“There seems to be ample evidence to suggest that singing creates a quantity of fine aerosols
that can stay suspended in the air for long periods of time, move with air currents,
and stay infectious for many hours, exposing virtually everyone in a building.
Our sources strongly recommend against singing indoors in public until a vaccine is widely available and widely used. For similar reasons, the use of wind instruments should also be avoided.”
(from “Church Music in the Age of Covid-19”, Wisconsin Council of Churches)
Reading this caution issued by the Wisconsin Council of Churches was one of the more memorable low points for me in the journey through the Covid-19 crisis. It has been matched only by a list of alternatives to singing that I also saw printed in a similar piece of ecclesiastical policy. But that said, I also cannot deny the truth behind this admonition. We need only recall the cautionary tale of the Skagit Valley Chorale’s rehearsal earlier this year. 60 people gathered for a 90 minute choir rehearsal and within days, 45 people in the choir were sick with Covid-19 and I believe four of those people died as a result of the disease.
The notion of singing being a vehicle for the spread of a potentially lethal contagion was never something I thought about before now. While I have thought about it as a way of spreading something contagious, those contagions were always life giving rather than death dealing. It has always been a vehicle to disseminate truth and beauty. It has the power to help us express our joy and our pain. It invites us to join the groan that is too deep for words and the shout that resounds above the heavens. Singing fosters hope in us when we are down in the pit of despair and leads us to that rock that is higher than ourselves. Singing together helps us to transcend the limits of our mortal condition and at least approach, if not pierce, the veil between heaven and earth.
To be very frank, I don’t know what corporate public worship is if it does not include congregational singing.
Yet here we are, encountering yet another Covid-19 oxymoron borne of the paradox that it daily invites us to engage. We can now add worship without singing to the list which includes phrases like social distancing and sheltering in place. As a congregation we are confronted by the paradox of working to preserve and build community when it is dangerous to gather in close proximity to one another. We can neither deny the validity of the warning to keep our distance nor turn away from the truth that isolation itself is a danger to us. So as I wrote last week, it’s time to get creative. The severe mercy of engaging this paradox is that it invites us to pursue and rest in the bigger Truth who is allowing those two competing realities to exist in the same world.
The severe mercy of this paradox is that it invites us to pray, “Lord, how are you at work here, and how can I be a part of that work?” It invites us to look for and then strive to be a part of what God is up to. It is to seek to live in awareness, as two great catechisms in our tradition remind us, that our only comfort in life is that we belong to God and our chief end in life is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. In short, it is to dedicate our lives to the praise of God.
Often when we think about praising God we think first about the actions associated with praise. We confuse the big reality of praise with the ways we express it. Praise is more than thanksgiving and adoration. Praise is about more than singing or spoken acclamations. Praise is not merely the attitude of falling to our knees or lifting our hands to the heavens. Praise is a way of being. It is the awareness that every moment has everything to do with the living God. It is a heart that beats because of God. It is the awareness of God’s presence and the longing for that awareness when we are experiencing what feels like God’s absence. Praise or the act of glorifying God is what we are and what we do when we sense the heaviness that elevates us. The Hebrew word for this glorious presence is kabod¸ which also means heavy. Praise is being overwhelmed by the weight of God’s glory.
There are infinite ways we can express our awareness of the presence of this infinite God. Singing is certainly among them. But it by no means exhausts them. During his triumphal entry into Jerusalem Jesus reminded the Pharisees of this fact. When they complained about the song the adoring crowd was singing and told Jesus to silence them, he replied: “If these were silenced even the rocks would cry out.”
So even if we are silenced with respect to indoor singing, how can we listen for the song the rocks are singing? How can we participate in those songs that are more than songs, those songs that never stop singing? A line from the hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” came to me as I was thinking about singing and the potential temporary loss of it in our indoor worship. As I was complaining to God, and whoever else would listen, about the sheer stupidity and incomprehensibility of this ban on indoor singing I heard this prayer:
Come Thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
streams of mercy never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above;
praise the Mount, I’m fixed upon it, Mount of Thy redeeming love.
How ironic! A song reminded me that there are infinite means of expressing praise. Hearts do not necessarily need a diaphragm, lungs and a larynx to sing the songs that issue forth from their depths. When my feet are planted firmly on the rock of the Mount of God’s redeeming love, I have unlimited means of reveling in that gift. For that love is broad and long and high and deep and we will never arrive at the place where we completely comprehend it. We will always be growing in our awareness of it and thus always learning ways to express our sheer joy in the gift of being surrounded by it.
David Rohrer
05/29/2020