First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Singing For Our Lives

Start with the recognition that this room doesn't help. The acoustics of our meeting space favor the platform, and do not resonate the congregation's collective voice. It's too bad; we will never sound as good to ourselves in this assembly hall as we might in another, livelier setting. So it's a challenge for us - a reason to try a little harder, and to give ourselves a break from unrealistic expectations. But the importance of singing as a human and spiritual endeavor is far too great to let the acoustic limitations of the room discourage us. We cannot afford, either literally or metaphorically, to let an inhospitable environment rob us of our common voice.

Knowing that my own disappointment in the outcome of the recent elections is shared by many, though by no means everyone, here at FUS, I hesitated over proceeding with the announced topic this morning. What issue could be more trivial than the quality of congregational singing at a time like this, when it feels to a number of us as if the sky is falling, and the world as we know it is about to end? But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that if we are not to become the Chicken Littles of these times, made hysterical by the predictions of our own and each others' alarmed imaginings, then we are going to have to find ways of being about our work in a challenging environment for the long haul. We are going to need ways of grounding ourselves in our beliefs and values, so that we can outlast arrogant power, so that we can be more audacious than repression and more generous than greed; so that we may live by our hopes and not our fears. We cannot afford - not now, now more than ever - we cannot afford to be silenced.

And so it seems to me that this subject is, in fact, about the election - about how those who disagree, to greater or lesser extents, with the directions that their governments and leaders are moving, can stay sane, and faithful, and energized in the struggle for justice, peace, compassion and human well-being. We are not, of course, the first community of faith to live in times of tribulation. There is a reason why the Hebrew scriptures of the Psalms have been sources of consolation to subjugated people throughout western history, from the Jews of the diaspora, through pogroms and in concentration camps, to the kidnapped Africans of the southern plantation culture in America. In what was originally a sung collective form, the psalms give expression to the range of feelings, from anger to profound sadness to enduring hope, that characterize the human experience of oppression. There is a reason why the civil rights workers and the womens suffrage marchers and the labor organizers and the apartheid resistors each sang together, and left us a living body of protest songs. Like the psalmists before them, they were singing for their lives, singing for the human dignity and solidarity that made survival possible when all other power was stripped away; singing because the alternative is to be silenced, is to lose the voice that is not lifted together with others until the world has no choice but to hear.

Singing is something more than entertainment or amusement; it is a power that we can call upon to serve the values we cherish, or else cede to the uses of commercial manipulation and political propaganda. The truth is that something deep within us hungers for songs, and will seize upon them wherever they may be found. Songs become etched upon the neural pathways of our brains without our conscious volition or consent; advertisers count on this, and do not care whether we hate their jingles as long as we remember them. We cannot avoid songs, and we do not have a choice about their power to enter and subliminally to shape our consciousness; the only power we do have is to select, with conscious intention, the songs we want to inform and express our experience of the world. By this understanding, hymns are not just the musty by-products of an over-pious imagination; they are acts of resistance against a culture that would exploit our affinity for song to sell us manufactured trivia, and to absorb our loyalty into the service of the status quo. When we sing here in this room, when we sing about freedom and justice and our visions of the future, about walking hand in hand and peace on earth, we are countering both the sentimental chauvinism of Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American", as well as the insistent consumerism of Empire Carpet and the Big Mac. In the twilight of consciousness, whether at the end of the day, or at the end of our days, what will be running through our minds is a function of what has previously absorbed our attention. It is up to us whether the songs stored in the deepest level of our memories will represent the beauty and values we chose to cherish, or the manipulations of advertisers.

Long before advertisers, and even before deliberate propaganda, human communities sang for their lives. Anthropology would suggest that at the emergence of society there is no distinction between song, dance, drama, ritual, education, and religion. The story that gives the people their identity and history, that makes them one community, is sung, and learned by singing, using the whole body. Such singing is a sacred act, almost an archetype of creation itself; it is not separated from work, love, survival, meaning. Singing together is part of what sustains everyone, in times of hardship or crisis, in times of celebration. By song, events and people are remembered beyond the course of one lifetime; by song, deeds of high valor and of crime are described to the next generation, so that they may learn the right ways to act. Singing together literally creates community, not just by making us feel warm and fuzzy toward one another, but by uniting us in an act of fundamental creation, by which we both discover and are assigned our place in the order of the world. To refuse to sing would be quite unthinkable in such a setting, for it would be tantamount to resigning from the human race; it would be to shake the foundation of the universe, to withdraw from the process by which order is sustained, a process in which all voices are required to keep the cosmos in harmony.

We moderns may be pleased to think that our enlightened reason has transcended these primitive habits of mind, but singing is never confined to the elaborations of our rational neo-cortex. In point of fact, it is one thing that we have in common with almost every classification of animal. Wolves howl; wild geese cry; frogs fill the summer evening with their courtship serenades. Whales sing to one another across the miles of ocean; crickets make tiny violins of their chitonous wings. All of it is message, and meaning; do they know the beauty of it as well, those creatures? It is clear in many cases that they cooperate, or respond to one another, in ways that achieve what we would call rhythm, or harmony. The ability to make complex collective music lies as deep as the reptilian level of the brain; it is the primitive prototype of the glorious neo-cortical achievement of human language. When we sing, intentionally together, we integrate the highest and deepest levels of brain function, momentarily unifying the often antagonistic building blocks of our creatureliness. Singing, especially singing together, is a human activity all but unique in its visceral power; that is why it can sustain us in tribulation, and even sometimes transform the world.

It is that very trans-rational quality that I suspect can make singing a somewhat threatening proposition. To sing fully is lose one's self, in the music and in the blend of voices. It is to be submerged into a greater life and a purpose beyond our own, into something that transcends the isolation of our individuality. On the one hand, this is what we hunger for, to be part of a common experience; this is what sustains us in the time of tribulation, to know that we are not alone. As much as we are made for independence and integrity, we are also made for this, for connection, for shared creation, for that which is larger than ourselves. And yet at some level we also fear it, the loss of self-hood, the absorption into a communal process that short-circuits the hard-won authority of reason and personal intention. That is what music, particularly singing, does, and that is why it is both dangerous and powerful. Which is why it behooves us to have a care about what we sing, for our singing shapes us, in ways deeper even than thought. But the thing is that we lose a whole dimension of life, and of our humanity, when we decline the risk of singing. To live fully is to live in the paradox between our inevitable separateness and our inherent connection; if we never let ourselves be absorbed by the shared song, we miss one of the secrets at the heart of what it means to be human. And where there is no shared song, there the powers of oppression have indeed crushed the spirit, and darkness descends.

The nature of music as a human enterprise has undergone a vast change in the past 130 years, since Thomas Edison first successfully recorded the human voice. Throughout all history before that time, music was exclusively a real-time phenomenon. You heard it when it was originally played or sung, or not at all; there was no storing of music to be listened to later. The change initiated by the availability of recorded music has had a profound and paradoxical effect. On the one hand, music has become far more accessible to all parts of the human community. Grand orchestral symphonies, once available only to kings who could command the wealth to bring together a full complement of musicians, can now be heard by anyone with the price of a CD and a Walkman. Greatly gifted performers can share their talents with the whole world, and ethnic and cultural varieties of songs and instruments can be experienced everywhere. We have vastly more music available to us than any other people in history, and yet for most of us as individuals, the opportunity to participate in the creation of music has significantly diminished. When virtuoso performances are to be heard at the push of a button, why should we settle, as everyone once had to do, for the music that we can find locally, or make ourselves? In effect, we are intimidated, I think, by the bewildering variety and quality of the recorded music by which we are constantly surrounded - if not, indeed, bombarded. Who wants to listen to themselves and their neighbors sing, when Ray Charles or Chris Williamson or Pavorotti or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or Lawrence Welk - depending upon your personal tastes - are the alternative? We do not have to teach our children the songs we have loved; they will learn from recordings, as we did. But they will not learn from this to sing themselves; they may even start out innocently singing along, but public disdain will all too soon put a stop to that. The expectation that we will sing together, as families and neighbors once did, diminishes. When was the last time you were in a public setting where people sang, other than here at church? (We won't ask whether you sang; I'm just talking about the opportunity!) Perhaps at a baseball game, or a birthday party. If you are lucky, you may have friends who like to make music together, but it's a dying art.

Here's what I think: If I were trying to root out the last resistance to a reactionary corporate-sponsored military U.S. domination of the globe, one of the things I would surely do is to discourage people from singing together. Let them watch other people sing on TV, where even the description 'live' is a debatable term, and advertisements can be fed to them; let them fill their cars and headphones with performers whose enhanced voices they can never hope to match; teach them to feel that singing is something best left to the professionals and the experts. Don't let them think of singing as something that might connect them, or give them courage, or express defiance; don't let them remember that people have ever and again held on through the times of tribulation by putting their longings and pain, their angers and dreams, their grief and commitment and love, into songs. Singing is dangerous; it reminds people that they have voices to raise, that there is power to endure and power to triumph in their songs.

The only way to win the struggle in which we are engaged is to weave a web of community that is stronger than the forces of separation, distrust and destruction - this has always been true. Any faith is trivial if it cannot sustain those who hold it when they are deeply challenged by the course of events, and ours is no exception. What do we do now? We remember our values, not our grievances, and strive to live by the same principles we have always affirmed. We guard such liberty as is left us with jealous zeal, remembering Benjamin Franklin's famous reply when he was asked after the Constitutional convention in 1787, "What kind of government have you given us?" "A Republic, madam," he answered, "if you can keep it." If we can keep it; that's the challenge now, and that means practicing both our freedoms and our joys, leaving as little space as possible for the further encroachment of fear. To sing together is an act of freedom and of joy; it is the affirmation of a connection that cannot be sundered by the tribulations of time; it is a power that no tyranny can take from us. This room doesn't help us, but never mind. Let's sing as if the CIA agents were standing in our midst; let's sing as if the mystified nations of the world could hear us. Let's sing as if we had pledged ourselves together to the promises of peace and justice, and mean to see each other through, no matter what setbacks may come. Let us lift our voices, so that we may not lose them; let us sing as if we were, very truly, as we are, singing for our future, for our freedom - singing for our lives.