MUSIC, MOVEMENT, and COMMUNION

I love to sing. I love it when the church resounds with song. If you rarely sing, you can learn to sing. It's easy. Just do it! Be robust! Worship renewal is based on a solid fact: those who sing pray twice, have fun, find joy, and become merry by singing.

Musical worship is also based on some solid guidelines. First, the amount of festive ritual and song is based on the level of celebration we are engaged in. Sundays, Christmas, Easter, etc. are solemnities. They require lavish ritual and song because they are at the core of faith. There are also feasts, obligatory memorials of saints, optional memorials of saints, and simple week days. In short, the worship calendar is arranged in a hierarchy of importance. How much celebration is determined by the importance of the day. The official name for this is the principle of progressive solemnity. Celebrate major movements lavishly. Keep it simple on the ordinary day.

Secondly, we have music guidelines. The first thing we must sing is the Great Amen that comes at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer. This is our festive "yes" to the offering Jesus made on Calvary. This Amen is robust and expansive. Secondly, we sing the Alleluia and verses to accompany the Gospel procession which leads us into the announcement of the Gospel. (Alleluias are, by nature, sung. They are never to be recited.) Thirdly, we sing words which are musical in themselves, such as the psalm that responds to the initial Scripture reading and our communal responses during the Eucharistic Prayer.

Music making and singing accompanies our processions. We begin the Eucharist singing so that we can be united as church and community. We are not a crowd of individuals who happen to be together. The communion rite has two aims: to ritualize the communal walk we make to the Lord's Table and to unite us as the Body of Christ. To accomplish these aims, we use simple, repetitive, singable music, such as psalms, that we sing as we do our ritual walk/procession to the Lord's Table. We take and eat; we take and drink. We continue singing and walking back to our seats. We sit down (not kneel down) and continue singing until all have received. Then we enter into communal silence so that we may give thanks and pray to the Lord in the presence of one another.

The period of ample silence after communion is important. Nowhere in our guidelines do we encourage choirs singing for us during or after the procession, not cantors singing "meditations" during the time of silence, nor instrumental mood and background music intruding into sacred silence. This is not the mall or a dentist's office.

Do most parish communities meet the guidelines which spell out the communion rite? No. In fact, this ritual renewal has been a colossal flop. Why? Because we still seem to walk like a crowd of individuals getting communion. We do sloppy, poorly choreographed processions. We still slip into privatized piety embodied by kneeling after we have returned to our place and putting our heads into our hands. Our children follow the example of adults. Maybe - in the next millennium - we will have achieved the aims of these ritual guidelines. Meanwhile our responsibility is to keep moving by singing and processing well.