Do you believe in God? What drew you to belief in a higher Power/Intelligence/God? Was it the undeserved love of a believer? Mercy or grace demonstrated? Fear of the unknown? Intellectual curiosity satisfied by a good argument from a sermon or something you read? Perhaps what you really believe in is "love" or "mercy" or "good intellectual arguments". But if it's God, that which is behind all those things, why? I've come to see just about everything in the light of how I have come to see God. But as one of the things which my career, my ministry and life revolves around happens to be singing, I'll focus on it here for a minute. Because I think I really came to "see" God because of "singing." Yeah, wierd. But hey, it's my blog.
Why do we humans "sing"? anyway? What is it about that phenomenon of holding vowels for unrealistic amounts of time whilst choosing to phonate on various levels unnatural to our normal speech, and lining all that up with other sounds taking place, equally deliberately, through various means be it percussively or through wind, string or other vocal vibrations...why have we "evolved" into creatures so inclined to do this thing? Seriously, it's gotta take more faith to believe we simply evolved from the primordial ooze into what we are today (creatures who sing) than it is to take the Bible at face value, and it was singing, for me, which convinced me of this early on, perhaps as early as kindergarten. It has been singing which has kept me unable to accept my own father's atheistic belief system, singing which has kept me tethered to the church even in the early years when I thought the church a ridiculous institution full of hypocrites and fools. (Well, I still think the church is full of hypocrites and fools, as I am one of them, but I no longer see it as a ridiculous institution! Ah well, that's another conversation.) Phonation on pitch for communication is something whales do, birds certainly, and other animals, but unlike them, it's something which we labor to do well, we seek out help to do better and better, and we mourn not being able to do, we pay others to do for us and worship those who seem to be able to do it best. Singing is joy, agony, entertainment, work, necessary, delightful and important in each and every culture. Seriously, can you name a culture which does not come together over this? And what I find at the end of it is what I find at the end of everything else in this life: It is a gift of God, a gift given to us for the purposes of glory, not of ourselves but of our Creator.
Like so many wonderful phenomena of the human condition, we take it all for granted. Like so many beautiful gifts from the natural world: sex, speech, hearing, sight, movement, touch, when we cease to give credit to the One who made all this possible and take these phenomena to be results of a random biological evolution, they become tools we use to bring pleasure to ourselves, and tools we use to bring pleasure to those who in turn may respond by bringing pleasure to us, and this purely horizontal use of our senses has an ultimately fatal flaw. It flattens us. And when we feel flat, we get bored. So we try to spice up our use of these sensations...it's like an addiction to drugs, this addiction to heightened sensational fulfillment. Note the increasing need for our popular singers to tease the other senses of our bodies both visually through the lyrics and through elaborate video displays. Without a desire to bring glory to God, to know God, to hear from God, to allow God to use us, live through us, whatever, we are left with ...a great thirst which never gets quenched, as if we are stuck in a dream state drinking and drinking away and yet the dryness is never assuaged.
To sing for the LORD's pleasure, to sing praises to God, even to sing truth in a way that is meant to inspire or comfort or encourage other people without even invoking God, but out of a heart which acknowledges we are not our own, but have been bought with a price, have been designed for the pleasure of our Creator, allows us to take whatever voice we have, whatever musicality we have been given, and to thoroughly enjoy it from start to finish. I find the working through, the practice, the attention to details, all to be a quenching of a great thirst. To take the time to make music is to take time for joy. As my choir or my students or even my fellow singers can tell you, I'm a "take-no-prisoners" type of work-horse when it comes to wanting it to be the best it can be come time to share with a congregation or audience. But at the core of it all for me, each point in the journey of a song: the seeking out, the selection, the working out of details, and all the practice leading up to the sharing of it, are acts of worship of God, and somehow I felt that intrinsically from the moment I opened my mouth to sing as a child. I sensed God's presence in the music, and that music was owned and operated from a place beyond myself. I knew my job was just to let the Owner have His way with it, to be servant to that. And when I do that, all is well. When I try to own the song or the process for myself, feelings get hurt. When songs get chosen, sung and performed for the wrong motives, messages get misunderstood. Yes, my worship through music is going to appear to many people meaningless and irrelevant to society. But for those others who have been called through the same method God chose to call me, we get each other, we come together, we become a choir to sing our Creator's praise, and we know Him just that much more.
