Unlikely Singing

Images and stories from a shaken neighbor have flooded our senses and united our benevolence for the last few days. We imagine that we are powerful beyond measure, and we expect to control our world. When that fails we elect someone else. Then a natural disaster demonstrates that sometimes it is our impotence that knows no bounds. During these times there is a chance that, if we keep our eyes and ears open, we might observe something that is deeply true.

Last week our church choir's schedule called for the singing of a new arrangement of the hymn, "How Can I Keep from Singing." During our rehearsal we discussed the role of singing in our lives. It is easy to relate singing to superficial emotion. We sing for joy when we are happy, we sing for sadness when our heart is broken. But in most of our lives, these emotions happen for reasons that are not life-changing. They are real, but we are able to move beyond them quickly. Then we see unimaginable destruction and grief, and we find that we are without words. We see news reporters choked by the lumps in their throats. We see physicians coolly striving to save lives in primitive conditions, then falling apart when they speak about their efforts. We see mothers and fathers screaming for their children, and orphans pulled from far below the earth.

In our rehearsal discussion, we talked about the slaves who worked in the cotton fields near the spot of our suburban Alabama church. Expected to toil in the Alabama sun anytime it was in the sky, they found a way to put one foot in front of the other, and to express themselves to one another, even though they had been forced to come from different tribal and language groups in Africa, and only had pigment and captivity in common. The way they communicated their anguish, hopes and plans for escape was by singing.

Their grandchildren faced laws designed to keep them a secondary class of citizens, without the rights to vote, advance economically, or even drink and eat near the grandchildren of their ancestors' captors. When they joined hands to walk in protest, they sang.

When Jewish people from all over Europe were forced into concentration camps, their diagnosis became terminal. But at the Terezin Camp, those who remained met in a basement around a piano that had no legs, and a leader taught them the choral parts of the Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi. When they performed it, the Nazis touted the concert as evidence of their benign treatment of happy captives. They didn't realize that the Jews were singing the Christian liturgy of death toward them, not for them.

And last week a lot of attention was paid to 69-year old Ena Zizi, who burst into song as she was pulled from the wreckage of the Cathedral in Port-au-Prince. She had laid under twelve feet of rubble, praying for nine days. When she came into the light she provided her own soundtrack.

These anecdotes demonstrate the deepest purpose of singing. Words are not enough, once the circumstances of life become overwhelming. Whether a heartbroken teenager listening to the top 40, or a grown-up living through an unimaginable torment, people are ill-equipped to express themselves through language alone. Singing allows more of our thoughts to be seen by others. It allows us to order our chaotic thoughts. These are the times when we "see through a glass darkly," and singing sheds light.

When we claim that school music is important because it relates to mathematics, or that hymn singing in church is important because it conveys theology, we short-change the value of the musical expression. Theology requires 500 pages to cogently express the experience of the slave who sings, "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child." A world-class theological conference would be required to derive verbal expression for the experience of the Jew who sings to the Nazi, "Day of wrath, that day will dissolve the world in ashes...When therefore the judge will sit, whatever hides will appear, nothing will remain unpunished." A sermon would be confounded to attempt to express the experience of Ena Zizi, who had prayed alone for days, and then couldn't help singing.

The purpose of singing is not to set words to music. It is to take up where the words leave off, delving deeper into the human experience and our need to express it.

My life flows on in endless song above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the real though far off hymn that hails a new creation.
Through all the tumult and the strife I hear its music ringing.
It sounds an echo in my soul; how can I keep from singing?