Life as a Clergy Wife: My Most Excellent Sunday Adventure

Other than waking up to God strongly suggesting that I go to church with my husband, I'm a little fuzzy on the exact sequence of this morning's events.

Let's just say that between the time we arrived and liturgy began, I somehow ended up singing with the choir. Singing soprano! Singing Rutter's "Look at the World" for the offertory! Wearing an outfit!

Don't I look happy?

I was! And many hours later, I still am, even though I had to leave the outfit at church.

Wedding: Music Consultation

Our one and only meeting with the Canon for Music and Worship at the Cathedral of the Incarnation was nothing like this. Thanks be to God.

Wedding consultation

by: Tallis

Let All Things Now Living

St. Luke's Bottle Band from St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Park Ridge, Illinois is astonishingly awesome. God bless 'em for joyfully making joyful noise since 1979. 

I'm trying to conjure up what an equivalent musical expression might look like at Catholic parish but nothing comes to mind. Is that a good thing or a sad thing?

My Lofty Experience of Singing

Singing this year's Christmas Vigil with a choir turned out to be the healing experience I'd hoped for and clearly needed. How lovely to be so generously invited by a choir director and so warmly welcomed by the regulars. How glorious to sing next to a soprano whose voice transformed the descants into brilliant shooting stars of sound. And on pitch, too!

I was grateful to be standing where I was for another reason. I'd been placed directly across from the Crucifix above the altar -- a presence hovering over Real Presence, and face-to-face with me. Thanks, I needed that.

It doesn't matter whether I'm singing as a parishioner or a choir member, my perspective on the liturgy changes literally and figuratively whenever there's a choir loft in use. In both instances, I'm more focused on what I'm doing, which is praying, whether my voice is floating up or down. This is why I've become such a big fan of choir lofts. Too bad they've been ditched by church building committees.

A liturgist I know says this relatively recent development in church architecture is as much about economics and acoustics as it is about inviting the pew people to participate. Makes sense, I guess. But now having experienced singing from a loft several times, I've become positively retro on the matter. I'm certainly much better able to appreciate Thomas Day's book, Why Catholics Can't Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste, first published in 1990 and still brutally hilarious. Note to self: come up with music selections for my Mass of Christian Burial now.

ADVENTure Continues (4th Week)

It's the fourth Sunday in Advent and I'm busy sucking on lemon mint herbal throat lozenges. My throat doesn't hurt, I just like the taste of church music. It's the closest I ever get to synesthesia.

I'm getting ready for Christmas and excited about singing with a choir again. I haven't sung the Christmas Vigil Mass at midnight in years. My reasons?

Quite frankly, I was growing tired of spending Christmas Day wiped out with oratorio-induced adrenal fatigue. While I loved the rush that resulted from hours of singing, I did not love the subsequent crash. Or, for that matter, the time tripping. It's one thing to stay up all night at home, wandering around in flannel jammies and eating pretzels. It's quite another to begin peeling off pantyhose, swabbing off make-up, and chowing down a full meal at 2:30 AM. Plus, I couldn't help but notice that prayer was slowly being eclipsed by performance.

The lemon mint herbal throat lozenges that had once tasted like hymns, anthems and psalms, started tasting bitter. And so, I opted out and focused on making a joyful noise unto the Lord in my acoustically superior shower stall.

Whenever I think that healing happens in the strangest ways, I remind myself that nothing is impossible -- or strange -- for God. In June, I participated in a Gregorian chant and polyphony workshop. Last month, I went to lots of funerals and sang everything, including whatever the Cantor was offering up.

At one funeral, the healing mercy of God appeared to my right in the form of a former choir mate, one whose voice is like molten gold with threads of silver and flashes of sapphire. By the Alleluia, we were one voice interwoven and lifted in prayer. Shortly thereafter, I realized that singing with others was, for me, an essential spiritual practice. As for singing Christmas Vigil, this seems like the perfect time to celebrate birth as well as resurrection. Gloria in excelsis deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis!