A repost of my All Saints Day reflection from 2023:

I sing…a lot. Each November, I sing Handel’s Messiah with Orlando’s Messiah Choral Society. And all fall during rehearsal season I practice in the car, between my car and the office, sotto voce in the office, in the shower, while cooking dinner, while eating dinner. Everyone in my family pretty much knows the bass part of all the choruses, even though they don’t sing the Messiah (and aren’t basses).

Singing has been one of the sustaining joys of my adult life. I really had no experience until I joined a local community choir where we lived. I was overwhelmed at first, but stuck with it, and it pretty quickly became an essential part of my life. Before taking up choral singing, I loved classical music, especially live orchestral performances; but choral singing has been my real entryway into knowing and loving music. It’s been the prompt to learn to read music, and learn music theory, and to take up the piano.

Music is also something I shared with my Father, and my growing engagement with music, like so many of my pursuits, is tied up with our shared history, loves, and experiences. Since losing Dad in September of 2022, I’ve found how much of my life is in some way inflected by how I shared it with him. Like a reverberating chord, I can sense his influence without experiencing his presence. And that is grief.

Dad passed away over a year ago on a Friday in September. We held his funeral the following Friday. That Sunday, voice shot, I attended the first Messiah rehearsal of that season. I was emotional of course, the more so because Dad loved the Messiah. Then we rehearsed what had already become one of my favorite choruses: “Surely he hath borne our griefs.”

I was overcome, but also grateful that this music - music I was helping to make - could give voice to a grief beyond words.

One of the reasons Handel’s Messiah is so enduring is Handel’s genius for “text painting” - matching musical elements to the text. Handel uses dissonant diminished chords (as well as the corresponding melodic interval - the “tritone”) to great effect in this chorus. The choir sings a diminished chord on “griefs,” here and in its other occurrences. This movement, along with the other choruses from Isaiah 53 that follow in succession (And with his stripes we are healed; All we like sheep) so beautifully represent the reality of grief and loss - both our grief and Christ’s suffering - and confidence in Christ’s work. Surely he hath borne our griefs. The chastisement of our peace was upon him.

I have often sung through tears since that day. Though I have ideas, I can’t exactly say why music has such a capacity to give voice to both loss and hope, death and resurrection, but it does. As John Donne put it,

Since I am coming to that holy room,
         Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy music; as I come
         I tune the instrument here at the door,
         And what I must do then, think here before. 

To “tune our instrument here at the door” is to experience how beauty and loss, joy and sorrow go together. It is to know the pain that accompanies the hope that we will one day “get in” and sing without tears. It is to sing through tears. It is to know what Robert Capon calls the “burning heart” that accompanies all our joys:

For all its greatness…the created order cries out for further greatness still. The most splendid dinner, the most exquisite food, the most gratifying company, arouse more appetites than they satisfy. They do not slake man’s thirst for being; they whet it beyond all bounds…We embrace the world in all its glorious solidity, yet it struggles in our very arms, declares itself a pilgrim world, and through the lattices and windows of its nature, discloses cities more desirable still…

That is the unconsolable heartburn, the lifelong disquietude of having been made in the image of God. All man’s love is vast and inconvenient…[but] if we are to put up with all other bothers out of love, then no doubt we must put up with the bother of love itself… (Robert Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, 188-189)

To sing through tears is to embrace the world and also to “look through the lattices and windows of its nature” to a more desirable city. It is to express the “unconsolable heartburn” that bespeaks both our loss and grief, as well as longing and hope.

This Sunday, churches that observe the church calendar will celebrate All Saints Sunday. It’s the day in the Christian calendar that reminds us of the “choir of saints” that has gone before, and also to “tune our instruments at the door.” The church will sing through its tears.

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If you’d like a listen, you can listen to our choir’s 50th performance of Messiah in 2022: