All my Life Singing

I never remember not knowing this protocol—an indicator, surely, of how early in life I began singing. There were external factors. I attended church with my mother and father, a Gospel Chapel. In the wooden pocket built into the back of each pew were hard-worn copies of The Hymns of Faith and softback books titled Songs of Praise. Inserted into the middle of Songs of Praise was a photocopied selection—on green paper—of some of the congregation’s favourite songs. At the Open Worship service each Sunday night, at which attendees waited upon the Spirit, the Spirit tended to lead according to a tacitly understood timetable: an opening prayer and Bible reflection, then a mixture of further such reflections and song requests, followed by the Lord’s Supper, and, finally, a closing song. “Could we please sing number 23 in the Green Pages?” Mrs Docherty might request. And we would stand and sing.

Later, there was singing at school assemblies. Our teacher, a tall and energetic man in his 20s, had painted his guitar black and fitted it with the gear necessary for amplifying sound. He led us through a selection of rock and country classics. I still know the words, or at least selected lines and fragments, from “The Boxer,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Delta Dawn,” and “Daydream Believer.” Once, a group of us boys earned Mr Houlahan’s rare ire by changing the words of “Dream” to “Scream.” We were seated on low benches at the back of the school hall, slightly raised above the heads of our peers and feeling invincible. Another time we altered “Grandad, you’re lovely” to “Grandad, you’re ugly.” Both of my grandfathers had long since passed away, so it seemed but a small betrayal.

There were also intrinsic factors. My mother is a pianist, chorister, and choral leader. For her, the idea of spending eternity with God singing his praises is quite appealing, probably more so than for my buddies from Linden School. Mum was a member of The Festival Singers, a Wellington-based choir. Among my parents’ collection of records, stacked between Peter, Paul and Mary, and Fred Dagg’s Greatest Hits, was a trio of Festival Singers’ albums. With me today, still, is the voice of tenor soloist Graham Wise, exhorting listeners to “Sing and shout in every land: ‘Glory be to the Son of Man!’” The Festival Singers’ repertoire was, in the 1980s, still carrying echoes of the preceding decade—“choruses,” set for choirs, with a little synth tossed in, creating a sound of its time, but in that time fresh and new and exciting. My mother was near the heart of it. The choir director and founder, Guy Jansen, was a friend and mentor who encouraged her gift for composition. A number of Mum’s songs, typically Scripture set to music, made it onto the choir’s records: her carol, “O He is Born”; my favourite, “Just a Cup of Water”; a setting of the words from 2 Chronicles, “If My People”; and even a song written especially for my brother James and me, “The Kingdom of Heaven,” composed after she heard me, aged seven, explaining to James, aged five, that he would be able to overcome his bad mood if only he would ask Jesus into his heart.

But I think it was from my father that I received my love of singing. This seems ironic given Mum’s pedigree and discography, and more so given Dad’s inability, through most of his life, to sing in tune. But sing he would. Around the house, at the sink doing the dishes, in the shed, it was common in my childhood to hear Dad sing. He was self-consciously bad at it, but it didn’t stop him. There is something in Dad’s spirit that gives rise to song. Early in life, my brothers and I learned the words to a Taranaki rugby supporters’ song from his youth, extolling the virtues of the team mascot, Ferdinand the Bull, thanks to Dad’s unerring memory for lyrics and loose approximation of tune:

Ferdinand! Ferdinand! With your fifteen men,
Play the game, guard our name, ruck and bowl again.
Let victory’s gleam shine on our team—
In this land you are grand Ferdinand!

It was a song he’d accompany with fist thrusts and, if we were lucky, a blast on the bull horn that sat on a shelf in the lounge and sometimes accompanied Dad to matches. Dad liked deliberately to mangle French pronunciations, too, as well as reprise linguistic stabs made by my brothers and me in our earliest years so that his speech was punctuated by exclamations of “Marvellukes!” and “Magnifi-queue!” and “Glarlias!” There is an impulse, very apparent within him but common to all of us, to give voice to feeling. These words were one way he did this. And so were the songs, no matter how ill they hit the ear.

In keeping with his own formative years in rural Taranaki, when he would beg his mother to drive him to New Plymouth on match days, Dad took me again and again to big games at Athletic Park in Wellington. It was a cold ground. Perched at the high point of Adelaide Road, it specialised in cool air coming from the north or, cooler, the south, right off the top of Tapuae-o-Uenuku. The air you breathed at the top of the Millard Stand was the pure stuff, hitting the lungs like a lozenge and making you want to shout. New Zealand rugby crowds are notoriously short on song, taciturn and grim, like the figures in John Brack paintings of ’50s Melbourne racegoers. But there was one chant that used to emanate from somewhere deep in the stands or over the terraces. It would come at a crunch moment of a test match, perhaps with the All Blacks on desperate defence or else feeding a scrum on the opposition 22, backline split left and right, options galore, and a try in the offing. The chant was simple and intoxicating: “Black! Black! Black! Black!”—on and on, barked backing, spat spondees, urgent and urging. It was really something to be in the stand and standing—everyone on their feet now—and hearing your own voice among the many.

Sometimes, in a quiet moment and taken with the urge to sing, I don’t know what to sing. I have this idea that somewhere there exists the perfect song, a song to wholly satisfy the impulse to sing. Every song, I know, is merely an approximation of this Undersong, a reaching after, a doomed attempt at achieving what only this rumoured song could ever achieve. I have been obliged to settle for a second theory—that for each moment and mode, for each impulse, each surge of feeling, there is a song, an actual, composed song in the real world of songs, that fits best. Sometimes the song is Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train,” so simple in its lyrics and chord progressions yet in the mouth and breast of Elvis, conveying a yearning and feeling otherwise unutterable. In Elvis’s best songs, no matter how inane or maudlin or saccharine the lyrics, there is a coiled energy, a latent explosiveness, a pent-up power that’s more powerful for not being spent, hopping along on the jaunt of Scotty Moore’s guitar, rolling about with Bill Black’s bass. At other times, the song is “Mystery Girl,” written by Bono for Roy Orbison’s faultless falsetto. And sometimes it’s the plaintive haunting of Bernstein’s “Somewhere” from West Side Story or the repeated “Maria” from the same musical as if a Hispanic Jesus had just emerged from the tomb to call us each by name, over and over.

I am not discriminating about where or even how loudly I sing. The shower, obviously, and at full force. Also, the office or street, more mezzo forte. Walking to or from work is a perfect time for rehearsing a favourite song and, in my case, trying once again to replicate, exactly, the Mississippi slur on “Always on my Mind” or “American Trilogy.” It is possible to become so focused on this goal as not to notice the approach of an oncoming passer-by whose smile, registered too late, is typically a caught-you-in-the-act kind of grin. There follows a comment to the effect of, “You’re in a good mood!”, a flush of embarrassment and inward smile on my part, and then, thirty seconds further down the footpath, a reprisal, this time mezzo piano … “All my trials, Lord, soon be over.”

Yet one needn’t be in a good mood to sing. Last month, I visited a dying man. He was the father of one of my closest childhood friends, and he had also been the principal at the secondary school I attended. I have very little experience of visiting people who are close to death, and after wracking my brains for conversation starters, discovered that all Bruce really wanted was for me to hold his hand. It felt like a benign sounding—What’s in there Mark, beneath the polite questions about the past? Later, on Facebook, I found a video of a visit paid him by members of his daughter’s choir. They were singing “It is Well with my Soul,” and, each time the camera swung around to Bruce, he was gazing across and up at Shona, his wife, who was lying on the bed beside him. He neither spoke nor seemed in need of talk. The song was enough. Maybe it was more than enough.

At his funeral, we also sang. If there is any proof needed that singing has nothing in particular to do with feeling happy, just go to a funeral. You will find your seat, chance upon an old friend, feel your throat swell as the slideshow wheels by on a screen overhead, and laugh as the celebrant cracks a small joke to lighten the mood, touching on some personal foible of the deceased—“If Bruce were here, he’d be telling us all about the catch with the banana in India ….” And then comes the first song, preferably a hymn, preferably a well-known one, and necessarily a hymn that, boiled down, amounts to “Death, where is thy sting?” Then your eyes will alight on the coffin beneath its garland of blooms and you’ll be reminded that this is for real. When you wake tomorrow morning, it will not be to the sound of Bruce laughing. And yet you’ll sing, raising your voice to affirm the fact that a man was raised once before and that this makes a material difference in the present moment. You may or may not finish the line. The words might refuse to come out, like water in a pipe that’s been blocked by an air bubble. But the congregation will carry you, and, suddenly, it will not seem so strange that the walls of Jericho fell to a song. Or that the words to “Great is thy Faithfulness, O Lord” come from Lamentations.

In Luke’s writing, both in his gospel and in Acts, the Holy Spirit is linked with the loosening of tongues. Zechariah’s tongue is freed for speech. So, too, are the apostles’ tongues at Pentecost. Luke also makes room in his gospel for songs, both Mary’s Magnificat and Zechariah’s song. Perhaps the words Simeon is quoted as speaking were also sung. To sing at such moments is to accept a gift from God. Very often, to sing is to give full expression to whatever is going on in the depth of our spirits, be it joy or sorrow or whatever’s in between. To refuse song is to refuse to join in with what will go on anyhow without us. The stones will cry out! The trees of the field will clap their hands! And in those trees: birds, like the ones I woke to one morning at Peel Forest beside the Rangitata River, gorging on song. I had heard of the dawn chorus, but I had never actually heard it. Not like that morning.

This morning, after watering a couple of stuttering courgette plants, I found myself unwinding convolvulus from a favourite hedge. Our five-year-old daughter Bethany was on the trampoline nearby, bouncing and singing a song of her own making. Katy Perry, meet Matt Redman. I don’t remember the words verbatim, but there was a steady stream of them, mixing “baby” with “Lord” and “I want you” with “Jesus” and “I know you’re there” with “You know I’m here”—though I fancy God would have to be pretty obtuse not to have noticed Bethany. Or Katy Perry, for that matter. Wikipedia will tell you that Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson began life in a Christian family, the daughter of Pentecostal pastors. Her first album, “commercially unsuccessful,” was a gospel album. There’s an irony, I guess, in a person from such beginnings making it to the top of American pop with numbers like “Roar” and “Never Really Over.” But there’s also a continuity of song. Is it any real surprise that a church girl should keep on singing? The Undersong is the Lord’s.

In West Side Story, Tony sings Maria’s name again and again, varying the note sequence and rhythm each time, such is his delight in singing it. Many songs consist of a name sung over and over; it’s as if the spirit, in gratitude at having been released from self-preoccupation, revels instead in the name of another. On the flip side, to hear your own name, said or sung, calls something forth from within you. Late last year at a Diocesan family camp, I attended a prayer vigil. A photocopied prompt invited me to gaze on a small, free-standing wooden cross and to imagine what Jesus might say to me from the cross, and then from beyond the cross. For the second of these questions, I thought of Mary at the tomb—beyond the cross—hearing her own name from the mouth of Jesus. And so, I thought, that’s what Jesus would say to me: Mark. Just that. And it was enough. When I turned, I noticed that someone had left a Bible on the floor open to the start of Mark’s gospel so that, from a distance, all I could read was my own name. It felt like God’s simple, unvarnished call. A fitting response is song. Having been called by name, I am suddenly and wonderfully cast beyond myself, freed from my self-absorption, and ready to adore the great Other: the One who came and made His dwelling among us. Which is why, perhaps, John the Apostle can imagine in Revelation 5:12 an endless song:

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain
to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength
and honour and glory and blessing.

Reading these words in the silence of a private devotion can seem like an unnecessary stockpiling of abstract nouns. But try singing them some time. Better still, join a choir or congregation and sing them with others. Let yourself lose yourself in praising the Lord with every word and note you can muster. In such singing, we hear ourselves. In this singing, we are also heard: God—Father, Son, Spirit—overhears us and, like us, exults in the sound of his own name sung—“all the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word.”