On your feet now—applaud God! Bring a gift of laughter, sing yourselves into his presence. Know this: God is God, and God made us, we didn’t make God. We’re God’s people, well-tended sheep. Enter with the password: “Thank you!” Make yourselves at home, singing praise. Thank and worship God. For God is sheer beauty, all-generous in love, loyal always and ever.
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Praise the Source beyond our seeing, architect of time and space,
weaving every thread of being, author of the human race,
sin forgiving, captives freeing, well of justice, truth, and grace.
Praise the Word within our hearing: Christ the way, the door, the key,
teaching, healing, persevering, tortured, killed by Rome’s decree,
new creation pioneering, paradigm of what will be.
Praise the Breath that powers our praises: Living Spirit, Wind and Fire,
sowing gifts whose wealth amazes, quick to comfort and inspire,
soaring high above earth’s rages, Dove of Peace, our heart’s desire.
These are the first three verses of the hymn “Praise the Source Beyond our Seeing”, by the great contemporary hymnwriter Brian Wren. Not only is he a hymnwriter, but the author of the book “Praying Twice: The Music and Words of Congregational Song”.
So, I thought it would be good to start with talking a little about prayer. Prayer is defined as an invocation or act that seeks rapport with a deity, an object of worship, or a spiritual entity through deliberate communication. Prayer can be a form of religious practice, may be either individual or communal, and can take place in public or in private. It may involve the use of words or song. When language is used, prayer may take the form of a hymn, incantation, formal creed, or a spontaneous utterance in the praying person. There are different forms of prayer such as petitions, supplications, thanksgivings, and worship/praise. Prayer may be directed towards a deity, spirit, deceased person, or lofty idea, for the purpose of worshipping, requesting guidance, requesting assistance, confessing sins or to express one's thoughts and emotions. Thus, people pray for many reasons such as personal benefit or for the sake of others. Meditation is considered a form of prayer, but without words or music.
Well, that’s pretty dry on the whole, and doesn’t really convey the ethos of prayer, or of congregational singing for that matter. I wonder, though, if we do ever consider than when we sing hymns as a congregation, we are actually praying both in words and in music.
What’s important about congregational singing?
Brian Wren says“I believe that congregational song is an indispensable part of Christian public worship. . . . By “indispensable” I mean two steps down from “essential” but three floors higher than “optional.” Non-hearing congregations can worship without song, and hearers can worship together without singing together, as Quakers do mostly, and others do occasionally. But though we don’t have to sing in order to worship, it helps immeasurably if we do.” (47-48)
St. Augustine of Hippo (+430) is often quoted as having said "He who sings, prays twice." The Latin cited for this is "Qui bene cantat bis orat" or "He who sings well prays twice".
Actually, this does not appear in anything of St. Augustine that has come down to us. He did write, "Singing belongs to one who loves".
Fr. John Zuhlsdorf wrote his thesis on Augustine, and decided to check what Augustine really said:
“For he who sings praise, does not only praise, but also praises joyfully; he who sings praise, not only sings, but also loves Him whom he is singing about/to/for. There is a praise-filled public proclamation (praedicatio) in the praise of someone who is confessing/acknowledging (God), in the song of the lover (there is) love.
Augustine is saying that when the praise is of God, then something happens to the song of the praiser/love that makes it more than just any kind of song. The object of the song/love in a way becomes the subject. Something happens so that the song itself becomes Love, in its manifestation the one who truly is Love itself.
Back to Brian Wren who says that congregational song is in trouble: two of the reasons he cites are that “Individualism and the quest for privacy make us less inclined to join a group and sing along with it.” and that the current high quality of recorded sound convinces us that our own voice has no worth.
Wren speaks of sentimentality in church music, defining sentimentality as “feeling for feeling’s sake, as it were,” “superficial emotion, emotion not based on full reality, association without communication”. He quotes Don Hustad, who has been a recognized leader in evangelical church music for six decades, and as well as being a musician, composer, and teacher, he is most well known for his informed criticism of evangelical church music and his well-developed philosophy of worship. He notes overuse of favorite music regardless of its liturgical significance; choosing music which bears little or no relationship to the rest of the service; failing to sing up to the full theology and experience of the congregation; resistance to new musical selections and new forms of music.
For me this is the crunch: resistance to new or different music, (we’ve never sung that before), or insistence on “the good old hymns” (why can’t we sing the hymns we know), to me says we want to box ourselves into the most simple definition of prayer, and ensuring we cannot stretch our theology, but remain always in the same place. Singing God’s song in this generation, praying twice, functions as a catalyst to move us forward. Hymns are not just nice music, or things which make us nostalgic, or make us feel good. Hymns are supposed to change us, to change our attitudes and our thinking, to reveal yet more of God to us as we worship together.
There’s that word “together”. I know that when I try to get people to move up, or move together on one side of the sanctuary, there is a great resistance. No matter how often it’s said - people would rather sing feebly and without any energy, and remain sitting in the same place every week. When you sit in isolation from the rest of the congregation, what does that say on so many levels? Is worship supposed to be private? Or community? If it’s supposed to be in a community, why would we want to sit apart, and then sing down into our necks, or not sing at all? It begs the question, why even come to church? If the service is public worship, then worshipping together as a community is the most important thing - and if we are all going to sit in our little silo-spaces, we are NOT worshipping as a community together - we are worshipping as individuals sitting in the same place.
Our voices, however they are, come from God, don’t they? Music comes from God, doesn’t it? The words we sing come from God. Why would we want to limit ourselves in how we approach God and pray to God? As a church, as a denomination, our congregational song - our prayers within prayers - should make us into something which furthers the revelation of God’s realm on earth, for THIS time and for THIS generation.
In our hymnbook, there is a page which includes John Wesley’s directions for good congregational song : “Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing God more than yourself, or any other creature. In order to do this, attend strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually.”
The last verse of Brian Wren’s hymn:
Holy God, your three dimensions, each with music clear and strong,
interweave, resolving tensions, sounding one unfolding song.
You have made us, loved and saved us. May our praises be life-long!
1. Fr. John Zuhlsdorf - blog. Information not available.
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer
3. Praying Twice: The Music and Words of Congregational Song. Wren, Brian. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville. 2000.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Hustad
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