I am not, by any honest measure, a singer. The choir knows this and loves me anyway, which is more or less the whole gospel in one sentence. Still, most Sunday mornings, before the bell rings and the red doors open, I carry my coffee up the narrow stairs to the choir loft, the balcony at the back of the church where our singers sit, and I watch a small miracle assemble itself.
It looks ordinary at first. Robes come off their hooks, with the usual friendly dispute over whose is whose. Folders open. Pencils appear from nowhere, because a chorister without a pencil is a sailor without a compass, and the scores are soft with years of markings: breathe here, watch the organist, don’t rush. Morning light comes in off the lake and lands on the open music. Our organist coaxes the old organ awake one stop at a time. It is an aging instrument, and everyone knows it, and everyone loves it the way you love a grandparent’s voice on the phone, wobble and all.
The music is quieter this time of year. We are deep in Lent, the forty days before Easter when the church pares things back and gets honest with itself, and the anthems lean spare and honest. But peek at the back of a folder and you will find the Easter music already penciled in, alleluias stacked like kindling. Hope, it turns out, gets rehearsed weeks in advance.
Not every take goes well. Last Sunday a tricky entrance fell apart three times running. On the third collapse somebody snorted, the whole loft dissolved into laughter, and the direction that followed was a single kind word: again. I have preached a fair number of sermons on grace. I am not sure any of them said it better.
Different voices, one song
Here is who sings at St. Dunstan’s: a retired teacher, a nurse just off a night shift, a teenager who came for the snacks and stayed for the descants, those soaring lines that float above the last verse of a hymn, and a bass who will tell you cheerfully that he cannot read a note of music. Different lives, different ages, different reasons for climbing the stairs. When they sing, none of that disappears. It harmonizes. The loft never asks anyone to sound the same; it asks everyone to listen to one another. If you have ever wondered what a church is for, that is not a bad place to start.
“We’re not aiming for perfect,” one of our altos told me between anthems. “We’re aiming for together.”
I think about that when my own faith goes wobbly, which it does, because I am a human being and not a hymnal. On mornings when I cannot quite carry the tune of belief by myself, somebody nearby is holding the line, and the song goes on with me inside it. That is what the loft keeps teaching me. You do not have to be certain to sing. You only have to show up and open the folder. Hymn 376, Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee, has carried better doubters than me.
The choir sings through Easter and into early summer, then hangs up the robes for a well-earned rest. Rehearsals resume in late August, Thursday evenings in the loft, and there is no audition. There never has been. If you can breathe, you qualify. New voices are welcome, wobbly ones included, and there is a pencil, a folder, and a chair up those stairs already kept for you.
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