Making music is a powerful form of spiritual practice for many.  In church, Unitarian Universalists sing hymns, sing in the choir, play an instrument, clap hands.  Communal music making illustrates the fundamental spiritual principle of individuals working together to create something of beauty and joy greater than what they can create alone.

Music has been a cherished part of my life since I was a child.

I sang songs in school and then came home to share them with my mother.  

My Darling Clementine

Beautiful Dreamer

Waltzing Matilda

I sang White Coral Bells with my mother and thrilled that she could sing the round in harmony with me.

My mother and my grandmother both played the piano.  We had an upright piano in our home that had been a wedding gift from my grandparents to my parents.  And my grandmother was a piano teacher.

I grew up in Santa Monica.  My grandparents lived in Ohio, where my parents had been born.  When my grandmother arrived for a visit she would always bring piano music in her suitcase and she and I would sit at the piano together.  She showed me where to put my fingers.  She showed me how to find middle C on the keyboard and on the music staff.  And when she went home to Ohio she would leave the piano music with me and I would teach myself to play.  Sometimes mother and I would sit together on the piano bench and play duets.

In school, I learned the clarinet and started playing in the school bands and orchestras. Sitting in the band, playing my part, working with all of the other instrumentalists to create the music together, I felt I belonged.  I had a place.

That experience of school band and orchestra gave me my earliest spiritual experience:  the core of the spiritual enterprise as I know it now to be:  each individual doing their part, each person necessary and whole unto themselves, but also each of us working in cooperation to create something greater than what any individual can do alone.  Each free to express themself, but all accountable to something larger.  The worth and dignity of every clarinetist, the interdependent web of the band.

We are exploring this fall, the varieties of spiritual practices available to Unitarian Universalists.

Spiritual, meaning concerned with the spiritual questions of Identity, Purpose, and Meaning.  Who am I, What Should I do and Why does it matter?

And practice meaning an activity engaged in regularly, most likely daily or weekly, and with the aim of increasing your skill and deepening your experience.

We begin by looking at those spiritual practices that are typically done within the context of a spiritual community.  Last week we looked at the spiritual practice of worship.  Today we will look at singing and other kinds of music making within a spiritual community.

Next month we will transition to those kinds of spiritual practices usually done privately by an individual on their own.

And we will end in November and December looking at those spiritual practices done publicly, with others but including people outside ones own spiritual community.

So, “Come, sing a song with me.”

Why do we sing in church?  Why is hymn-singing a part of our regular worship practice?

Because, I think, hymn-singing, provides for the congregation exactly that spiritual experience that I felt playing my clarinet in the school band.

Each of us has a part to play.  The hymn would be less if any of us didn’t contribute our voice.  Lacking any voice the hymn would be diminished and also different.

As in life, we’re all necessary, but the point of singing with the congregation is not to show off and impress how beautiful our individual voice is, but how beautiful is the sound all of us make, singing together.  We are a singing congregation.

It is the spiritual experience of the one in the many, of contributing an individual gift to something greater than the individual.

We sing an opening hymn at the beginning of worship.  The act of singing marks this sacred hour as different from the rest of your mundane week, because you probably don’t sing much in the rest of your life.  Opening your mouth to sing signifies this is a special time.

The hymn helps us make that transition from walking into church from our separate lives and joining together in community.  We leave the past week behind, our individual homes, our cares and preoccupations of our work, or what we did alone and apart during the week.  And we come together to be with our spiritual community.  We arrive a little shy.  A little hesitant.  We’re eager to see our friends.  But also, always, a little unwilling to let down those walls that protect us as individuals.  And there are strangers in the room!  And I’m not sure if I’m going to like what the preacher has to talk about today, so I’m holding myself back.  And I’m not sure if I have time for worship this morning when my life is so full and there’s so much to do, so I’m not immediately ready to give myself fully.

And so we sing a hymn.

We rise in body or spirit.  All together.  As one.  We shyly look, not at each other yet, but at the page in the hymnal.  And we open our mouths and we make a sound, and for once we aren’t talking about ourselves, we sing to express the sound of our community.

Come, sing a song with me, 

We breathe together, guided by the phrases of the music.  Our separate bodies start to share a common rhythm.  We focus our minds, all together, all at once, on the meaning of the one set of words.  We sing the same hymns from the same hymnal year after year so that we start to know a common religious text.  The particular hymn chosen to open that worship service follows the theme of the day, even if we’re not aware of it yet.  The tempo and style of the music sets an energy for the morning.  Are we up and excited?  Clapping hands?  Or is the song more somber, or more traditional?  Beautiful, invigorating, complicated, simple?

So with our music-making we move together into a shared worship space.  The stronger voices lead, and that’s OK, we all have different gifts, but the softer singers, or those who merely stand and mouth the words are necessary too.  We do this together.  That’s the point.

Hymn-singing is already part of your spiritual practice, because we sing hymns in our spiritual community, every Sunday.

If you are a musician, music-making might be a larger part of your spiritual practice, the way that playing in band and orchestra was a spiritual experience for me growing up, and later singing in the Gay Men’s Chorus was a spiritual practice for me.  Certainly our UUCLB choir or Wylder Spirits might consider their music-making a spiritual practice.

Music-making as a spiritual practice might look like participating in a regular drum-circle.  Maybe you sing in a community choir, or play in a community orchestra.  Hymn singing and chanting has been a regular part of monastic communities for centuries.  The Psalms were mostly likely intended to be chanted together by a community as part of worship.  And many of the Psalms, like the one we used as our Opening Words this morning, speak about music-making as a spiritual practice the whole world participates in, together.

You may not have thought of your music-making as a spiritual practice.  And it may not be, for you.  Or maybe it is.

One goal I have for our exploration of spiritual practices this fall, is to expand your sense of what spiritual practice can be.

When we say spiritual practice the first image that comes to mind is probably not singing in a choir, or participating in a drum circle.  We think a spiritual practice requires a special place, like a temple, or a home altar.  There’s probably incense to light, or a bell to ring, or a ritual to perform.  If that’s not you, you might think the whole idea of spiritual practice doesn’t apply.

So I want to expand you picture of what a spiritual practice can be.  And we will talk about a lot of spiritual practices that have nothing to do with bells and incense.  But I also want to be clear that not everything we do is a spiritual practice.

So let me end this morning with a little definition that we will come back to several times over the next weeks.

So a spiritual practice is spiritual and a practice.

It’s spiritual because it engages with the concerns of spirituality:  questions of identity, purpose and meaning.  That doesn’t mean that you have to contemplate exactly those questions during your practice, but those questions should be present in some way.  

And it has to be a practice.  People can have spiritual experiences randomly, a sudden insight, an unexpected revelation.  But we’re talking about spiritual practice.  Regularly.  Deliberately.  Doing the work.  Even when we don’t feel like it.  Even when nothing particularly interesting happens.

So spiritual.  And practice.

And then, there are three more qualities that distinguish a mundane activity, from a spiritual practice even if they look, outwardly, exactly the same.

Here are the three.  A spiritual practice is holistic, intentional, and ecstatic.

Holistic.  A spiritual practice involves all of your being:  physical, mental, and emotional.  There’s something for your body to do.  There’s something for your brain to do.  A spiritual practice engages all of your attention.  You can’t be doing your spiritual practice and also watching TV, or chatting with a friend.

A spiritual practice activates your body in some way.  Even if the practice is just to be physically still, there’s probably a particular pose you’re supposed to hold, or a discipline about breathing.  A spiritual practice engages the brain.  You are to focus your thoughts, concentrate on a particular phrase, or question or image.  A spiritual practice engages the emotions.  Often the emotional practice is to strive for peacefulness and calm, but it could also mean being open to whatever feelings naturally arise:  joy, regret, forgiveness, gratitude, tears, laughter.

So is hymn-singing holistic?  Yes it is.  We use our bodies.  We stand, if we can.  We breathe.  We use our voices.  We engage our mental selves, to read the words and follow the music, to concentrate on the lesson of the words.  We feel the emotions of the text and the music, letting sadness or joy move us.

A spiritual practice is intentional.  Intentional simply means that we do the practice for the purpose of engaging with spiritual questions and furthering and deepening our spiritual lives.  Knitting as a spiritual practice looks very much like knitting to make a scarf, but one is for the purpose of knitting a scarf and growing a soul, the other is only to knit the scarf.

Is hymn-singing intentional?  Well it’s certainly my intention when I choose a hymn for worship that the hymn will contribute to the spiritual goal of that Sunday.  I select music and words deliberately for their emotional and thematic content.  And hymn singing has its place in the liturgy because of the usefulness of hymn-singing in marking sacred time and creating community.

And lastly, a spiritual practice is ecstatic.  Ecstasy here means that spiritual feeling of opening oneself out to that something larger in the universe where we find comfort and meaning and purpose.  It’s that feeling of being blinded by the light, or knocked off your horse, or the heavens parting, or just being filled with overwhelming feelings of joy and love and compassion for the world.  It is that spiritual experience that sometimes comes to us unexpectedly and maybe we only feel it as true ecstasy a couple of times in our lives.  You won’t feel that ecstasy every time you sit down to do your spiritual practice.  But it should be possible that you might be able to connect with that ecstatic feeling during your practice.  And it should be that you do feel at least an intimation of that ecstatic feeling regularly during your practice.

So is hymn-singing ecstatic?  Well not every time.  But now and then, you’ve probably felt a little of it.  The music is beautiful or lively.  The voices around you are blending with and supporting your own.  There’s a heartache in the words that touches your own, or an image that thrills your soul.  And once in a while, if everything is working just so, if the music is doing its part, and you’re doing your part, a hymn can bring us to that place where we exist beyond all places, where we live beyond ourselves, where we sing with the sea and the world and its inhabitants.  We hear the rivers clap their hands, and the distant mountains join in chorus, and we sing to the Eternal.