Aging Spiritually: Spiritual Food For My Soul
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Today’s Aging Spiritually devotion is a very personal expression of my experience with, and gratitude for, choral music in worship. I thank you for indulging me this very personal expression today.
During the first 25 or so years of my ministry I served as a church musician. Though I had trained as a band director, God called me to use my musical gifts and skills in the church. I quickly grew to love choral music and the worship that it enables.
Conducting choral music for worship is one of my greatest, highest, and deepest spiritual practices, though I now rarely get the privilege. It is spiritual food for my soul. Choral music is an act of community, where individuals of different talents come together as one in a single, unified purpose, offering our best efforts in the worship of God.
Individually, most of us are limited in our abilities. But, when 2 or 3 of us join our voices together in music, the Spirit of God “intercedes with groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). A choir becomes a unified expression of every voice, a spiritual practice of contributing our individual parts to the greater whole, for the purpose of expressing the inexpressible.
Choral music is a spiritual expression of art. The voice comes from within the body and is energized by the breath, the pneuma, the biblical Greek word for Spirit. The text frames the meaning of the music, making whole the unified work of body, mind, spirit, and humanity. We touch the Spirit, or perhaps more accurately, the Spirit touches us through the melody, harmony, and rhythm of the music.
Some of the most powerful spiritual experiences of my life have been through choral music. As a teenager singing in youth choir, I discovered a God I could relate to. I experienced the depths of grief singing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with a conductor who was in her final days of life.I exuberantly sang the Ode to Joy in the Beethoven 9th Symphony to celebrate the opening of a concert hall.
I sang with the great choral conductor, Robert Shaw, the Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 1936 plea for peace among nations, Dona Nobis Pacem, and experienced inner peace singing Taize choruses in a Presbyterian church, and chants with the monks at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers. I experienced the transcendent light and sound of the universe in The Ways of Stars, sung by the Atlanta Master Chorale.
Most significant of all has been my deep privilege of leading others week after week into the spiritual presence of God through leading a choir in worship. Those experiences, and many, many more moments of conducting, singing, and hearing voices in worship have shaped my spiritual life far beyond words alone.
It has been the soundtrack of my life, bringing diverse voices together, singing beyond our individual race, gender, orientation, economic or social status, beliefs or doctrines, personalities, or human understandings.
Through choral music, the excellently trained voice is asked to blend with untrained voices, together opening their hearts to the presence of God’s Spirit, which accepts us all in our individual uniqueness. It is the best example I know of the prayer of Jesus that his followers “may be one as we (the Divine) are one”(John 17:11).
Choral music in worship is a gift of God’s Spirit, the opportunity for all who lift our voices to give our whole selves, body, mind, and spirit, to God, and to be received and accepted by God through that spiritual, artistic expression. I know of no higher experience in life.
Practice
Find a recording of a good choir, or go online to Sing For Joy® from St. Olaf College (stolaf.edu) or to Atlanta Master Chorale -YouTube, and allow the music to lift your spirit beyond your everyday experience.
Contemplate how the music you hear enhances the text, expressing meaning that is a spiritual experience deeper, higher, and richer than just words alone.
Give thanks to God for the blessing of choral music in worship.
Greg Smith
Legacy Ministry for Older Adults