How grateful I am when members of a congregation raise their voice to sing the Mass’s hymns, and how sad I find it when they sit silently as if for a performance. Thanks be to God, communal singing is the norm in my parish. Even at 8:00 a.m. Mass, our little music group can count on voices chiming in from the pews—not just compliant voices but heartfelt, even enthusiastic ones. There’s no doubt that their energy encourages our pianist’s hands, Anna’s soaring mezzo-soprano, and the alto line coming in beneath it.
That alto is me! I still register wonder and gratitude when it comes through sounding so effortless. Who would have guessed? Don’t get me wrong: I’m not claiming any sort of virtuosity. I know that singing harmony isn’t all that difficult. Legions of musicians (including, perhaps, you) harmonize around the world every Sunday without making a fuss about it.
But humor me, please; I’m a woman who lost the craft of singing, then found it again in my sixth decade during a time of great trouble. Being able to sing in harmony for my parish still feels like a small miracle.
During the 1950s, youth music helped define me: the requisite piano lessons at age six, church and elementary-school choirs, secondary-school ensembles. Private voice lessons revealed a coloratura range, and I joined a select chorus in college. But due to crippling shyness, choral singing proved to be the limit of my potential. During solo auditions I inevitably lost my voice, even though it rang strongly enough within the safety of the first soprano section. Toward the end of my junior year, I abandoned public singing and hardly looked back.
It was only three decades later, in 2008, and at another’s insistence, that I returned to music. My husband had died five years earlier. I was severely depressed and fantasized about suicide. Teaching literature and writing sustained me Monday through Friday, but my weekends were empty. I didn’t socialize and I attended Mass infrequently, telling myself that none of my fellow parishioners would even notice the absence of such a pathetic outlier. They were too occupied with their perfect families while I sat alone; they seemed so secure in their faith while I doubted.
But someone did notice my absence. One day, a friend of a friend, aware of my past musical career, asked me to cover for an absent member of her group. Thanks to some angel’s touch and the dawning sense that something had to change, I forced myself to say yes. I discovered that making music gave me brief but glorious relief from my emotional pain. When that gig ended, Anna blindsided me with the invitation to join her choral group, and it seemed natural to agree. (I figured that, among other reasons, it was cheaper than counseling and healthier than meds.)
Flattered, I vowed to add value beyond simply doubling her voice. I discovered that my fifty-eight-year-old pipes had deepened and that decades of teaching had helped me overcome my shyness, and I embarked on a new avocation as an alto harmonist. Finding those interior notes in chords proved a challenge for someone whose voice had always gone reflexively to the melody or descant, but over time and armed with a new electric keyboard, I gradually learned to fill in single chords, then harmonize phrases, then whole songs.
Slowly, I sang myself back to life. My growing competency showed me that I was not, as I’d believed, a woman doomed to trudge through fallow years devoid of any new discoveries or growth. Tentative forays at Mass yielded to solid public part-singing.
In those first years, I realized that mastery came most easily when I imagined an alto line as its own alternate melody. It made me grin to think that it was me in particular producing that divergent tune. I felt my life to be a sort of alternate narrative to the ones my fellow parishioners were living. I was still prickly and quickly aggravated over homilies and social activities targeted to couples and families. I also brooded over my divergent status as a liberal in a mainstream parish. As a result, belting out an alto line in public seemed a little subversive. See, we’re not all alike in this parish. There’s more than one way to live as a full member of the body of Christ. There’s more than one melody available to sing God’s praise!
A little arrogant and presumptuous, yes, but it was sustaining at the time. That metaphor gave me a job to do in the community. Over time, it drew me to study and reflect on the Church’s history of conformity and diversity—monophony and polyphony—and about the way God has always used outliers in his service.
After several years, grace interceded to open my self-absorbed heart. Inspired by my study of Church outsiders, I’d published several books with Catholic presses by then. To my surprise, my own parish bulk-ordered copies of an Easter devotional I’d produced. I feared that the book’s frankness about my own evolving faith might shock the “conventional, perfect Catholics” I’d imagined inhabiting those pews.
But that Easter season, fellow parishioners regularly cornered me after Mass as I was putting my music away or approached me in the parking lot. “Thank you for being so honest about your difficulties,” they would say, sharing their own lapses of faith, love, and charity, and seeking advice for managing the crises and loneliness I’d never dreamed they experienced.
That was the season when my sense of Christian community became infused with new fellow feeling, the season when it became obvious to me that all of us mortal faithful ones are “singing harmony,” or attempting to. We’re all trying to fit unique voices—shaped by personal experiences and traits no one else has—into the human community that is the body of Christ. No one finds this process easy, whether it involves singing literal harmony or feeling seen and valued in the diverse assembly of God’s people.
The challenges are great and many. On the one hand, courage and trust are essential: you can’t be afraid of sharing your own truth. At the same time, however, you must be constantly attentive to others. If you’re a singer, you must make small adjustments in your voice to match the community’s timbre and timing. If you’re a parish member, you must remain respectful of individual and communal opinions. You must be aware of the integrity of the whole, the “chordal progression” that establishes the community’s nonnegotiable shape. Not all notes are good notes for a particular time and place, or in the context of a particular song.
You might say that God’s people—especially church musicians, but all who have labored to build a Christ-infused sense of community in their parishes, dioceses, and faith lives—have been practicing the skills essential for synodality for a long time.
I still admit to being skeptical about whether that kind of “harmony” is possible. We’re so divided, so suspicious, so sure of the righteousness of our own melodies. Yet I cannot help but take comfort from my personal history. Who am I to doubt? Once so wounded, so quick to take offense, so estranged—I was drawn back in, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, to join the communal song.
And so I dare to pray that the synodal process might in truth “gather us from among the nations,” in the words of Psalm 96, that all our voices may find concord as they sing the praises of the God we share.
