Praise and the "Collaboration of Hearts"

 Nai Syrian Children's Choir

1 When in our music God is glorified,
 and adoration leaves no room for pride,
 it is as though the whole creation cried
 Hallelujah!

2 How often, making music, we have found
 a new dimension in the world of sound,
 as worship moved us to a more profound
 Hallelujah!

When In Our Music -- Voices United 533

It is a delight to be part of the congregation our son serves as pastor and to sit with the family, including our two grandsons, when we attend worship. The 3 1/2 year-old has figured out that Granny can't support him in her arms for an entire hymn anymore so he slides over in the pew to me for lift-off. As I hold him he'll play with my beard, survey the congregation over my shoulder, and...sing-ish. He loves music and has a great sense of rhythm. While he doesn't read yet he watches my face intently and will repeat words at the end of lines. I find it all so pleasing.

There are many powerful aspects of "singing our faith" and the simple joy of doing so across generations is just one of them. I thought of this experience as I read this from the On Being Project:



Abigail Washburn and Bela Fleck

In this week’s show, musicians Abigail Washburn and Béla Fleck discuss how music speaks to some truth that lives between all of us, and I keep thinking about one story that Washburn shares: Once, when touring China with her band, she met an erhu player before one of her shows (an erhu is a two-stringed instrument often nicknamed the Chinese violin). She says he looked unhappy and insisted that American and Chinese musicians simply could not play together because their musical traditions sound so different. Hearing this, Washburn asked if he’d play his erhu. She recalls:

“He started playing this breathtakingly gorgeous melody from Tibet. And the band, as we were listening, we just started to tune up our instruments and [play] along with him. And you could see that corner of his mouth turn up ever so slightly. That night, we performed that song that we created in that moment for 1,400 people in that town. At the end of the show, he came up to me, and he said: ‘Tonight, I discovered something. It’s not that Americans and Chinese can’t play music together. It’s just that music is actually the [collaboration] of hearts.’”

Maybe another part of music’s healing is how it allows us to connect histories that, as Nathalie Joachim reflects, we usually dismiss as disparate. This is the kind of hope the late Joe Carter experienced performing spirituals around the world: “I can sing ‘Motherless Child’ in Siberia [and] they know what it means,” he said. “They’ve been through hell. I can go to Scotland and Ireland and Wales and sing these. They understand the sentiment. The songs have become symbolic, I think, of that universal quest for freedom, that yearning for freedom, and that part of us that says, ‘I will not be defeated.’”

Stories like these nourish my hope in all the life thriving past the edges of language and the borders of nations — how, even when we refuse to listen to one another in conversation, we still manage to move each other in song.

I love the notion of the collaboration of hearts, which is what I figure we do as we sing our praise as Christ's people.

Thoughts?

3 So has the church in liturgy and song,
 in faith and love, through centuries of wrong,
 borne witness to the truth in every tongue,
 Hallelujah!

4 And did not Jesus sing a psalm that night
 when utmost evil strove against the light?
 Then let us sing, for whom he won the fight:
 Hallelujah!

5 Let every instrument be tuned for praise!
 Let all rejoice who have a voice to raise!
 And may God give us faith to sing always
 Hallelujah!

Read about the death and legacy of Grandmother Water Walker in today's Groundling blog
https://groundlingearthyheavenly.blogspot.com/2019/02/gratitude-for-grandmother-water-walker.html