A Reflection from the Rev. David Hoster
Dear People of St. James’,
What does it mean that we value music at St. James’?
It means, among many other things, that there is more to life than language. Systematic theology has its place and value. Ritual language in worship has its own, somewhat different place. So, too, does the language of sermons, meant to get us to see more and try harder.
Music, however, moves someplace other than where language can take us. Early humans likely sang and chanted together, dancing around a fire at night, before they ever had words to coordinate their practical tasks during the day. Music embodies who they are together, where mere words set out what they would do together.
The music that we modern folk share does the same, defining who we are in ourselves, who we are with one another, and who we are in God. People absorbed the highly structured cantatas of J.S. Bach into Protestant souls that craved order and all things aright on earth. Bach’s music is vastly different from Gregorian Chant, which transports souls far away to realms of heaven not tightly connected to the way things stand on earth. Jazz and blues give shape and substance to communities that need the flow of their lives viscerally affirmed in the face of the world’s active hostility.
Music moves below us, and above.
Music moves “below” when it does what I just described—gives visceral expression to things held in common that reach beyond words. When we “lift every voice and sing,” we lift up our shared lives from our separate, human depths and incarnate them in unison with other voices and instruments and often with the movement of our bodies. We make real what we all know in our hearts is already true about ourselves as a community of souls.
Yet, music also moves “above,” expressed in the brilliance of the wonderful old hymn that says, “My life goes on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation.” Our shared music, the expression of our lives, exists above and beyond the pain that characterizes so much of our existence on earth.
Thus, music “above” is faith. Pain and lamentation, we know only too well. Lamentation is fact, not faith. The music we share, however, raises our souls above the fact of lamentation. Music is faith, not fact. It creates, in our souls, a vibration that even resonates with “the real though far off hymn that tells the New Creation.”
So, music is not only who we are and where we’ve come from. It’s also where we are going. Quite simply, we have no life or journey without music.
Covid inflicts a particular tragedy and challenge on us at St. James’ by threatening to take our music away. That’s because choirs have become such dangerous things these days. Singing spreads invisible aerosol droplets that might unwittingly transmit novel coronavirus. Same with wind instruments—trumpets, saxophones, flutes. Spreaders, all. They are denied to us in our corporate life for the foreseeable future.
So, we can’t sing together as we always have, at least not indoors. We can’t be lifted by hearing our wonderful choirs do what they do so well. We’re denied the corporate expression of who we are. If we’re not attentive to our core value, we might even slip out of harmony with “the far-off hymn that tells the New Creation.”
That makes it all the more essential to remember our music, play it, and sing it, and dance it. Even in isolation, our singers show the way. If you haven’t experienced our good folks streaming their voices together online from their separate homes, click on this link immediately. Or this one. Even if you already listened, click on them anyway and listen again. It will do you good.
Now, join your voice with theirs. Tune up your instrument, even if, like me, all you can play is a stereo. Lift your voice. Don’t worry. You’re in pandemic isolation. Nobody but Jesus is listening, and he’s fine with your singing. Heck. Get your feet in motion and dance. Jesus will dance with you. We have no nighttime fire to gather round and sing, but we still have our song, and it is still who we are and it gets us out of ourselves in isolation and into communion with those who share the song with us wherever they are.
Our lives go on, in endless song, above Covid’s lamentation. Let’s lift every voice and sing and harmonize with the far-off hymn that tells the New Creation.
The Rev. David Hoster
