So the Stones Cry Out

Sunday morning. I hurry a few paces ahead, with each crunching step drawing me closer to the clearing that is just around the corner. The childish chatter blends back into the trees behind me, and I breathe deeper, knowing their dad can handily manage both of them alone, certainly for a few minutes, even on top of a mountain. Just a few rare and sacred moments of solitude as I emerge to behold the layered horizon of grey-blue ridges before me, fading out into the hazy distance.

I pause and pull the cool air into my lungs. I try to focus on my breathing. I strive to exhale fully, situating myself in the present. I work my very hardest to ground myself, mindful of the mountain holding me up, solid under my feet. I try and try and try to stop thinking. I work to stop trying. I strive to stop working. Contemplate! Reflect! Now! Before your kids round the corner and demand you shout and sing and yodel like Maria Von Trap into the cavern below so we can hear our echoes! Be in the now! Be present! Just do it!

It isn’t working. But if anyone can engage in immediate and instantaneous contemplation, it should be me!

I have spent too many Sunday mornings rehearsing this hurried pace, as I rushed around looking for some choir member’s lost folder, or giving feedback to a piano tuner attempting to un-tune a piano in order to match to an old organ’s waning pitch, or listening back from the center of a huge sanctuary as a jazz quintet attempts to adapt its reedy, rhythmic resonance to the demands of a soaring stone space built for still small voices of boys choirs and low drones of well-articulated sermons. None of these mornings were full of mindfulness or contemplation for me, despite the fact that when the church bells chimed—whether sounding throughout some rolling English countryside or tolling from a spire and bouncing around the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan—my job was to instantly calm at the ringing of those bells. I was the liturgist, the soloist, the cantor. My call was to create not the illusion, but the reality of mindful, sacred worship for all who walked through the doors, whether pilgrims or regulars or confused tourists. Center yourself quickly so others can gather. I was well rehearsed in having ten-to-thirty seconds to transform from a bustling staff member to a calm, steady voice of invocation of the divine.

But this Sunday, I was not in the nave. I was hiking with my family. My days of thick robes and handbells were over. Or at least on hold, as in-person worship and any communal singing had been banned. Another casualty of the Covid season or, as the high-church, liturgical calendar-following folks like to call it: Coronatide.

Those who know me well have, over the years, inquired as to how I found myself in such an unusual occupation, particularly those who observed my propensity to duck out of the Saturday night scene early, despite my extroversion and the joy I find in socializing and community, in order to be able to be up before dawn to attend a church in a tradition I don’t even claim as my own. They wonder, “How did you become . . . a church musician and service coordinator? A liturgical jazz singer? An interfaith cantor? A gospel improviser? (And more recently) a virtual voice in a recorded Zoom box?”

My typical response has been, “Well, churches pay better than bars,” a cheeky aside to distract from the complicated undercurrents that have drawn me in and out the doors of churches over the years. It gets a laugh, and gets at some kernel of truth, as most jokes do. I did first enter the job market during the Great Recession, and the only thing folks would reliably pay me to do for a few years was sing. And my avoidance of the question wasn’t an attempt to skirt inquiries about my faith or doubts or grappling with organized religion—that’s a conversation I’ll have with anyone. If you don’t believe me, set aside several hours and give me a call. The dodging is due to the fact that I’m not always sure why I’ve done this with my time and energy, with my life. It has taken me to beautiful, sacred spaces all over the world and quiet unknown corners of the spiritual lives of strangers. I wouldn’t trade it, and the sacrifices have been minor if anything at all. But how one finds themself in these spaces in the first place is more difficult to fathom.

As a cantor, my task is not to perform for audiences who are rapt or moved or even inspired by my voice. I am here to sing in a way that invites others to join me. I am to create a space for other voices to fill, leading them with a confidence that puts them at ease, and as they enter the song, my job is to get lost in the tides of singing. To make myself heard in order to become as quickly inaudible. To be seen with the goal of becoming invisible. It is an extrovert’s dream to put themselves out there not to be judged but to be joined, as we come together to do something so much larger than ourselves.

The truth is, I struggle to know who I am in isolation. I don’t want to be alone on a stage with a single spotlight. I certainly don’t want to lock myself in my home, away from a community so that I can adhere to the necessary but soul-sucking protocols so aptly and depressingly named “social distancing.” I don’t even know what I think until I call my mom or text my sisters or ramble at my spouse to find clarity. In order to know my ideas, I need to articulate them to someone else and hear them echoed back to me in love. And the same is true for what I feel. When I am alone, feelings, internal sensations of some kind, rush around my consciousness and through my body like trapped animals. But when I gather my breath and release a melody into the world, they are set free. And when others join me in that refrain, my intangible feelings become real tangible waves of sound moving the air and reverberating through bodies. Regardless of the words we are singing, the sound we are making becomes my emotional experience of the world, and I know who I am.

Another liturgist and theologian I like a lot, Don Saliers, talks about how what we believe lives somewhere between or around what we think and what we feel. Ours is a culture that has somehow reduced religion to the assertion of beliefs, often neglecting the role that tradition, ritual, community, practice, and so many other elements play in religious spaces. Simultaneously, we have created a secular world that makes it nearly impossible to believe anything as we question everything we know, including who has the truth and whether they are telling it. Whether it is healthy critical thinking or the assertion of alternative facts, we can never be sure what to be sure of. We don’t know what we believe because we don’t know what to think and we don’t know how we feel.

Other liturgical types I’ve spent time with over the years respond by going back to the Latin: lex orandi, lex credendi. As we pray, so we believe. The idea is that the prayers we utter together, in community, become what we believe, even if only by habit and repetition. But if Don is onto something, the prayers we sing and set to emotional music, become the stuff of real belief, dancing in that space between and around our thoughts and our feelings.

There were many mornings I walked into a church, coffee in hand, eyes still a bit bleary from sleep, completely unsure of what I believed. But I would stand and sing: benedictus qui venit, in nomine domine… Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord… I didn’t really know what else I believed, but I would hear the stone rafters of the cathedral sing back to me, with their nearly eight seconds of reverb. I still rarely completely know what I believe, but years of Sundays here have taught me that these were the words the crowds shouted to Jesus when he entered Jerusalem, provoking the authorities to command him to shut his people up before they started a riot. But he retorts, “If these people were silent, even the stones would cry out.”

On those Sundays, I could hear my voice ring back from the stone pillars: Hosanna in excelsis! Hosanna in the highest. The word Hosanna is nonsense, really, to someone like me. An ambiguous term of adoration, rooted in ancient Hebrew, with no exact translation in any language I actually know. Again: I don’t always know what I believe. But if I draw in the breath and release it back into the world as song, I hear the whole earth and the crowds around me cry out in adoration and praise for what is. In this moment. Hosanna in excelsis, indeed. I might not know what I think and cannot name what I feel, but in this moment I believe in this act of hope.

And in this nonsensical, unknown and unknowable place, gratitude abounds.

As I exhale, I hear the small footsteps of my two kids breaking my reverie, catching up with me, bringing me back from the cathedral to the mountaintop. “Mom! Mommyyyyyyyyy!” they cry, and their small, high voices bounce back from the ridges of mountains beyond.

I realize I did it. I reflected. I centered. And now I am here, in the present. Now my job is to make space for them to do the same. It is Sunday morning again, and I am the cantor.

They join me in the clearing, and with no choir folders to locate or instruments to tune, we embark in our new tradition at the top of the mountain. We sing our silly nonsense into the void and hear the stones cry back. And with everything I am—my voice, my breath, my bones and even my brain—I believe in all of it.