Singing

Today is the first day in a long time that our nearly-two year old son was simply too excited to take a nap.  It just so happens that he is also on the verge of realizing he can climb out of his own crib.  Being as awake as he was, making it all the more likely that he just might have a go at climbing out, Jess and I agreed I would hover near his room so I could run in and, you know, make a diving catch.  With the monitor in one hand and a book in the other, I could hear him cycle through all the songs we sang in the car today.  He'd lie down for a moment, and then another one would pop into his head.  He's a musical little person!

I share this because the timing was just right to read Andy Crouch's chapter on singing in his book The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in its Proper Place.  I was looking forward to this chapter because when Jess and I heard him speak about his book Culture Making at Whitworth University a few years ago, he incorporated his piano-playing into his presentations to great effect.  That is to say: occasionally he would illustrate his points about theology and culture using music and the way music shapes the soul.

The ninth of his ten commitments that make up the book The Tech-Wise Family concerns singing: "We learn to sing together, rather than letting recorded and amplified music take over our lives and worship." (183)

He writes:

"It is absolutely possible to learn to really sing.  You may or may not be able to learn to sing on pitch, but you can learn to sing with heart, mind, soul, and strength.  The best time to begin to learn is in childhood, when our brains are primed for learning, our neuromuscular system is most able to be trained to connect mind with strength, and we are fearlessly willing to try something new.  And of all the components of well-led worship, singing is the one that is most immediately accessible and engaging to children (listening to sermons takes a while longer!).

"So the tech-wise family will do everything in their power to involve their children from the earliest possible age in expressions of church that model this kind of worship - not just the pleasant ditties of Sunday school or "children's church" but the full-throated praise that can come from people of every generation gathered in the presence of God.  Maybe that isn't the Sunday-to-Sunday reality where you worship (it's only sometimes so in our own church), but it's worth exposing our children to the communities and places that have kept alive the powerful tradition of Christian song.

"And as much as possible, we'll sing at home, when friends and family gather, as we clean up the kitchen and fold the laundry, as we celebrate holidays like Christmas and Easter, when we get up in the morning and when we lullaby ourselves to sleep.  Our singing will be nothing like the auto-tuned, technologically massaged pop music that provides the bland sound track for consumer life; it will be the sort of singing you only can do at home, where you are fully known and fully able to be yourself.  And it will be a rehearsal for the end of the whole story, when all speech will be song and the whole cosmos will be filled with worship." (192-193)

Our son clearly didn't 'lullaby himself to sleep' this afternoon.  But as I read this earlier while looking at the squirming, singing toddler in the monitor, I think the first paragraph I've quoted above rings particularly true: "singing is the (component) of worship that is most immediately accessible and engaging to children."

I was involved in a memorial service recently in which the hymns we chose to sing were songs the deceased actually loved to sing and everybody knew it.  You may have favorite songs to listen to.  But what are your favorite songs to sing?  Songs that you might simply find yourself singing in an absent-minded moment?  Songs that a loved one or a family member or a friend might associate with you?  What songs do you hear and immediately think of someone else who may be still alive or perhaps has died?  In what ways are your most precious moments of life or of discerning the reality of God or of the gift of existence all sometimes bound up inescapably with music?