- The Diocese
- Beliefs and Practices
- Christian Life
- News and Publications
- For Clergy
- For Parishes
Mark Risinger
July 5, 2010
St. Mary the Virgin - quite a change for a cradle Baptist
Music and liturgy. The cadence of those syllables faintly suggests a seminar title or topic of a conference session. To speak of “music and liturgy” with that little conjunction between suggests that they are somehow separable. But for most of my life, they have meant practically one and the same thing.
Long before I knew to what the word “liturgy” referred, being at church meant hearing and making music, and the format was always more or less the same: an organ prelude, a choral call to worship, an opening hymn or two, a solo (usually by a choir member), more hymns, and a big anthem right before the sermon. After the sermon, an invitation or altar call hymn, and finally a concluding chorus, wherein we joined hands across the aisles as we sang. For you see, I was born and raised a staunch Southern Baptist.
For most people in the church of my childhood, the idea of “liturgical worship” was a negative. Prayers were meant to be spontaneous and unrehearsed, not read out of some book. That book also prescribed a ritual they thought promoted mindless adherence and a “going through the motions” attitude that is the antithesis of sincere belief. Few of them, I would guess, stopped to notice that the Baptist order of service outlined above was about as unwavering as anything ever conceived by the Archbishop of Canterbury. I was content, however: I loved to sing and I loved being at church, where I knew all the verses to most of the hymns and looked forward to hearing my favorite anthems sung by the choir.
Then, I committed musical adultery in my heart at 17. I had been recruited by my piano teacher to be a guest in the bass section of her choir for midnight mass on Christmas Eve, my first experience of worship in an Episcopal church. During a Wednesday night rehearsal shortly before Christmas, we began to sing through the lovely (but now largely ignored) settings of the Mass Ordinary by George Oldroyd, starting with the Sanctus (No.716, The Hymnal 1940). D major, soft beginning, building gradually through the first two iterations of the word “Holy” involving a lot of sixth-chords. It was that third “Holy,” opening up on a ringing chord in B minor, that took my breath away and made time stand still for an instant. I glanced around. Everyone else just kept singing as if nothing had happened, but I was literally shocked into silence and immobility for a brief instant. I did not realize it then, but my life had begun to change in that moment both spiritually and musically; as it turns out, I had experienced the first of the many moments since that have embodied for me the essence of liturgical worship and its music, music in search of that moment of seamless union between the sense of the sung word, the sound of the voices and instruments, and the unspoken prayer of the soul searching and longing for God.
The transformation of my worship habits that began with Oldroyd culminated in my moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, after college and joining the choir of Boston’s Trinity Church, and later that of the Memorial Church at Harvard University. It was there that I found sustained contact with a different style of music, as well as a different form of service—Morning Prayer, Evensong, and the Eucharist— and somehow I knew it was where I belonged, my musical and spiritual home. The years in Cambridge eventually led to a move to New York, where for the last seven years I have sung in the choir of “Smoky Mary’s” (otherwise known as the Church of St. Mary the Virgin), where Latin chant continues to be sung alongside Mass settings from the 15th to the 21st century.
Why does the music of the Anglican tradition speak to me so deeply, and why is its steady presence in the rhythms of my life so essential? Evelyn Waugh wrote in Decline and Fall of “the big wheel,” an amusement park ride consisting of a round room with tiers of seats surrounding “a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly.” The fun of this ride is climbing on and getting flung off, but as one of his characters explains, “the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on…Of course at the very centre there’s a point completely at rest, if only one could find it.” Insert obvious analogy here: the frenetic activity of daily life feels far too much like scrambling around on a huge rotating disc most of the time, but the regularity of the liturgy, the connection it provides to a tradition extending back through centuries of faith, and the music that lies at its heart, all draw me in closer to the center where I find those moments that eradicate the perception of time and its passing, leaving me suspended at a still point of perfect calm.
Now that I am a confirmed member of the worldwide Anglican Communion, I might expect to find those moments on a regular basis. I wish I could say that they happen in every part of the service or at least once in every Mass, but they don’t. They are rare, precious, and usually unexpected, like the one that happened to me at 17. That is why I can still feel chills when I close my eyes and relive that Church Music moment almost 30 years later.
In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis posits a Law of Undulation, acknowledging the ups and downs of our energies, passions, and appetites as we travel through life, especially spiritual life. The truth is, there are Sunday mornings when the strong desire to be in church simply isn’t there. Getting there is hard work, but once in a pew, having a familiar pattern to follow helps us participate even when we may not feel very “spiritual”: we find there is still value and virtue in having those words and thoughts pass through our minds and our lips. Music enables us to reach even deeper, to awaken something that otherwise might feel dry and perfunctory.
And I have found that the power of that music, like the love of God, transcends denominational and liturgical borders. I am often deeply moved and spiritually refreshed by singing Tallis, Byrd, and Stanford. But recently I was also taken to that point of stillness and calm by singing “Just as I Am,” a cappella, as the post-Communion hymn at St. Mary’s. It was momentarily disconcerting, having to sing the most popular invitation hymn from my Baptist childhood in the midst of an Anglo-Catholic liturgy. Except that I couldn’t sing. I was left having to listen with quivering lower lip to most of verses 2 and 3, as the music rolled along the vaulted ceiling and through the incense to the congregation below. That hymn reminded me once again that music has always been the quintessential part of my worship. It will continue to be so for the rest of this life and the next. And for that I give thanks to God.
Download The Episcopal New Yorker:
 |
PDF of current issue |
As the official publication of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, The Episcopal New Yorker reaches more than 33,000 households representing every congregation in the diocese. Reaching laypersons and clergy, this newspaper informs, inspires, teaches and promotes understanding among the diverse constituencies in the diocese.
