A Journalist Learns from Singing in the Choir

by Allan Roy Andrews

"All God's critters got a place in the choir." So begins a bouncy folk tune written and recorded several decades ago by New England singer and songwriter Bill Staines. I've sung in church choirs off and on for most of my life, but I'm still attempting to figure out what draws me to it.

In many ways, a church choir is the ultimate community of cooperation. Many voices attempting to sound as one. E pluribus unum, and all that. In many other ways, a church choir is the hotbed of petty jealousies and competing egos, as well as the deep harbor of catty criticisms of the institutional church.

Almost every choir I've belonged to harbors a cadre of heretics who to some degree choose to sing in the choir so they don't have to sit under the convicting gaze of the preacher or so they can slip in and out of services through a choir door (mea culpa on both counts).

Church choir directors, even those who rely on hiring professional soloists, don't require a test of faith; I've known some vocally talented agnostics who sang on Saturdays in the local synagogue, on Sunday mornings at the Episcopal Church and on Sunday nights at a downtown pub.

When one wants to find the rebels of a church congregation, one needs look no farther than this week's row of contraltos or basso profundos (or tenors or sopranos). Not so oddly, this all sounds like the world of a daily newsroom, where often a righteous muckraker by day becomes a profane cynic at night.

Despite petty problems, I'm convinced there's a lesson for democracy, not to mention lessons in theology, hiding under those choir cassocks and albs that have known more wearers than a starched hospital gown.

But why does anyone give up several hours of his or her week to sit in uncomfortable chairs and rifle through sheaves of indecipherable code, much of it in a foreign language? All of this while sitting beside someone who either smokes too much or often is in need of a bath or a breath mint.

I believe singing in the choir may be one of those hidden graces that God uses to evangelize the soft of tone but hard of heart (or the heavy of tone but soft of faith).

I was one of those boyhood sopranos, a treble as they're known in chorister circles. I probably should have gone to a cathedral school and become a trained chorister, but there were too many baseball dreams in my blood. When my mother offered to pay for singing lessons, I rejected them because of the time they would demand, taking me from ballgames in the neighborhood. I was enlisted as a 10-year-old to sing two solo selections at my older sister’s wedding, but that was enough of a vocal career for me.

As if getting what I deserved, my three sons, all now young adults and fair singers, totally rejected my suggestions that they join the youth choir at church. I never tried to push it, remembering the angst I went through as a teen turning away from church singing opportunities.

When, as an adult, I had strayed for several years from attending church, it was joining a choir that drew me back into the fold, and now, several years and several choirs later, I’ve learned some of the mysteries of sacred song.

Among those who pay attention to the ancient Rule of St. Benedict, some discover a way of reading called lectio divina. As I understand it, such reading, primarily of the Bible, involves reading with more than the eyes and the mind; it engages the heart and the whole person. Lectio divina is a slow, contemplative process that demands frequent pauses and a peaceful "listening" to the text.

Without necessarily being aware of it, church choirs are doing something like this every Sunday. They take a tiny text, perhaps little more than a sentence or a phrase, and mold it into a four-part anthem that speaks of the deepest recesses of being to listeners in the congregation.

The English writer C.S. Lewis once suggested Christians should begin each day with reading both the Bible and a daily newspaper--would that we journalists and our readers could apply a kind of lectio divina to our consumption of the daily news.

And perhaps Lewis didn’t go far enough; maybe we need to take some time to sing a meaningful text to ourselves more frequently. All God’s creatures, including homo sapiens, have a place in the choir.

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This slightly updated essay is an adaptation of a column published online for The American Reporter in March of 1999.

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Poetry survives in a prose-prone world, but evangelicals (and many others) remain phobic

By Allan Roy Andrews


In the past month, the Academy of American Poets launched a new page on its Web site devoted to poetry and teenagers. The page, labeled “Poetry Resources for Teens,” is quickly reached by visiting poets.org and pulling down the menu “For Educators.” The resources on the new page include “reading recommendations, writing help, spotlight audio and video recordings, as well as new ways to get involved in grassroots poetry projects,” according to an Academy press release.

Describing the motivation for producing the page, the Academy’s press release sounds much like what could be written by any American church or religious organization. The Academy acted, in its own words, in response to a recent survey they conducted, which showed that over 75% of the people who use poets.org share one characteristic:  they first developed an interest in poetry before their eighteenth birthday. With young people spending a reported average of 16.7 hours a week online, it seemed clear that in the long term, the best opportunity to reach new readers and writers of poetry is in their early years.

In pondering this news from the Academy, I thought again of the importance of poetry and the contrary disdain it experiences in American life and letters, especially among religious movers and shakers, and in particular amidst the evangelical subculture.

I guess my real problem with this push to give teens access to poetry is that it further distinguishes adulthood as a time for generally disdaining and disregarding poetry as unimportant to faith and life in the twenty-first century.

We need more people like John Keating (the fictional English teacher played by Robin Williams in the film, “Dead Poet’s Society”), who told his adolescent charges:

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for . . . .

(Alas, I use a movie to make a point about poetry!)

My wife asked me a trick question last week: “What language is spoken in heaven?”

“Probably Aramaic,” I quipped.

If I had taken, as she did, any course in college offered by Dr. Thomas Howard (author of Christ the Tiger and subsequent others—see http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/authors/thomashoward.asp), she informed me I would have hastily answered, “Poetry!”

If that be so, it’s clear to me that the heavenly language fights for a public voice in today’s prose-dominated world. Oh, to be sure, poetry is available to any who hunt for it, but such a suggestion is a bit like telling sushi lovers in the Dakotas they can find their favorite food if they just search long and hard enough. Sorry, folks, but Fargo ain’t Tokyo!

If poetry is the language of heaven, it still gets short shrift on earth, even among those who claim to be diligent advocates for life beyond our numbered days.

Case in point: Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of Christianity Today International, a moderately evangelical organization that counts as one of its founders the evangelist Billy Graham, recently ran a poll to determine if its readers still counted themselves as “supporters of the arts” in these disturbing economic times. I’m less interested in the results of the poll (Weekly newsletter, Jun 23, 2009) than in the way the question was framed:

Are you cutting back on spending money on the arts (music, painting, movies)?

Please note the limiting listing of the arts: “music, painting, movies.” Poetry flies under the radar in Christianity Today’s perception. In fairness, the survey accompanies a compelling argument by Canadian singer-songwriter Carolyn Arends on why the arts are important; although, she seems to limit poetry’s influence to its aid in worship, comparable to icons.

In other contexts, I’ve chided Christianity Today and other popular evangelical publications for not regularly publishing first-rate contemporary poetry. One can look to Christian Century, Commonweal, First Things, and Sojourners to find a smattering of poets in religion journals, but one must look long and hard to find poets being published in the largest circulation religious magazine, familiarly referred to as CT. Among the magazines I’ve listed here, Christianity Today alone is without a poetry editor.

Almost a decade ago, an English professor at Houston Baptist University, Louis Markos, in a Christianity Today column of open commentary, called evangelicals “poetry phobic.” In the ensuing years, the magazine has done little or nothing to address and attack this phobia. Even Books and Culture, Christianity Today International’s intelligent and erudite collection of book reviews, does not have a designated poetry editor other than editor John Wilson, who often shows his personal appreciation of poetry but does not push for any regular publication of poems.

Let me be clear: I welcome poets.org’s effort to expand the exposure of teenagers to poetry. What I’d like to see is religious publications, who often target teenagers as an audience to be addressed and assessed, spend more time exposing their adult readers to the rising cadre of fine poets addressing questions of faith and the dilemmas of life and theology.

If it is true that evangelicals (and perhaps other religious subsets) are poetry phobic, much of the fault can be laid at the feet of the journalists, essayists, commentators, and preachers whose words fill the monthly magazines and who too often show a disdain for the poetic voice.

Note: Anyone interested in fine contemporary poetry from a Christian faith perspective should visit the Journal of Christianity and Literature hosted by Pepperdine University at http://www.pepperdine.edu/sponsored/ccl/journal/. 


Another excellent source of such poetry is Image: A Journal of Art, Faith, Mystery at http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/. Image is closely tied to the Graduate Writing Program at Seattle Pacific University and to the Glen Writing Workshop in New Mexico.