Choir music is sacred, whether secular or not
"Community worship", they said, secularlily
The decline of religiosity and community – two separate modern phenomena, yet undeniably related – inspires me to reflect on communal rituals, purpose-made gatherings, ritual leaders, and the importance of such customs to human life. Most of the modern ways in which people seek meaningful connections in groups that are not directly related to attending a religious service probably have plenty of precedent in history–
I mean, I’m no historian and it’s hard to have an accurate intuitive picture of how community life worked in antiquity, but I’m pretty sure not everything was about the divine. I guess I’m saying I’m not sure how I’m setting up my point or how I’m getting there, but what I want to get to is this:
Church attendance is down, social fragmentation is up, trust is down, loneliness is up. Widely known facts about the developed world in the 21st century. Say it’s late-stage capitalism, say it’s the phones, say it’s this that or the other. Okay, what got us here is complicated. But we can agree that by now we acknowledge a problem.
A problem regarding how well we get along and how much time we spend being human with other humans, collaborating, making meaningful connections – the kind of existence that, ostensibly, we are built for. I picture us sometimes as a recovering patient whose muscles have atrophied, relearning how to walk, and sometimes getting distracted, and looking at drawings of legs, mistaking looking at drawings of legs for using their own pair of legs.
But this rather comical or sad picture simultaneously inspires me to sincerely appreciate community in the different forms it takes in my life. I have never been a religious person, really, not on the level of belief, and not on the level of participating in communal ritual for the sake of it. And yet I feel like a convert to some religion, because I have started going to “church”. (To different kinds of "churches", really, I have several hobbies. Here's one!)
The spiritual practice
My church is the choir I sing in. For my people, music and especially choirs are like church. Not because we pray there or perform worship. We don’t. Not because the music is religious – it mostly isn’t. In my mind and in my heart, the act of making music collectively with no instruments except our voices is a super awesome human thing that might as well be some sort of prayer, some sort of worship.
It is taking your very breath, your spirit (these are one and the same, if you say it in either of the Biblical languages – Hebrew ruah and Greek pneuma) and creating sound, creating magic. Different voices, timbres are different and yet they unite. The conductor guides you, pushes you, formulates colorful stories for your benefit to focus the performance. And all your voices resonate and interact and harmonize. How ritualistic the breathing and vocal exercises, how profound the music can become, how powerfully energized your breathing feels after choir practice!
(And yes, depending on the specific choir, it can be a community in the ordinary sense, in the form of a hobby group, a sort of community in the form of an amateur musical collective, or a community well and truly akin to a religious one.)
Although I'm highlighting choir music, which is certainly special to me, I do feel a similar way about jamming with other people or performing rehearsed songs, about music in general, and I also feel a similar way about other kinds of collaboration, especially the creative kind. That is what spiritual practice is for me.