Worship Woes

Have you sung together on Zoom yet?

It’s terrible, impossible, and I love it. I don’t know all the techy bits to tell you why, but Zoom only transmits one audio channel at a time. So if you try to sing together it frenetically bounces from one voice to another trying to figure out who’s speaking. I kind of feel bad for the poor little algorithm or whatever it is that does that math every time we sing on Circle of Hope’s Prayer Team’s meetings for Common Prayer on Tuesday mornings and Saturday afternoons.

Christians sing. It’s what we do. Not everyone has as many opportunities to sing as people who are part of a church. I mean, there’s the shower and the car when you’re by yourself maybe, but singing together all the time is a particularly Christian thing (not exclusively Christian of course, just very Christian in my experience). My mom and dad took my kids and their cousins on vacation together at their place in the Poconos and they wrote two different songs to sing. Charles Wesley wrote 6,500 hymns. I recently saw this lampoon of popular Christian worship music on YouTube and immediately wrote to the Circle of Hope Design Team leaders in gratitude for their innovation and creativity.

Grieving our very real loss

I have been particularly bereft by our inability to sing together very much. I love singing. We unite our whole beings in worship. That is we unite our own, body mind and soul — heart synced up with head through the bond of music and lyrics — body synced up with soul in our very breath. We get lined up in worship, even just in ourselves. But then we also get lined up with each other. A really good worship song, in my opinion, gets you to take a breath at the same time as everyone around you. (A good sound technician for a worship space mixes the sound so you can hear each other breathe). When I was 10 or 11 years old I attended a traditional hymn sing at the Ringgold Meeting House (this year’s event is cancelled but hope with me for Sunday, August 29, 2021, at 5:00 pm) and I will never forget the surreal feeling of sining an old hymn with each line punctuated by a very audible inhale in unison. We smiled at each other as we noticed it. It was so very lovely. Our bodies were completely in sync with each other and with the song which was directed toward God. I’ve read that in such circumstances even heart beats can synchronize!

But of course that might have been your nightmare last night. Singing together is a a great way to endanger a lot of people and yourself in the season of covid-19. Singing together on the  Prayer Call on Tuesdays at 7:15 am could be the upside down version of the Ringgold Meeting House hymn sing. We are painfully out of sync. It really is close to impossible. It’s more of a defiant trudge than a harmonious togetherness. But in that struggle to line up with one another, to follow the ill defined beat and unite with my brothers and sisters across the zoom lines has another kind of power to it. Without the benefit of actual somatic unity we are left with faith, hope and love alone. Faith that this prayer and song matters — to the ways of the world and the people with whom we are connecting, hope that we will be able to sing together again — that we will survive this mess and our community will endure, and love — love which is the easiest to imagine transcending all these barriers.

Resolve to adapt

Worship across the screen is difficult — certainly on the zoom call with our mics unmuted, and also singing along on YouTube live at circleofhope.net/onlinemeeting. I hope you will join me in moving beyond the lament of the loss and embrace the challenge of the new way of being together. It definitely takes more faith, hope and love from you, or directly channeled to you from God. The intangible power of tangible togetherness is no longer on our side. Worship might be becoming more of a discipline, accept it. Accept the challenge to praise. How many of the Psalms, our original worship book, follow the formula of defiant hope after all? We must start with the obstacles, that’s just how we are, but we must move beyond them as well. Let the strong conclusion of Psalm 27 encourage your bones (imagine courage sheathing your bones):

I remain confident of this:
    I will see the goodness of the Lord
    in the land of the living.
 Wait for the Lord;
    be strong and take heart
    and wait for the Lord.

— Psalm 27:13-14 (they put it to music in France)