A Chorister's Faith

 

A Chorister’s Faith

28 August 2015

Homily preached at 11 a.m. Sung Rite I Funeral with Eucharist

For Herb Cole

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

Matthew 5:3-12

Bless, O Lord, us thy servants who minister in thy Temple

Grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts

And what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives,

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen

Herb sang in choirs for more than 70 years of his life.  He started singing as a boy soprano, and just kept going. 

Herb was a chorister.  No, that does not mean he was a choral director, though he did serve as choir master as a younger man in several different Church choirs.  We Episcopalians have our own way of talking about things:  our ministers are priests; what Baptists and Methodists call the sanctuary we call the Church (as opposed to the Parish Hall); religious robes, vestments;  and a basement, the undercroft.   For us, a chorister is a member of a choir, not its director. 

Herb was a chorister.  He also was a father, husband, businessman, and active churchman.  But I think chorister sums up his passion and love in his life best of all.   Choral music means being attentive to the director and listening and helping each other.  Showing up on time, staying the distance, taking critiques well, and letting the choir master take the lead.  Practice, practice, practice.  A Church chorister sings things he or she may not always quite believe, but feel they should.  But singing it all the same.  Often, a strange new song becomes your own.  Herb’s choral music is a great metaphor for many of the principles Herb lived by.

Choristers sing.  They learn early on that the most important thing in singing together is like the basic rule of physicians:  first, do no harm.  If you are getting the notes wrong, or timing the starts and finishes wrong, sing more quietly.  I knew a chorister in Washington DC who mouthed most music and only vocalized on the few tried and true pieces he had learned well as a young adult.    Herb sang well and led sections.  But doing no harm in life was a rule for Herb.  It should be a rule for us. 

The musical figures Choristers use all have a spirituality to them. 

Melody:  singing a tune, lyrical and melismatic, phrasing it so that the music flows and the text is expressed, is the heart of singing.  Learning a tune—or perhaps several—to serve as the leitmotif for your life is an important way of giving shape and direction.   The hymn we sing today, “How Lovely is thy Dwelling Place” was a leitmotif, of sorts, for Herb’s life.  He specifically asked that it be included in his funeral.  It is a metrical version of Psalm 86, a song of ascents, sung by pilgrims to the Jerusalem Temple as they climbed the Judean hills higher and higher until they reached Mount Zion.  It talks about worship, song, and its place in our lives. 

“How lovely is thy dwelling place,
O Lord of hosts, to me!
My thirsty soul desires and longs
within thy courts to be;
my very heart and flesh cry out,
O living God for thee.

Beside thine altars, gracious Lord,
the swallows find a nest;
how happy they who dwell with thee
and praise thee without rest,
and happy they whose hearts are set
upon the pilgrim's quest.

They who go through the desert vale
will find it filled with springs,
and they shall climb from height to height
till Zion's temple rings
with praise to thee, in glory throned,
Lord God, great King of kings.

One day within thy courts excels
a thousand spent away;
how happy they who keep thy laws
nor from thy precepts stray,
for thou shalt surely bless all those
who live the words they pray.

Harmony:  It is not all about unison and uniformity.  Intervals and variations are needed to give depth, warmth, and feeling to a bare tune.  Sometimes dissonance and disharmony, well placed, begun and ended appropriately, bring further depth to what otherwise might be saccharine or maudlin.  Blending different tunes produces moments of harmony interspersed with dissonance, counterpoint.    One of the things Herb found amiable in the Episcopal Church after the uniformity of the Church of his youth was our comprehensiveness, our greater diversity and the interplay, however messy it may be at times, between different voices. 

Rhythm:  Rhythm is the skeleton on which the notes are hung.  It gives shape to the tune, and emotional life.  Herb was attentive to the rhythms in our life—youth, adulthood, love, raising a family, work, retirement—and all that this implied.  He was drawn to the rhythm of the liturgical year:  Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide, ordinary time, and how the moods and colors of worship change with the times and seasons.   Again, this is part of the harmony and balance we rightly should have in our lives. 

Dynamics: when to sing loudly, and when to sing softly; when to put energy in, or delicacy.  When to let things quiet into silence.   As Herb got older and suffered from increasing levels of debilitation, he was wise enough to let go of things as he needed to.  He kept singing almost to the last.  He dropped pastoral and Eucharistic visiting when he became unable to manage the scheduling and details.  He did both with grace and style. 

Rests: The proper use of silence is important in music.  As it is in our life.  It is the idea behind the Sabbath.  It is the idea behind silent contemplation. 

Death is part of life, just as silence is part of music.   It is hard to let Herb go. 

John Bukey told me that he will direly miss Herb sitting beside him in choir.  Though at times recently John has had the honor of helping Herb find his place in the score, he says that to the end he has always relied on Herb’s strong baritone voice to give him the pitch.   Russ Otte told me the choir today has left a chair open for Herb, with a cassock on it for him, plus extra copies of all the scores.  Herb always squirreled away extra copies of scores, "for future use."  It is a good thing to be missed at your death.    It is the sign of having been needed, having been loved.  It will be hard to let Herb go. 

But our confidence is that life indeed does go on even in death.  There is music hidden beneath the silence.  I take comfort in one of the images we have again and again in scripture of the life of the blessed in heaven.  It is perhaps too much a commonplace, and sometimes is seen in cartoonish, almost comical light.  But it is, again, an image of great comfort to me, a chorister.  The image is that the blessed are arranged in choirs.  Many choirs.  Good choirs.  Choirs with harps, drums, and trumpets. And almost certainly organs like none we have ever heard here below, even the most celestial. 

If the blessed sing in choirs, Herb should be feeling at home right about now.   Thanks be to God. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.