I love choirs.
I love the massively populated professional choirs one must try out for, and the ten-voice operations that can’t read music but do anyway.
I love choirs built with the voices of boys, those made up of females, and the ones that employ the talents of both. I love the choirs made up of music loves who run the gamut from accomplished musicians to complete amateurs.
I love them all. Even the really bad ones:
When you hear a good choir, from a distance (the best way to listen is the manner in which Johnny Cash heard them in “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down”-from outside the church), there truly is no sound more musically beautiful, save the cry of a newborn child. The sound of a great hymn, sung from the swelling hearts of a well-directed choir in the magical harmonies of John Newton or H. G. Spafford is simply glorious. It is transportive: the music takes you into the presence of God.
This is so much like reading the Bible…when read at a distance, in simple appreciation of its devestating beauty, is transportive. It moves the reader closer to the Lord.
One must be careful, though. That music pulls you in, and soon you find yourself on the front row, distracted by Sister Penny’s dominating flat tone and total rejection of the conductor’s direction. The alto section’s empty eyes and vacant expressions might haunt you because they betray the fact that they have no personal experience with anything deeper than a coffee mug, much less the deep well of the love of God. Or, Bro. Tom, picking his teeth during the opener renders you speechless, and the distracting competition of those two arrogant (and screechy) sopranos leaves you begging God to place a hedge of protection around the stained glass windows.
Clik here to view.
So beautiful from a distance...
Choirs, for all of their majestic music, are built of humans.
And so is the Bible. An honest person must admit there are some real dizzying and ugly distractions from the beauty in that book.
Oh, but the beauty…
It pulls you in. You long to join the choir; you long to sing with them, to be a part of that beautiful sound that you’re certain must please the ears of God. You enthusiastically dive in. You commit wholeheartedly. You sit tall, you follow the director. You sing any part that needs an additional voice. You ignore the mistakes. You make excuses. You sing until your throat is raw, and your head is aching, and then you put on an embarrassed smile and walk into the choir loft where you take part in train-wrecks twice a week for the glory of the Lord.
You discover (but try desperately to ignore) that not only can the director not read music, but he has very little interest in glorifying God and no shortage of interest in glorifying himself. You uncover the disturbing truth that he manipulates the composer’s music in anyway he wishes, changing words and transposing keys willy-nilly, sometimes for no discernible reason whatsoever. Turns out, these same propensities are true for most of the choir members as well, who, musically, are just winging it.
It becomes apparent to you that Sister Penny, the Most Powerful Voice in the Tri-County Area, although completely tone-deaf, is the only person in the room who can read music, and so she sees no reason to follow the ignorant director who directs by ear just because she wants to sing it her way, which is right, dangit, whether the rest of the room thinks so or not. Her voice is so appallingly bad, the rest of the choir refuses to hear a thing she says, even if she’s occasionally right.
In the alternate reality that is The Alto Section, you discover that the working definition of “harmony” is something Randy Jackson might term “making it your own”, or, more truthfully, singing the melody an octave or two lower, in a key that does not fit the door of the song being sung. The musical term “unison” is an absolutely foreign concept that will never be uncovered in this room, not now, nor in the time to come. You find out the bass section is two dudes who come to practice once a month, if you’re lucky, and if they do show up, there’s a good chance one or both of them will be drunk. More often than not, this actually makes them sound better, because they’re less inhibited by their inabilities and frustration to care about what they actually sound like.
You also uncover the sad truth that the reason Sister Tammy and her prissy soprano warbling is given all the solos because she’s the only one with enough misplaced confidence and desire for fame and glory to sing them, except Sister Penny, whom the director refuses to give a solo no matter how desperate the situation, because he knows if that happens, there will be a violent open revolt. You stare with wide-eyed wonder as the group tries to sing “Mansion over a Hilltop” in some weird new key called K minor. You marvel at the insistence the director has for “high standards”, which embodies itself as a refusal to use orchestrated tracks, any instruments save the piano, or newfangled modernistic inventions like the metronome.
The scriptures have the same issues: there’s a lot of little problems uncovered by closer inspection. Things aren’t so beautiful when you start opening them up and exposing their inward parts.
The tendency is for one to just step away from the choir room, head back outside, and try and remember the beauty they once heard, but that’s unrealistic and ultimately frustrating. It’s sort of like trying to enjoy a plate of fried chicken after spending a month at a chicken processing plant: you just can’t get that smell out of your nostrils, or forget the fact that those filthy birds eat and root in their own feces.
Some facts of life are just too ugly to forget.
But, there are other things we must remember, too, and this one is paramount: the most beautiful hymns are created with pain, as the masterpieces of Newton and Spafford demonstrate, and as the writings of the weary prophets starving alone from Cherith to Patmos attest. They are born in solitude, through intense struggle and grief. The great music of the faithful is never created in a choir room. Choir rooms are settings of interpretation; choir lofts are places where interpretation is put on display. Interpretation, it turns out, is a messy business.
Clik here to view.
Rock of Ages, cleft for me
Let me hide myself in thee...
I don’t know if it’s good for a restless mind to be in the choir; personally for me, now, I need to just hear the hymns at a distance. I need the solitude of Cherith so I can recognize that any ravens bringing sustenance bring it solely from God. I need that sustenance raw, untouched by human hands. I can’t deal with or digest the preservatives, the pesticides, the packaging, the pontificating spokesman, or the pretty artificial colors.
But I miss the choirs. I miss singing with them. I miss the beauty of the songs and the reality of choir practice. I miss hanging out with those beautiful rare committed singers who bring whatever voice they have and humbly offer it, such as it is, to God as a sacrifice of praise. I miss the days when I could listen with my eyes closed, only hearing the searing beauty, not seeing the problems that inevitably come when humans take part in the interpretation of the things of God. As I listen from a distance, though, I cling to the hope that occasionally a lonesome hurting soul can find the inspiration to write another honest broken prayerful hymn:
“There’s somethin’ in a Sunday
That makes the body feel alone.
And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’
That’s half as lonesome as the sound
Of a sleeping city sidewalk
And Sunday morning comin’ down.”