This is our final post in Daniel’s series on historic practices of prayer. Next week we will be reading and reflecting on prayers that Jesus said during the last week of his life. On Saturday we will have our final post, which looks back on our prayer program together. (MK)
Day #34: “Singing as Prayer” (Daniel Snoke)
The church has been singing since it began. There are many places we could point to biblically and historically about the connection between prayer and singing, but St. Augustine summarized this well when he said, “he who sings prays twice”. By this he meant that singing is not just an intellectual ascent to God, but an embodied participation in his grace. Below is an excerpt from my essay on why Christians sing, which will help us understand how singing deepens our prayers.
In Reflections on the Psalms, C. S. Lewis talks about how the expression of an emotion is the completion of that emotion. As we experience the emotion of joy when we look at a sunset, our natural response is to turn to our friends and invite them to express with us how beautiful it is, “Wow! Isn’t that a great sky!” Lewis argues that until we give voice to our experiences and invite others into them, our emotions are incomplete. In the same way, we might understand thankfulness on an intellectual level, but until we express it to others, our thankfulness is incomplete. In Ephesians 5, when Paul commands us to “be filled with the Spirit” and the actions that accompany it, he is not giving us an impossible task. Rather, he is showing us how to embrace our union with Christ through the actions of worship. When he tells the church to sing, he wants us to not just comprehend God, but to receive his grace and presence through the means of singing. God wants us to express and complete our thoughts and emotions through singing, so much so that there are more than 50 direct commandments to sing in the Bible, and even more discussion of songs.
So what is “singing,” and how do we do it? Colossians 3:16 is another famous passage that commands Christians to sing, and it will help us answer these questions.
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”
First, singing involves our minds. When Paul exhorts us as believers to let Christ’s word dwell in us, he connects teaching to singing. Our songs have lyrics, and they do not just exist to complement the melody, but they guide our thoughts to God’s truth. Some scholars think “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” is referencing different sections of the Psalter, while most interpret it more broadly. Either way, it is clear that our singing is supposed to form our minds and highlight God’s word. Many of us can quote scripture or understand theology because we have learned songs that teach us and help us memorize content. Christianity is a faith built upon evidence and facts, so our singing requires our understanding. Christ is the Word Made Flesh, and so our minds are required when we unite ourselves to him.
In Colossians, Paul wants our singing to be specific and to engage the details of our thoughts and beliefs. I know a lot of people who feel manipulated when they are asked to sing in worship. Sometimes it is because of their own hard hearts, but often it is because our songs lack the intellectual depth to give them a reason to sing. We would never ask someone to buy a used car before they knew what kind of car it was and what its history was. We need knowledge before we commit, and the same is true for singing. We cannot ask christians to emotionally commit to a vague idea of religion. Instead, our singing should play a part in telling the story of redemption. This does not mean we can never sing a simple song, but it does mean that the context and content of a song matters. Our worship is not just an attitude or general feeling; it is an expression of specific emotions that are driven by particular truths.
Second, singing involves your body. It might seem obvious, but you cannot sing without your body. Your head vibrates, your core muscles tense and relax, your mouth moves, and your limbs keep rhythmic time. Paul wants us to not just understand Christ’s word, but to embody it, letting it “dwell in” us. Songs that stick with you have a special power because when you sing, the words become yours, not just ideas you receive. In Genesis, God made mankind in his image, including the ability to embody ideas and creatively express them. To sing something, you need a rhythm and a melody. This requires you to comprehend lyrics not just on a philosophical level, but in an artistic and interpretive way as well. You are required to ask what “grace” might feel or sound like physically, not just what it means. As the second person of the Trinity, Christ has a physical body, which means he has a literal human voice. As we worship with him, our physical voices echo his.
When we worship together as a church, our individual bodies are joined into a corporate body. Earlier in Colossians chapter 1, Paul talks about how we are the body of Christ. This is not just a metaphysical reality, but a tangible, physical one as well. This is perhaps best realized when the church sings. When a multitude of people join their voices together, individual physical sound waves unite and become one. Harmony of music is a physical manifestation of many becoming one. When churches do not sing, or sing songs that are hard for the average person to perform, or create an atmosphere where the corporate voice is diminished, the physical reality of our worship is lost. It is easy to use music to over spiritualize or intellectualize worship in an effort to achieve a sense of personal intimacy with Jesus, but when we do, we lose the manifestation of Christ himself here and now in the presence of his gathered people. Paul wants our singing to embrace the physical reality of the church, both individually and corporately.
Third, singing involves your spirit. Paul says our hearts should be engaged in singing, not just our intellects and bodies. It is not enough to make noise and understand ideas, we are also supposed to sing from our hearts. Singing often leads our hearts away from selfish emotions and into ones that we ought to feel instead. This is what Paul is getting at in Colossians when he commands us to have thankful hearts while we sing. We often think or act like we have no control over what we feel, but Paul wants us to be able to choose what we cultivate in our hearts. Singing lets us express and choose the emotion we embody through song. Mr. Fred Rodgers understood this when he wrote the children’s song, What Do You Do With The Mad That You Feel:
“[…]It’s great to be able to stop
When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,
And be able to do something else instead
And think this song:
I can stop when I want to
Can stop when I wish
I can stop, stop, stop any time.
And what a good feeling to feel like this
And know that the feeling is really mine.
Know that there’s something deep inside[…]”
What Fred Rodgers is getting at is the fact that we can own our emotions through our actions. We do not need to be a slave to our feelings, but through our expression, we can lead our hearts. As we choose to express thankfulness while we sing, we may not always feel very authentic, but we are training our hearts to make room for thankfulness and we grow our capacity for its reality within us.
Christ himself sang the Psalms and expressed a wide range of emotion through them. On the cross, he sang Psalm 22, crying out in anguish on our behalf. When Paul says to sing the Psalms, he meant all the Psalms, including the ones Christ sang in agony and despair. The Psalms deeply express a very wide range of emotion, not just joy and thankfulness. They are full of lament, anger, sorrow, despair, pain, joy, love, peace… For our worship to truly involve our spirits and not just our minds and bodies, we must include the full range of emotion in our singing. If Christians only sang happy or victorious songs, we would live skewed emotional lives. I have talked to many Christians who struggle to understand God in the midst of pain and sorrow. In part, this is because they have only sung songs about his glory or majesty. They need songs to sing that also include God’s sorrow over pain and his anger towards injustice.
Singing has an amazing way of engaging every aspect of our beings; mind, body, and spirit. It is no wonder then, that both scripture and church tradition have highlighted it as an important means of uniting ourselves to Christ in worship.