Live Harmoniously

I listened this morning to the King’s College boy choir singing the sacred carols that lift me beyond seasonal nostalgia into a wider place of mystery and awe. One began with the bell-like voice of a child,  amplified and echoing in the great stone vault of the chapel. After the opening verse others joined him—male voices blended in their particular kind of beauty, supporting that poignant child-sound with rich, full layers of harmony.

Choral music often opens up prayer space for me, partly because it so clearly shows what it means to be “one body.” When we pray, we join, as one prayer puts it, “choirs of angels and archangels.” We join the “choir invisible” whose membership remains a mystery, and whose song is too subtle for human hearing. We join other pilgrim souls who are praying with and for us, and sometimes in our stead. We become part of something we did not make and do not control, but which, entered into, brings us home to ourselves in unforeseeable ways.

Our individual work is to find our melody, our line, and sing it. Elie Wiesel writes that at the heart of every story is a song. The earliest human stories, it seems, were songs or poems recited to drumbeats that summoned communities together. Our own stories take shape in the rhythm of daily routine, repetition, recurrence and recognition of old things made new as consciousness matures and consequences unfold. As those routines involve others, melody finds its way into harmony.

Harmony is not simply a blending of sounds or lines, but also involves tensions held and released—dissonance introduced and then resolved in a return to sounds that complement and comfort. The term comes from a Greek verb meaning “to fit together.” As in a puzzle, fitting involves seeking and finding our place, our partners, our near and distant neighbors, our selves as members, not only as individuals.

Living harmoniously is more than metaphor. We bring the sounds of our voices, the rhythms of our movements, the pace we keep, the energy of our ideas into the places where people gather, and something new emerges at a “vibrational level,” if we allow it—if we do not too quickly impose the agendas of the occupied mind. Families or circles of friends, teammates or co-workers who “dwell together in harmony,” as the psalmist writes, experience a sensuous delight like “fragrant oil on the head” or “dew . . . that settles on the mountains . . . .” It is “good and pleasant” to dwell together in this way—modest words for the deep pleasure of security, acceptance, belonging.

The son of one of my dear friends has chosen to work as a choir director. He spends his days helping assemblies of willing and variously talented people find their way into song. As his hands move, they seem literally to gather and shape the sounds like a potter at the wheel patiently allowing the clay to take form under gentle pressure. His leadership is gentle. He opens space and allows others to fill it in a way that helps me understand harmony as a kind of hospitality: we hear and respond to one another as we sing together, making the small adjustments needed until suddenly a chord comes clear and is held in a moment of truth that is its own knowing.

Now, especially, in a time of deep public division and dissonance, we need to find the harmonies that align us and enable us to sing “a new song.” Melody may be lovely, but it is not enough. There are things we can only know when we know them together. Knowing those things may help us survive.

Image: Cantare Children’s Choir, Oakland, CA. Daniel Strychacz, Director.