ode to joy

I have an incredibly talented and thoughtful group of friends. Many of them write regularly on their blogs (there’s a whole list of them in the column to the right). Really, my friends–especially those far afield–are responsible for my renewed writing binge here.

Case in point: My friend S. recently moved back to Alaska. To keep abreast of the shenanigans of she and her lively three kids, I’ve been reading her blog regularly (because, like I said the other day, I’m a bit of a stalker). Around Christmas time, she wrote an incredibly beautiful post about how she has fallen in love with every church and faith community to which she belonged. She talked about the candle service at the church where she grew up, the banjo sermons at a small-town Alaska church, the generosity and sense of community she felt in every single one. And most importantly, she described the somewhat ramshackle volunteer choir in her current church. Now, maybe I was particularly hormonal or emotional that day, but I found her musings moving and beautiful. And it made me think how often hollow our academic/urban/atheist/modern/ambitious/[insert your own adjective here] worlds and existences can feel. I’m not saying anything new here; my reaction to her post was actually rather predictable. In fact, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes it far more eloquently in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, than I ever could:

…sooner or later we wake up alone, sensing that there is no way this affluent, scientific, and sophisticated world is going to provide us with happiness….after each success, it becomes clearer that money, power, status, and possessions do not, by themselves, necessarily add one iota to the quality of life.

Csikszentmihalyi may have said it better, but I was still moved to write S. this response:

So I have added all of my friends’ blogs to a blog feed, yours included, and I just had to write you after reading your “Volunteer Choir” post.
I don’t go to church. Except for Christmas services at a multi-denominational Christian church in the U.P., an occasional Catholic wedding or funeral, but otherwise, not really. Sometimes I feel guilty when I see the Lutheran church across the street emptying from Sunday services around the time I’m just coming to from my third cup of coffee. And sometimes I think about how if I have children, the community of a church would be nice. But otherwise, I don’t think about it too much.

Let me also say that my not going to church isn’t due to a particular stand on religion or anti-religion. I neither believe nor dis-believe in god. I know how comforted I feel going through the rituals of a Catholic funeral when I am grieving; I know how moved I am by the parables and tales of the Bible, especially the Old Testament (and how much it is my moral compass); and I also know how frustrated I am by the use and mis-use of religion in contemporary society to do and preach some pretty horrible things. But that’s not why I don’t go to church. I just don’t go.

And let me also say that I grew up, for the first chunk of my childhood, at least, in a very religious, very Christian household. Services twice a week kind of thing. Our only friends were congregation friends. It is a particular brand of Christianity that I now disavow completely. So maybe I don’t go to church because, well, where would I go?

Finally, let me say that for the past few years I have been on this mission to find a choir to join. I was a choir singer my whole life, but stopped in college when being part of a choir became competitive. That was not why I sang. I sang for the sheer joy of it: For belting out when you wanted to, for the goosebumps you get when a good harmony emerges, for smiling and animating a stage while you sing. I never wanted to be a soloist, and it was never about recognition or glory. Singing and music have always been, for me, about the sheer head-to-toe joy that fills me when I’m in a choir. While formal once-a-season performances are fun, it was actually choir practice that I looked forward to the most. And unfortunately, what I’ve found is that most of the adult choirs out there are competitive, performative, perfectionist. That’s fine, but I want joy. I even tried to join a choir here in Madison, but it was too instructional. We spent all our timing learning how to read music. And, well, I spent 12+ years doing that, thank you very much. I wanted something different now.

So when I read your blog post on the volunteer choir, it made me cry. The same kind of cry I get at the end of a musical when the cast is performing the show-stopping, all-out, every-voice-counts finale. The same cry I get when I hear a perfect harmony that is a goose-bumppely fusion of voices. The same cry I get when I sing my favorite songs, in my car with the windows down, when nobody else is there, and I can just belt out my delight or my pain or my love. It’s a cry of sheer joy. Thinking about that choir, mismatched clothes, an off-key note here or there, the inevitable older woman who thinks she is an opera singer dragging out every vibrato note, the man with the surprising falsetto, the clarity of a child’s voice hitting every perfect C in the melody. Joy.

And it just made me think: Some people feel that kind of joy all the time. Every week. Every Sunday, in fact. And some people feel moved to give and to care for their neighbors and communities (which I am always frustrated by and lamenting…how selfish so many of us are, how uncaring, how unwilling we are to share our privileges and our wealth, myself indicted as well), and to do it every week, all the time. And some people can look at their neighbor, whomever he or she is, and see the good in them (which is something I’m always talking to my student teachers about, about being able to see the “better angels” in our children instead of all the ways we’ve been taught to pathologize and denigrate them, to sort and to stratify them. To learn to love them, in all their little bundles of complexity, and to see them as the powerful, brilliant, charismatic adults they all can become if only we let them). And some people even find a way to be silly, every week, as they celebrate and cultivate community (something that is so rare in our academic life here in Madison).
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And it just made me think…Maybe I oughta give church a second chance.