THE first time I went to a football match, I was convinced that tens of thousands of people singing in unison was enough to turn the game. I had never heard such visceral and uninhibited singing, or such power mediated by song.
The combined will and energy of a myriad of voices, it seemed to me, could really be enough to encourage and inspire tired bodies at the end of the second half to give it one final push in extra time and come away as victors. I would go so far as to say that the experience of being in the midst of a wall of sound, and in the middle of thousands of voices conjoined in song, was almost a spiritual one. Not all the words of the songs were spiritually edifying, by any means, but the energy of this sound was glorious.
Some of the football chants were sung to tunes that I vaguely knew. Fragments of them emerged in waves during the course of the game: Eventide (Abide with me), When the Saints Go Marching In, and Cwm Rhondda. I was swept up in the romance of massed voices, the novelty of which distracted me from the actual words being sung, which were often neither virtuous nor kind.
As I stood in the temple of Old Trafford that day, I had one wish: that one day the singing in our churches could be as uninhibited, as passionate, and as wholehearted. I longed for congregations to be as fervent in their song as these football fans were in theirs. I longed for our churches to sing with the Spirit, and with the understanding also.
I began to wonder whether the Church in the West had forgotten how to sing, and whether the joy of corporate song was somehow ebbing away, not only from our wider communities but also from many of the acts of worship through which our faith was expressed. Our song was becoming disembodied, fragmented, and atomised; we were losing our confidence to sing, and we were losing our voice.
THROUGHOUT salvation history, singing and song have been at the heart of the human relationship with God, enabling a dialogue between the creator and creation. Song is the vehicle for praise: Moses and Miriam sing their song to God in Exodus; in St Luke’s Gospel, Mary sings her “Yes” to God in the words of the Magnificat; the angels sing the good news of Christ’s birth; Anna and Simeon burst into song when they see the Christ-child; and the hosts of heaven sing the praises of the Lamb in the Revelation of St John.
But it is perhaps in the Psalms where the singing community is most evident, and there is regularly a call to come before the Lord’s presence with a song.
In the Early Church, psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs were to be sung together. The psalms were the voice of the Church. The congregation was the choir. For the first 200 years or so, it is likely that everyone sang — men, women, children, believers, and non-believers on the fringes of faith. The theological ideal of the Church was to sing together, and be gathered up like the grains of wheat from the hillside and made into one bread, one singing body.
What we are left with, in all these examples, is an understanding of the primacy of the text in the context of song. We don’t know that much about the tunes of the psalms, or of the songs and spiritual songs of the Early Church, but, from the words that we have been left, and from the words on the pages of our sacred scriptures, we can recognise that the intention to praise and offer petition through song was a vital part of the Church’s life.
This wasn’t just singing for singing’s sake: this was singing with a single-minded intention, singing for the purpose of praise. A song in which the words are at odds with the intention of the heart just won’t do, and can’t be easily sung; for it would be like betraying the self.
St Augustine understood the effect of words and music, but noted where the real power was. He said: “I realise it is not the singing that moves me but the meaning of the words when they are sung in a clear voice to the most appropriate tune.”
WHAT would it mean for the Church to sing with a whole voice, and with one voice? It is not certain if the contemporary theological direction of the Church can allow us to be as optimistic as our forebears were in this ambition. Along with the divisions and factions of the Church, largely based on oppositional views on human embodiment, and how that embodiment is expressed, we hold on ever more weakly to trying to be part of the Body of Christ, a “communion”; but that communion is increasingly one in which we cannot even sing together with one voice, let alone share in one bread.
We seem to exist in a long night of weeping as the world looks on with scornful wonder at our schisms and irrelevance, and those who long to respond to God’s eternal call continue to wait for the morning of song.
In Eucharistic Prayers, the Sanctus, the heavenly song of praise, may be preceded by the words, “Therefore, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify your glorious name, for evermore praising you and singing. . .”, and then those words of invitation soon follow: “Though we are many, we are one body because we all share in one bread.”
Could they be reinterpreted thus: “Though we are many, we are one body because we all sing with one voice?” If you have ever sung William Byrd’s Sanctus, from his Four-Part Mass, you will understand the profundity of this kind of polyphony, where equal but different voices entwine and embrace and evolve together to combine in their praise of God most high, balanced exquisitely to ensure no voice outshines another, no voice overpowers, but each individual voice is valued, cherished and lifts hearts to heaven.
IT IS a possibility that, without this kind of corporate singing, there would be no Church, and the Church is not fully the Church if it does not sing together.
Dare we suggest that there is something sacramental about the Church’s song? We could interpret the Church’s song as an outward and audible symbol of an inward and spiritual grace. When the Church sings together, it is a sacrifice of praise, a self-giving act, whereby we put our all on the altar.
If 40,000 football fans can turn a game, what could a myriad of voices do when singing in praise of God together? Perhaps this is why I found my experience of chanting in a football stadium quasi-spiritual: I yearned for the Church to be something like this in its earthly manifestation. As I stood in the midst of many voices singing together, my own body was resonating with the sound, and being moved by the emotion of that experience, but the content of the song meant nothing to me, it was empty praise. The words were frivolous, malicious, jocular.
My experiences in Taizé were more like the Church envisaged by those early Christians: a Church that would sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs together with one voice. The chants, shaped by the scriptures and the simple liturgies holding silence together, bound me with a community made up of people from every continent and island. This was unifying, it was embodied, it was a sign and symbol of that universal Catholic Church for which I longed.
Can we use the experience of singing together as a framework for our ecclesiologies of the future? Can song become a sacramental action of the Church? Why is it so hard for us to sing together with one voice? It could be argued that we have lost something of the vision for the universal Church of Christ; we have become so much the local expression of Catholicism that we have lost our Catholicity, we don’t seem to have a common song to sing any more, and we are reluctant to sing the songs of others.
Individualism and subjectivity (and, indeed, style) in the Church’s song have usurped the corporate. We have become so specialised and so bespoke — perhaps we have even become so culturally relevant — as to be lost in our sense of corporate and common prayer as our purpose. We now have so many songs that it is difficult to find a song in common. If 40,000 Christians were gathered in a stadium, what would they sing, and what could that singing do? Could it turn our game?
Perhaps the Church needs to go back to basics: the psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs of our faith, and sing them over and over again until those words are engraved on our hearts. We need to keep on singing these songs until what we sing with our lips, we believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we show forth in our lives.
This is an edited extract from On Voice: Speech, song, silence: human and divine by Victoria Johnson, to be published in March by Darton, Longman & Todd at £14.99 (978-1-913657-98-7). Canon Johnson will be speaking at the Church Times Festival of Faith and Music in April.