down the aisle of our family. I suspect many Sundays this experience is repeated in bench after bench.

What is it about this simple act that has such power?

Singing, I think, connects us in new ways; it is a powerful metaphor of community with power to create new realities for us.

Singing connects us again and again to the past and, in the act of singing with our children or others younger than us, to the future. When I sing and hear, if only now in memory or through elderly voices that remind me of them, the voices of my grandparents next to me, all they were and gave to me comes near. When I extend that connection to others of faith who went before me, and realize they sang through times as frightening as whatever I might be facing yet still sang on, I gain courage from that connection.

Mennonites talk all the time about community. We believe Scripture is interpreted in the context of the community, that authentic faith can only be lived in community, and that Jesus truly stands among us when we are gathered. We are at least as flawed and fraught with conflict as any other group of people. But our singing gives us hope. It is in the discord that the harmony is fully heard. It is only when we all sing the part written for us that the music is fully expressed. It is only when we are all paying attention to the song leader that subtle changes in dynamics can be expressed by hundreds of singers.

This crazy and sometimes wonderful culture we live in doesn’t often express the priorities we find in the gospel story. During the week we don’t hear much about the power of the powerless, the face of God reflected in the oppressed and downtrodden of our society, or the fact that God might be present in unexpected ways and circumstances. But try to sing through a Sunday morning without being confronted with that reality, if not in the music then in the fact that, amid the difficulties faced by those on all sides, still the singing soars.

—Joan K. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, manages her own therapy practice in Paoli and Telford. She provides clinical consultation to community programs for persons with mental illness. An avid storyteller, she is mother of three nearly adult daughters.

This article was originally published in God’s Friends, http: www.saintgregorys.org