By the Rev. Joanne Davies, SSJD Oblate
The days are evil … where is your joy? Can you find it within, to strengthen yourself, to redeem the day and to sit with God moment to moment? As it is often said….Is there a song for that? When we sing we pray twice… our whole incarnated body gets involved. It’s healing.
Singing is mentioned over 400 times in the bible. Singing together is the deepest way we can feel community in God. Singing declares creation. And singing alone is comforting, reminding us of God’s presence.
I was six when I first started to truly notice the way the liturgy was ordered on a Sunday morning. I marked where and how I needed to be by the hymns we sang and when they were sung. I loved singing about God, in love and sorrow. I sang loudly and joyfully. I can remember so clearly the bells on my winter hat ringing along with my head movements or the flowers and ribbons of my spring and summer hats bobbing around. No adult ever shushed me or told me to keep still…but the children I was sitting with from my Sunday school class were generally disgusted. But I was not dissuaded, I was sure I was experiencing heaven.
When I was in my late teens there were many songs I played over and over – the lyric flitting around and touching the edges of my spirit as I wandered through the generalized difficulty of feeling different. But there were also personal songs that I would never have told my peers about, like how much I sang “All Things Bright and Beautiful” in the mornings or fell deeply into the prayer of “Abide with me” alongside listening to Helen Reddy, and singing loudly and dramatically “I am Woman” followed by, “I don’t know how to love him”. Singing makes the meaning of the words stay in my head in a different way … so I can reflect and contemplate more deeply. Dare I say, to be filled with the Spirit? I could go on … listing songs, and remembering and sometimes, like Miriam, I danced as I sang. I came to understand that it was all spiritually formative. This realization illuminated for me why what we sing in prayer, and with prayer, is such vital sharing together, singing beloved hymns into the depth of our silence together gives us the spiritual tools to take our faith with us out into the world we live in.
How are we filled with the Spirit… in a way that comes from our knowing the Spirit with us? In worship how do we hold the receiving of communion? Silence is the music in the air of creation, it is space and time for God to enter our very being of who we really are. But we are also called to sing with the heart of Mary and Miriam. Both singers in our scriptures. We sing, leading our spirits to hold the memory of awe, blessing, gratitude, hope, safety, praise and joy. We also sing because God gives us space in generous love for lamentation and pain and our spirit is strengthened for the healing journey.
The letter to the Ephesians says… sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts. Patients ask me to sing with them and, with the beginning hope that they will lead me with the actual tune, I find myself letting go and just knowing the hope is really in the singing of the soul to God. With God. And doing this together reminds us of the companionship God wants for us.
Do you all know the 19th century song “My life flows on in endless song…How can I keep from singing”? The first time I heard it, I am rather embarrassed to say, I was a Divinity student at Trinity College, on retreat with other Divinity students from the College. The main part of the Retreat was song and music in liturgy. Not the history or much theology, or even where and how we should place song and music in liturgy, though with a kind of experiential planning, the liturgy was definitely part of the retreat. The overarching journey we travelled together over those three days was how singing with our prayers together in worship is enlivening, enriching and releasing…readying us to go out the door. And how the action of singing and hearing music brings us wholly to God, and rests us in God. So what did we do on our Retreat? Mostly we sang with all our hearts together… and these words sang into my soul,
My life flows on in endless song,
above earth’s lamentation.
I catch the sweet, though far-off hymn
that hails a new creation.
No storm can shake my inmost calm
while to that Rock I’m clinging.
Since Love is lord of heav’n and earth,
how can I keep from singing?
Through all the tumult and the strife,
I hear that music ringing.
It finds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?
