In many ways, a church choir is the ultimate community of cooperation. Many voices attempting to sound as one. E pluribus unum, and all that. In many other ways, a church choir is the hotbed of petty jealousies and competing egos, as well as the deep harbor of catty criticisms of the institutional church.

Almost every choir I've belonged to harbors a cadre of heretics who to some degree choose to sing in the choir so they don't have to sit under the convicting gaze of the preacher or so they can slip in and out of services through a choir door.

Many churches that hire professional soloists don't require any test of faith, so I've known some vocally talented agnostics who sing on Saturdays in the local synagogue, on Sunday mornings at the Episcopal Church and on Sunday nights at a downtown pub.

When one wants to find the rebels of a church congregation, one need look no farther than this week's row of contraltos or basso profundos. Not so oddly, this all sounds like the world of the daily news.

Despite petty problems, I'm convinced there's a lesson for democracy, not to mention lessons in theology, hiding under those choir cassocks and albs that have known more wearers than England's crown jewels.

But why does anyone give up several hours of his or her week to sit in uncomfortable chairs and rifle through sheaves of indecipherable code, much of it in a foreign language? All of this while sitting beside someone who either smokes too much or often is badly in need of a bath or a breath mint.

I believe singing in the choir may be one of those hidden graces that God uses to evangelize the soft of tone but hard of heart. I was one of those boyhood sopranos, a treble as they're known in chorister circles. I probably should have gone to a cathedral school and become a trained chorister, but there were too many baseball dreams in my blood. When my mother offered to pay for singing lessons, I rejected them because of the time they would demand, taking me from ballgames in the neighborhood.

As if getting what I deserved, my 12-year-old son, a decent singer, now rejects my suggestion that he join the youth choir at church. I don't try to push it, although now I've got a 6-year-old begging to join the children's choir. Perhaps the younger can instruct the older by example.

When, as an adult, I had strayed for several years from attending church, it was joining a choir that drew me back into the fold, and now, several years and several choirs later, I'm learning some of the mysteries of sacred song.

Among those who pay attention to the ancient Rule of St. Benedict, some discover a way of reading called lectio divina. As I understand it, such reading, primarily of the Bible, involves reading with more than the eyes and the mind; it engages the heart and the whole person.

Lectio divina is a slow, contemplative process that demands frequent pauses and a peaceful "listening" to the text.

Without necessarily being aware of it, church choirs are doing something like this every Sunday. They take a tiny text, perhaps little more than a sentence or a phrase, and mold it into a four-part anthem that speaks of the deepest recesses of being to listeners in the congregation.

The English writer C.S. Lewis once suggested Christians should begin each day with reading both the Bible and a daily newspaper. Would that we journalists and our readers could apply a kind of lectio divina to our consumption of the daily news.

Copyright 1999 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved

Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net

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