To Save Love for the World (Pt 3)

notes for a theology of sacred singing

Brian Kershisnik Nativity 2006

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Although singing sometimes eclipses and even contradicts a song’s musical and lyrical merits, the uprightness and worth of the song does matter. The essence of singing, its peculiar glory, is most fully realized in the resonance that arises between spirits, one with another, when song and singer and singing are rightly joined. Phenomenologically, as singers are coming into this kind of togetherness, they realize, with a sweet sorrow that often brings tears, how good it actually is to be alive—and are purified by that realization.

Theologically speaking, when we give ourselves completely to singing a song that its itself holy we become, if just for a moment, clear—and the Spirit shines and burns in the happening. That is why, as Paul Evdokimov has said, the most powerful testimony to the Christian faith and the greatest evangelization of the world is found in the liturgical hymn, the Doxology, “which rises from the depths of the earth, in which moves the powerful breath of the Paraclete who alone converts and heals.”¹

Seen in the light of the liturgy, uniquely but not only there, creaturely existence is essentially and ultimately musical, moving, in the way that music moves, toward the final brilliant fulness of creation in which every creature sings (in every sense of that word). This, at least, is the vision of the Fathers, as Evdokimov says:

Patristic meditation is forever oriented toward the liturgy, the opus Dei. “I go forward singing to you,” St John Climacus cries joyously. The same cheerfulness radiates from the winged words of St Gregory of Nazianzus: “Your glory, O Christ, is man, whom you have stationed in this world like an angel, a crier of your splendor; it is for you that I live, for you that I speak; I have become a living oblation to you—the one talent that is left of all my possessions.” In the same vein, St Gregory Palamas writes, “Illumined, man reaches the eternal heights... and already here on earth he has become a complete miracle. Even without being in heaven, he emulates the untiring singers of hymns; like another angel of God on earth, he leads the entire created family to God.”²