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Music Devotion
Congregational singing is a religious devotion that Jesus and his disciples themselves practiced. St. Matthew concludes the Last Supper in chapter 26 in this way, "Then, after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives." This hymn-singing was, as we now know, one of their final moments together as a community, although the disciples did not understand this at the time. Later that night their life together was destroyed by the arrest of Jesus in the Garden.
One the very last things they did together as a group was sing a song, weaving a tender tribute to singing within the Gospel fabric. But how did these very different men from several locations and walks of life, including carpentry, fishing and tax collecting among others, all happen to know the same hymn? Where did they learn this song that our New American translator calls a "Hymn," not a "Psalm"?
We can make at least three educated guesses. If this hymn was a song traditionally associated with the closing of the Paschal Seder, it might have been learned at home, repeated during many years of Passover observance around the family dining room table.
Or perhaps the hymn was one of those that had been taught in Synagogue school during Bar-Mitzvah preparation classes, along with reading the Hebrew Torah.
Then again, the idea that so many different persons might know the very same song could also suggest that it was an ascent hymn, written for the express purpose of visiting the TempleMount and taught to all pilgrims entering Jerusalem.
Whatever the answer, the underlying fact is that these grown men from several working-class walks of life apparently could and did sing a hymn together on a moment's notice, without any fuss. How different were the devotional expectations that produced such singing men from the mostly silent musical expectations of our own pre-Vatican II upbringing!
The Second Vatican Council initiated an important renewal in Catholic musical devotion by putting in place a series of steps for building-up strong congregational singing. Beginning by restoring liturgical services into the vernacular languages, continuing by publishing worship aids to encourage congregational participation, and then integrating native and contemporary songs along with traditional hymns into these resources, the Council launched a modern quest for the recovery of worshipful congregational singing.
What the Council could not do was restore the lost musical self-confidence of the mute congregations worldwide, themselves the children and grandchildren of other generations of mute laity, onlookers at liturgy. Instead the Council entrusted this delicate task to the creative care of music ministers belonging to every generation and in every place on earth. No mistaking it, this job of getting Catholics to sing aloud in Church was going to be equal parts musical-empowerment and therapeutic recovery of their voices by the voiceless.
I have been one of those music ministers for some forty years now spending a part of every weekend coaxing songs out of the often-reluctant throats of my companions-in-the-faith up and down the West Coast from Spokane to El Salvador. Everywhere I've been, except in El Salvador, I have run into a similar problem in that pre-Council Euro-American Catholics were most often taught as children never to talk out loud in Church. In fact they were warned not to make any noise at all in Church, much less a joyful noise, lest they directly offend an Almighty and Ever-Grouchy God. Of course they are now reluctant to sing in church. It feels like a desecration of the mood, like singing in the library (Silence, please).
The enforced silence possibly even convinced some vulnerable and imaginative children that they did not have singing voices. The way I have most often heard this expressed is, "I just can't sing," or "I can't carry a tune," or "I can't stay on pitch." Rather than considering music as the natural expression of all human soul- feeling, singing became reserved in their estimation for only a few people with special talents, unlike themselves.
I have heard similar disclaimers about other areas such as, "I don't ever cry," or "I can't paint," or "I have a black thumb," or "I will never get another cat again after Fluffy dies." All I can say is --and I'm sure you already guessed it, Dear Reader -- "Never say never."
Getting on the music is all about yielding to the influences of the sound and rhythm, about letting them enter you, just as you allow the fragrance of a gardenia to permeate your whole being with her when you smell it. There is only one way to let the rhythm sway you or the melody carry you, or the lyrics empower you; that is in some deep way, on some honest, personal level to let them enter your body, and thence your heart. (Shussh, brain)
We yield to the miracle of each song unfolding out of the universal silence into which it will soon return quite naturally when we are relaxing and listening to music at home, letting the sounds capture our inner attention and take us into the liminal, pre-conscious realm of feeling that opens up whenever we hear a melody we enjoy. But so too, we can yield while we are singing aloud by entering into the lyrics and experiencing the sad or happy feeling each song expresses and also by allowing some refrains from these songs to echo within our hearts long after the actual song is over.
If there is any clear endorsement of the devotion of music in the communion of saints, as distinguished from the crystal-clear example of the Angelic Choirs, it is the life of St. Francis who trudged across Italy singing his praises of the Lord in fair climate and foul. He once summarized the life of his brothers and sisters in this way, "For what else are we, the servants of the Lord but minstrels of the Most High, whose pleasure it is to lift people's hearts to spiritual joy?"
"Many times," Thomas of Celano says, "as we saw with our own eyes he would pick up a stick from the ground and putting it over his left arm, he would draw another little stick across it, like a bow across a violin. Going through the motions of playing, he would sing in French about his Lord. This whole ecstasy of joy would often end in tears as his song of gladness would dissolve into compassion for the passion of his Lord."
In this Zen-like example Francis uses two sticks to overcome the censorship of his ego about prayer. First he breaks away from the usual seriousness that surrounds how we pray by making instead a playful prayer, a joyful prayer in French, using the violin of sticks to accompany himself. But then, his genuine, wholehearted laughter is reduced to tears for, as William Blake explains it, "Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of laughter weeps."
So it is that music carries us over those emotional dams the Ego constructs to contain even our spirituality within its own, reasonable comfort zone -- far away from any real laughter or any real tears. Over the course of the liturgical year, as we participate in a full range of basic human emotions expressive of inner pain and confusion as well as of joy and thanksgiving, we are taken beyond the limits of our personal cultural limitations and we are exposed to the transpersonal sentiments of greater humanity through the hymns we sing together.
The trick, as the Master Trickster has shown, is to yield to the hymn.
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