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\u201cEveryone Is Welcome,\u201d announces a small sign over the door of the gothic brick edifice.\u00a0 It was first placed there to make sure people of color knew it was safe to enter in the sixties; later it served as an indication that people with AIDS were welcome too. Now it whispers carefully to me each time I enter.\u00a0 If the sign were any larger I\u2019d be spooked.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not scared of the building.\u00a0 I\u2019m not scared of worship, or of God.\u00a0 I\u2019m not scared of the two-story tall cross affixed to the wall in the front of the sanctuary. I\u2019m only scared of the people and their politics\u2014 though of course, I don\u2019t really even know them.<\/p>\n
But the small sign whispers that I am welcome, and I take it on faith that it is true.<\/p>\n
Lisa often takes my arm as we enter together at 9 pm every second Thursday of the month. She guides me through the dim light in the narthex into the large candle-lit sanctuary.\u00a0 Six tall candles on the altar.\u00a0 Three more high overhead in special lanterns.\u00a0 One in the aisle, and dozens in votive holders at the foot of the altar.\u00a0 I imagine each of them being carefully lit in honor of someone in need of more light.<\/p>\n
There is only one electric light on in the sanctuary, and it shines down on a statue of a Caucasian Mary holding a baby Jesus that looks strangely like a tiny adult.<\/p>\n
There are never more than twenty darkened outlines of shoulders and heads in the pews.\u00a0 I let the outlines exist as dark shapes as I walk past. It\u2019s too hard to think of them as people, and I do my best to forget them as soon as I sit down.<\/p>\n
We are all utterly silent. It\u2019s as though there\u2019s an unspoken agreement to remain sonically invisible to each other.\u00a0 I can pretend anything I want about the outlines.\u00a0 Only once has anyone ever spoken to me in the sanctuary, and that was a polite welcome from a priest in the back.\u00a0 Twice people have spoken to us outside, but Lisa is impatient with this, for my sake, and the conversations are as short as they can politely be.<\/p>\n
We sit down, and the old pew underneath us creaks and snaps.\u00a0 The candle light settles upon us.\u00a0 Lisa puts her palms together in front of her heart and bows, the same way she bows to her yoga students.\u00a0 I close my eyes and breathe in the air that smells like church.<\/p>\n
This is a Compline<\/a> service, more accurately a Sung Compline, so named because there is no speaking, only twenty minutes of singing.\u00a0 It takes longer than that traveling both there and back, but it\u2019s worth the time in a way I cannot consider without tears.<\/p>\n It works for me because I don\u2019t have to act like everything is okay.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have to talk and smile and be friendly. I can sit with my own truth, namely, that church\u2014something that was more than family, something akin to everything that mattered\u2014was broken for me many years ago.\u00a0 Nobody can see my eyes fill up.\u00a0 Nobody tries to talk me into getting more involved.\u00a0 I only have to walk into the darkness and candlelight, sit down, and allow the ancient sounds of the chants to flow over and through me.<\/p>\n Members of the small choir, seldom\u00a0more than nine, wear black robes that seem timeless and appropriate.\u00a0 Yet each carries a music folder outfitted with an LED book light.\u00a0 Sometimes the lights make me want to laugh, other times I shake my head, but usually I just close my eyes when they start to come in, so as not to ruin the timeless effect.\u00a0 They enter silently from a side door, off the transept to the left, into the traditional Lady Chapel<\/a> area, and sing from there.<\/p>\n They gather, they look at each other, and the lead singer begins, as she always does.\u00a0 \u00a0Her voice is not especially powerful, but it is clear and steady, complete in itself, confident but delightfully unassuming.\u00a0 She leads, the others respond. I\u2019m learning what to expect, many of the chants are the same each time.\u00a0 Her voice is always unfaltering, and my confidence in her is soothing.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s the others that capture my imagination this evening. I can sense them working to exhale their own music around a unified timbre and tone.\u00a0 One voice from several.\u00a0 I can feel the millisecond of hesitation as they surrender and breathe and allow the sound of many to form around that inscrutable sacred thread which connects one voice to another.\u00a0 This evening they are graciously successful.<\/p>\n This is the beauty of unison chant done well.\u00a0 It is the recognition of and reverence for the one tone which can possibly emerge from any particular group of voices.\u00a0 It requires each of the singers to listen to each of the others at once, a type of expansive listening we seldom do.<\/p>\n We Americans seem to always focus our attention to a fine point.\u00a0 I think we are taught to do this early in our lives.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s a cultural expectation, to find the one person to watch, the one voice to hear, and then to form ourselves around them.\u00a0 We don\u2019t seem to be able to take in the diversity of expression with an expansive consciousness, we drill down and focus, blocking out all the rest, as if the other<\/em> is nothing but a distraction.\u00a0 This works, I am convinced, to our great detriment.<\/p>\n Expansive listening is something good singers come to understand and practice. In this type of listening something important can be discerned, namely a common timbre, the \u201cinscrutable sacred thread\u201d I referred to above. It\u2019s not a tone created by or around any individual voice.\u00a0 Far from that.\u00a0 Each voice must find it, surrender to it, and conform to it simultaneously.\u00a0 This, to me is one of the most exquisitely beautiful practices human beings can undertake.\u00a0 It is submission and humility; it is yielding self to the current and tone and melody that only becomes possible when we sing, or act, in concert with one another.<\/p>\n I am reminded of something I read.<\/p>\n \u201cAgain, believe me when I say that if two of you on earth agree on anything that they ask, my Mother who\u2019s in heaven will do it for them. Because where two or three are gathered in my name, I\u2019m there among them.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 Matthew 18:19-20 DFV<\/a><\/p>\n I wonder if this isn\u2019t why God has granted me these moments of church again.\u00a0 So that I might reawaken to this thing I used to know, this thing I once believed about faith community, the inscrutable sacred thread that runs in and through those willing to practice an expansive kind of awareness.<\/p>\n I look to my left and examine one of the shadows across the aisle.\u00a0 I extend my awareness to the two forms in the pew just behind me.\u00a0 I allow the forms to become souls, with me, in this sanctuary, and in doing so stretch to imagine the inscrutable sacred thread around which we are selflessly wrapped, joined together in a unison of listening, witnessing, and worshiping. And for just a fleeting moment, while the choir sings the only four-part piece of the night, John Rutter\u2019s setting of the 16th century prayer from the Sarum Primer, \u201cGod Be In My Head,\u201d I submit to the exquisite vulnerability of being welcome here, just one of the many souls listening expansively in the safety of darkness and candlelight.<\/p>\n God be in my head, and in my understanding; \u00a0<\/p>\n
\nGod be in mine eyes, and in my looking;
\nGod be in my mouth, and in my speaking;
\nGod be in my heart, and in my thinking;
\nGod be at mine end, and at my departing.<\/em><\/p>\n