"O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing"

Re going back to church: the logical and theological answer about what we should miss most is Holy Communion, aka the mass. Communion washes away sins, and we've gone nearly four months without a cleansing.

However, the honest answer for me is church music. There's no experience in the secular world that matches up to familiar hymns sung harmoniously (I mean that literally, as there are always a few capable voices in the choir and congregation who can perform the alto, tenor, and bass parts). 80-year-olds stand next to 10-year-olds as they belt out tunes that date back hundreds of years. [bold added]

The great majority of the Anglophone world’s best hymns have emerged from the Reformed tradition—either from Presbyterianism or the evangelical side of Anglicanism. While the rest of 18th-century Europe was awash in ideas of the Enlightenment, the Reformed in Britain, Ireland and North America wrote hymns. The hymns of Isaac Watts and John Newton, John and Charles Wesley, and William Cowper are models of poetic efficiency: fresh ideas, evocative phrasing, natural rhymes. From Watts’s “O God Our Help in Ages Past”: “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, / Bears all its sons away; / They fly, forgotten as a dream / Dies at the opening day.” The 19th century produced many other gifted hymn writers associated with the Reformed wing of Protestantism, foremost among them Reginald Heber, Cecil Frances Alexander and Frances Ridley Havergal.

There is something mysteriously fortifying about the act of singing together. Oral and chest cavities vibrating in rhythmic unison—which is all corporate singing is—creates a peculiar companionship among people who, apart from their creed, may have little else in common. You might barely know the lady in the pew next to you, but when you sing a common song or hymn together, she may as well be your auntie.

It is one of the great tragedies of modern Western life that people so infrequently sing together. We may sing in the car or the shower, but mostly we listen to soloists gurgle the nonsense lines of pop songs. Somehow, with the rise of radio and recorded songs in the last century, we stopped singing together.