Song-less

I had hardly opened my mouth to sing in six months...

It was unsettling to realize recently that I have not opened my mouth to sing in six months… maybe more.

Some years ago I was prevented from singing for a matter of months when I developed polyps on my vocal cords. The polyps were the result of a coughing spasm that was itself the result of my rushing in a panic to the surface of the water when I did my first open-water dive (to a depth of twenty-five feet!) in a quarry in Bethlehem, PA in pursuit of SCUBA certification. Everyone knows that you are not supposed to rush in a panic to the surface from more or less any depth when you are diving. I was just learning; what can I say? The details of this injury are boring; SCUBA diving is not.

It has been years since I last dived. But it has been a very rare thing for me to go six months without singing. During that last spate of enforced song-less-ness, I would sit silently through rehearsals at the Orpheus Club, and I would whisper-sing the hymns in church while my vocal cords healed from the laser procedure that was used to remove the polyps. That period of song-less-ness lasted for some months (during the lead-up to Christmas!) and I realized that not having sung for so long left me feeling glum.

You might recall from a previous post that as a child I was always singing, and that, according to my mother, my motivation to learn to read was so that I could join the choir in church. You might recall that in my youth I attended a choir school. You might have heard me make the assertion that I have always encountered God somewhat immediately through music. I was singing in a choir when I worked at discerning my vocation. I once helped found a professional choral ensemble. I have been a singing member of the Orpheus Club of Philadelphia for about eighteen years now. Singing is a big part of my life, and on the rare extended occasions that I have found myself song-less, I have realized that the result is a glum Sean.

Until the other day, I had hardly opened my mouth to sing in at least six months. I had been on leave from the Orpheus Club while I coped with the changing circumstances of my life. And those changing circumstances have taken me away from the parish whose music I did a lot to support, strengthen, and perfect, and where my voice was very regularly raised in song.

A group of my fellow singers from the Orpheus Club, some years ago

As I say, it was unsettling to come to the realization that I had become song-less. Now, look: it’s one thing to be leaf-less, but it’s quite another thing to be song-less.

The number of people who claim they cannot sing always surprises me… and I know many of them are not telling the truth. Most people can sing at least a little. Singing is one of the greatest human activities. We can be marvelously ourselves when we sing solo; but I have always preferred singing with other people. Singing together with other people is one of life’s great pleasures. So happy was I to return to singing the other day, that I found myself singing with a few friends in a field by some horses. Classmates and I used to sing hymns in the refectory stairwell in seminary, or out the window from my room onto the quad. I have sung a Tallis motet more times than I could count in a pub in Washington, D.C. I once completed a quartet with three Whiffenpoofs standing at the four urinals in the Men’s Room at Mory’s in New Haven. I’ve sung with quartets in the subway beneath the streets of Philadelphia, and at any number of restaurants in this city, with only the tiniest bit of liquid courage in me. Once many years ago while trekking in Nepal, after hearing a performance of traditional Nepali music, I convinced my fellow trekkers that we should sing something to our hosts. Our small group was from four different countries; the only thing we could sing together that we all knew was “The Hokey Pokey.” We sang it, and did the motions too. I have often told people that there is more or less nothing better that you can do with your life than to sing God’s praises in church. I stand by that assertion: for most of us it is close enough to the truth. Singing together is joy. But song-less-ness is hard.

One thing about song-less-ness is that you don’t always see it coming. Even if your voice isn’t working and you have to sit silently through rehearsals, you don’t realize that you have become glum because you are without a song. Or, if life is turned upside down; and you start going to the 8 am Mass on Sunday morning, because you just want to get in and get out, and life is in too much turmoil, and you don’t know if you can bear much more than the simplest and smallest acts of worship (which is fine, by the way: simple and small acts of worship are still blessedly meaningful), and you know that this decision precludes any singing; and you think maybe that’s OK, because you are not sure what or why you would sing; and you know that if you let your voice out, you would also have to let your heart out, and you don’t know if you are ready or able to do that, because your heart has been messed with; as if you had rushed to the surface while diving and had suffered some kind of emotional version of the bends (or maybe it’s that you fear that if you come to the surface you will suffer some kind of emotional version of the bends); and all the while you have simply charted a course for your days in which there is neither reason nor occasion to sing; because we live in a world in which it is all too easy to live every day without once opening your mouth to sing (sad to say); and one day you wake up and you realize that you have not sung for six months or more, and that you have been left song-less; and you reflect that you did not set out to sentence yourself to a condition of song-less-ness; and you do not have to puzzle for long about what the solution to this unhappy situation might be: it’s right there in front of you; you could change the situation at any time; and you see, in the not-too-distant future, an opportunity arising to do just that; so you show up to that opportunity, and you open your mouth and sing.

Singing together is joy. But song-less-ness is hard.

You might be one of those people who claims they cannot sing. I do not believe you. And chances are that I am right about this. Be that as it may, the song that’s missing from your life may be different from the song that has been gone from mine for too many months. Yours may not be a song; it might be something else, but to me, it’s a song; I’ll call it a song that you’ve lost, and you do not know if you can get it back. And it’s true that there are some songs that are simply taken away from us and we cannot reclaim them. Some songs will have to live on in the echoes of our memory, because loss is a real thing in this life, and sometimes things are lost to us.

Until I considered it carefully, I did not see much of the difference between my first bout of post-diving song-less-ness, and my more recent experience of it: in both situations I felt somewhat powerless, as though my voice had been taken from me (you have heard me sing this tune before). But then, I had not even realized that I had become song-less these past six months or more. And it came as a jolt to see that I have, in fact, been living in a condition of song-less-ness.

What I am trying to learn now is this: that most of the time the only thing preventing me from singing is me. Even if I were locked in solitary confinement, I could probably find a song, if I could find the strength to sing it. I don’t have to be song-less; though I might have to look a little harder for the song, there’s a song to be sung.

What I am trying to learn is this: that most often the solution to song-less-ness is to open my mouth and sing.