Body, mind, spirit, voice, it takes the whole person to sing and rejoice

Friday I realized that the two concepts I most obsess over, that I spend so much time trying to figure out, "infinity" and "unity"… are the two words that are used in setting levels for sound. (unity is "0", a magical concept of when input and output are the same, infinity is when there's no sound) Of course.

Saturday I learned: Care means not giving up when everyone else has.

Sunday was Palm Sunday, the weirdest Sunday of the church year. Palm Sunday has to get you from joy and celebration through the Passion (since these events happen in the middle of the week but we can't trust people to go to church on the weekdays.

Palm Sunday is Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem. Jerusalem, during Passover. The political situation was charged, there were people piling in from everywhere, looking for someone to lead a revolution. Into this comes Jesus, riding on a donkey, not a warhorse, which is the first break of expectation (I mean, really, a donkey is awkward). But still, they shout praises and throw palms down and strip off their clothes to make a Biblical red carpet.

Thus begins Holy Week, my favorite week of the year, the week at the end of Lent where the whole Christian story really happens. I'll be updating you on where we are in the story throughout this week. Holy Week has come at the last of my 7 straight weeks of tech (ANY YOUNGER ONES WHO MAY BE READING THIS BLOG, SAVE YOURSELVES AND NEVER DO THIS), where I am exhausted and therefore in need of much church. And luckily, I now have more and more church than I used to...

Many people who read this blog have most often seen me in a choir loft. With both of my parents being church musicians, I've been singing in choirs for as long as I can remember, consistently, through my first semester of college. Choir camps nearly every summer since… 2nd grade?, weekends of larger choir festivals, singing with some pretty big-name directors/composers in the church music field. I grew up with church music, not "contemporary Christian", but Rutter, Britten, Mozart. I LOVE this music, and I love singing in choirs. Choir was never an option for me, growing up. Every Sunday I had choir. No question. And I was the smart aleck sitting in the back row in youth choir because I knew most of the anthems because I'd been hearing them my entire life, sure, but I did love it. We can very easily track my interest in speech back to choirs. Pronunciation was a strength of mine, getting the exact shape of the mouth for the vowel. Singing in church choirs is joyful and extremely comfortable for me. It's a place and situation that has very specific rules and behaviors which I know intimately. And there is nothing like lifting your voice alongside others in praise. Choirs were my first real experience with collaboration. You blend, you listen to others, you don't try to be noticed, but you also have to sing out and enter with strength and hit those consonants or else it will sound flimsy. The choir creates a whole that is larger, and that whole is the goal of everyone involved.

I was in a choir through Tisch my first semester of college, as a 2 credit elective, but after that, I wasn't able to commit to the time a choir needed. So I have sung at Bon Air whenever I've been back in Virginia, but mostly sat at church in New York listening to beautiful choirs and singing hymns with particular gusto. And while I've been singing hymns with particular gusto, a woman at my church noticed me, and noticed my tendency to sing the alto line, and started talking to me about joining the Parish Choir. Having been on the other side of this equation at Bon Air, I was both highly amused at being approached and heartbroken to say that I could not join. And throughout the years, this woman has seen me and mentioned the choir, assuring me it was very casual and didn't take up a lot of time and I didn't even have to come to rehearsal on Wednesday nights if I could just show up before the service on Sunday morning. Being a child of choir directors, I disbelieved this, knowing that rehearsal was important.

In the moments when the two of us would run into each other this semester, she would mention rehearsal at 8:15am on Sunday, but never Wednesday. I started to wonder if they had stopped rehearsing on Wednesday nights. About a month ago, the week after she tried to recruit me yet again, there was an announcement in the bulletin saying, "THE PARISH CHOIR WANTS YOU!" which said that rehearsal was Sunday, 8:15am. After a couple weeks where I was operating a show in a church and therefore had to be on call in case that church was confused as to what we did with the sound system, I found the woman during coffee hour and said, "Next week. I'll be there."

And thus, I joined the choir.

I was nervous coming into the church early that Sunday morning. I'm confident in my choir-singing abilities (I better be, at this point), but any new situation sends me into panic, really. But, of course, I was welcomed with open arms. It's a small choir that mostly sings hymns during communion at the early service, very casual, very welcoming. The woman had already set aside a robe for me. We warmed up with "O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing", which is one of my favorite hymns, and having the opportunity to sing with other people in this setting again was incredibly moving.

It's a lovely group that I'm so grateful to be a part of. Odd how getting up supremely early is more restful than sleeping late on Sundays. Beautiful.