Tension, Symbol, and Recognition
This article first appeared in the Fall 2019 edition of the GIA Quarterly.
Tension, Symbol, and Recognition
As is often the case, my colleague Michael Silhavy and I were recently in an argument. You may have seen a few of these on our weekly Facebook Live series, Tuesdays with Michael. Normally our conversations stem from the familiar, veer towards the imaginative, and stumble through various articulations of our unique experiences: lex orandi, lex credendi. These discussions range from light-hearted to actually quite serious, sometimes stoking a heated tension that resurfaces week after week. We both desperately want the other to see it from our perspective, to walk in each other's shoes, because let me tell you, the view of the church and the world through my eyes is spectacularly unparalleled. In honest attempts to reconcile our limited language and admitted biases, we do our best to characterize the church through a range of distinct lenses: ancient and new, organized and messy, male and female, unchanging and living, painful and life-giving, people of every culture, language, and race boldly claiming unity through incredible diversity.
Sign and Symbol
Our most recent exchange was born out of a self-examination about how GIA helps the parish minister, and we soon found ourselves using the language of sign and symbol. Referencing Judith Kubicki's insightful book, The Song of the Singing Assembly: A Theology of Christian Hymnody (2017, GIA Publications, Inc.), we engaged in a back and forth that both defended and questioned the assertion that a distinction exists between that which is sign and that which is symbol. We cited Kubicki, Tillich, Ruff, Saliers, Bell, Philippart, McCarron and a host of theologians who have wrestled with this question, invoking traffic signs that demand a vehicle come to a complete stop, flag-burnings that desecrate a culture, water, candles, liturgical colors, ritual blessings of the cross, and post-flood rainbows. Always embedded in our dialogue is that which remains the heart of our work, of our vocation: the song of our people. Kubicki helps us with these powerful words:
What we are talking about here is not the experience of an audience, but the experience of an active worshiping assembly engaged in the worship of God through singing. There is perhaps no other physical activity that so engages the body, the mind, the spirit, and the emotions of an individual and an assembly than wholehearted singing. …[T]he activity of hymn singing allows an assembly to recognize itself as believers and as members of a faith community.
--Kubicki, The Song of the Singing Assembly, 56-57.
A Deeper Reality
As liturgical musicians, the multivalent image of a singing assembly has so captivated our beings that we find ourselves arrested by the pure beauty and transcendence we can find no other place. Raising our voices with a community of singers means more to us than the well-crafted notes on the page or the deeply thoughtful and courageous texts, yet those carefully curated selections help us to engage in a deeper level of meaning than the obvious. A pregnant woman proclaiming Mary's Magnificat in the deep dark of Advent unlocks our imaginations to recognize our God Incarnate so intimately enfolded within us, bursting at the seams with a call to inspire a change in world order. A child singing "Christ has died, and death is dead!" likely has little concern with the implications of God who has conquered our last enemy, but those of us who sing with the child see a hope of life reborn, the cycle of the next generation who will learn, and dream, and carry into us all into the future with the audacious proclamation that life and love will always win. The power of a community with the strength to sing "What Wondrous Love Is This," both in the dark of Good Friday and in the joy of the Easter Vigil teaches us what it means to be whole, how to engage the meaning-making we need to carry us through the valley of the shadow of death, and how the mystery of our God-With-Us means that we'll never sing alone.
The work of GIA would be lost without its deep connection to and rootedness in the voice of a singing assembly and the limitless reality that it symbolizes. For us, Kubicki's love of finding the "theological pulse of a hymn text" extends to our work of finding the pulse of our people, examining the theological implications of singing, of a hymnal design, of the collection of anthems in choral music packet, of representation and of recognition. We understand this importance because of our own first-hand, ongoing experience with and love of that sound that has formed us for generations, from countless, unparalleled contexts. We don't just publish the music and texts of incredibly gifted composers, but we also dialogue and struggle, we talk and eat and make music with them and they with each other, and the family of GIA artists is stronger when we let our ideas feed off one another. And then the texts and music those poets and musicians set is sent out into the world, into parishes and churches, and is proclaimed from the lips of the people of God.
That's what I'm most proud to be a part of: a team of colleagues who work to perfect a craft of communicating with notes and words on paper so that a greater reality can shine through a parish minister's leadership of sung prayer. I'm proud to engage with a catalog of the finest musicians, theologians, and pastoral thinkers who see from their myriad perspectives the role of music in helping us to recognize our place at this great table. We, at GIA, are parish ministers. We are children learning to grow into the reality that exists all around us. We are the pregnant woman in Advent. We are working to shape the legacy of this audacious community we call ours, the one we see ourselves in, the one who shows us how to find our voice in every season of life.
Ongoing Evolution
This is the work that will never be done. And for that, I am grateful. I'm grateful for the responsibility to search for this incarnate love through the poetic and imaginative beauty of music, seeking the God who is still speaking among us, longing to be heard through the imperfect yet perfectly loved individuals who provide a voice of new languages, new melodies, new metaphor and symbols.
It's a strange honor to say that you enjoy arguing with your colleagues, but I take pride in recognizing the necessity of the tension, and in seeing my place at the table. I think whether we acknowledge it or not, those tensions are present in every choir, every parish staff, and every liturgy of which we are a part: lex orandi, lex credendi…lex vivendi. My greatest hope is that we continue forward with the best sparring partners at our side. Michael: take up arms. It's time again.
