Noli Me Tangere

Precious Lord, Take My Hand

I sang in a community choir last night. The rehearsal was in an old church in an old neighborhood. A plaque laid in stone near the front steps reads “Erected in 1906”. While the sopranos were working on their vowels I studied the ceiling of the building and wondered what had transpired beneath it in the last 98 years. I imagined elegant prohibition-era sermons on the danger of drunkenness and a civil rights leader exhorting the crowd with fiery oratory. I imagined more recently a congregation debating the merit of female pastors (a debate the liberals/progressives apparently won). And surely at some point choirs bigger and better than ours shook those stone walls with Bach chorales.

I also marveled at how old churches were seemingly built for choirs. Choirs and pipe organs. When I was a kid, the pipe organ was the worst sound on my 61-key Yamaha. But 10 years later I would visit the Cathédrale St-Pierre in Geneva and become teary-eyed and weak-kneed when those huge pipes bellowed out the service-ending fugue. I’m sure the floor shook, as did I. Those notes were pregnant with grandeur, and I felt I must repent. It was the first time that that church music scared me because it was good. (Previous fright had more to do with aforementioned keyboard sounds.)

As a high-school senior I sang in a choir once with some of the best teenage singers in the state under a brilliant conductor. We knew the music before we arrived in Savannah for the festival. At the first rehearsal, we were halfway through “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” when I had to stop singing, head full of a thousand heroic MLK images. A black kid named Michael sang that solo at the end in his trembling tenor and I became black. For a while, the sheltered white boy felt their pain.

Precious Lord, take my hand
bring thy child home at last,
where the strife and the pain all are past.

Looking back, this was probably the first time I wanted to be choral director of some sort, and one of the formative reasons black choirs move me. I don’t even love choral music, but I love singing in choirs. I love the sound of all those voices in harmony. And the conductor, there in the sweet spot, hears the best sound of all.

I have had this vision: sometime down the road I’m directing a choir in an old, old urban church with a balcony and a pipe organ. My family, who taught me to sing, is in the choir. All my friends from through the years are somehow in the choir. Even Christa, who can’t carry a tune. Even Pete, who doesn’t like music. But when we sing, we do it with all the vowel purity of a brit-choir and the throaty exuberance of a big black gospel choir. They pound my eardrums with the strains of sorrow and joy and I am proud of their sounds.

That's a silly picture. But I think that part of heaven must be something like this.

Posted by aokie at June 23, 2004 01:06 AM