Singing in Christian contexts has always involved the embodied action of particular peoples. From the earliest days, Christians have sung their faith to express their religious zeal and distinguish themselves from their cultural surroundings by singing “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Ephesians 5:19). Music (and singing) was understood to be a gift from God which could enflame human religious passions and enable praise of God. Augustine of Hippo, for instance, writes in an oft-quoted passage from his fourth-century Confessions, “How copiously I wept at your hymns and canticles, how intensely was I moved by the lovely harmonies of your singing Church! Those voices flooded my ears and the truth was distilled into my heart until it overflowed in loving devotion; my tears ran down, and I was the better for them.”1 The medieval mystic, theologian, and composer, Hildegard of Bingen, was inspired to write down her visionary insights, including music, through an all-consuming process: “heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast.”2 In a similar vein, sixteenth-century reformer, Martin Luther, believed in the power and goodness of music so much so that he felt incapable of comprehending its magnitude. “I would certainly like to praise music with all my heart as the excellent gift of God which it is and to commend it to everyone,” he wrote, “but I am so overwhelmed by the diversity and magnitude of its virtue and benefits that I can find neither beginning nor end or method for my discourse. … For who can comprehend it all?”3
At the same time, singing has also often been viewed as threatening or even dangerous, especially in Christian contexts. Powerful historical voices have articulated suspicion and distrust of singing (and music) precisely because of its embodied power. For instance, though he clearly recognized and appreciated the power of music, Augustine also expressed discomfort with the passionate stirrings it elicited and the ways music was used in pursuit of more sensual Dionysian—and morally suspect—purposes. Liturgical theologian Don Saliers notes that this discord manifested itself in Augustine’s attitudes to music and continued to resonate throughout history. He summarizes this development as follows:
In his Confessions we overhear his attraction to the sound that made him weep, yet that he knows also may distract him from the Word itself. This suspicion of music has also been part of Christian liturgical tradition, again surfacing in the Protestant Reformation with the so-called ‘left wing’ traditions represented most austerely by Quaker silence. The sensual character of music and its emotional power over human beings was noticed especially in the neo-Platonic strands of Christian sensibility and theology.4
This tug between what could be broadly characterized as the body and the mind resurfaces throughout European Christian history. Early Christian discourses that were suspicious of music’s emotional impact—and everything associated with it, including nature, women, and the body—were reinforced by the Cartesian privileging of the mind over the body in the seventeenth century and the entrenchment of the individualistic, rationalist, patriarchal ideals of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. As a result, hymns which were judged to be expressions of the rational/intellectual/mind were understood to be superior to hymns which were perceived to be more embodied and emotional, or passionate expressions of the heart.5
This suspicion of singing in its more embodied forms was exported with European ideas and cultural paradigms in the colonial/imperial projects of Europe post-1492. At the same time, and partly because of its recognized power, hymns were used as a tool of the modernist/civilizing-cultural/colonial project to impose Christianity throughout the world. The canons of Western European and Anglo North Atlantic hymnody were understood to be the most appropriate modes of congregational singing. As a result, and also because of the suspicion against more embodied modes of singing, songs and musical traditions from outside these canons were often stigmatized. They were associated with the body, the sensual/erotic, the “primitive,” and the passionate. As European cultural expressions, Christian hymns were understood to represent the pinnacle of human achievement.
In fact, in the Canadian Protestant churches of my inquiry—the United and Anglican Churches of Canada—the pervasive authority given to the inherited canons of Western European and Anglo North Atlantic hymnody in congregational singing still thwarts embodied congregational participation. It impedes the full expression of diverse and complex cultural identities which are, in my view, part of our imago dei. As a result, this impediment actually undermines God’s gift to us; we are prevented from fully expressing and experiencing God’s image in us.
Instead, congregational singing can embody a liberating praxis that serves to unmask these Western European and Anglo North Atlantic colonial forces—empire at the heart of song. A liberating praxis of congregational singing both challenges the suspicion against singing as an embodied action and aims to reclaim it from the domination of pervasive Western European Anglo North Atlantic cultures in liturgy. It advocates a participatory embodied spirit-infused practice of congregational singing. Liberating singing, animated by the Holy Spirit, thus creates new spaces for the inclusion of the wide array of cultural traditions that are either ignored presently, relegated to the exotic, or segregated away from the mainstream—in other words, for the diverse polycultural , multilingual, multiethnic expressions of God’s image in us.6
These diverse and often marginalized expressions help us reclaim singing as a profoundly embodied act which can usher in an experience of the Divine and contribute to a deeply spiritual experience as the corporate body of Christ reverberates.7 This passionate, powerful, sensual, unequivocally physical, and body-centered ritual activity is thus both profoundly incarnational and communal. It is this experience of community—of singing in relation with each other—that allows us to experience the Divine within and among us when we sing as part of the body of Christ. Initiated by drawing or “inspiring” breath—ruach in Hebrew or pneuma in Greek—into ourselves, we activate our vocal cords by pushing the air back out through our mouths into the world. From this space, the liberating action of the Holy Spirit invites us to be open to the transforming and creative power of our collective action as we re-enact and participate in God’s original and ongoing action of creation. Together the human and the Divine become eschatological co-workers, building and embodying God’s kin-dom through the deepest kind of concrete engagement, simultaneously listening and “speaking” in our sung expressions, feeling, and breathing together, mutually attentive in the song and its singing.8 Our personal vocalizations are transformed into a collective action that is one of the primary modes of embodied ritual expression, integrating our whole selves—our bodies, minds, and spirits.
A liberating approach begins with a recognition that we sing with our bodies and in community. It insists that all are welcome to sing; all voices regardless of training or timbre are enjoined to praise God. It confronts the reality that our bodies are not abstract entities; they/we are situated in particular historical, geographical, and cultural locations, times, and ecclesial spaces. We are formed by the concrete circumstances in which we find ourselves. Our singing reveals something about who we are, and it also invites us to express our responses to our settings, articulating who we can become and how we understand the divine intent for us.
I would locate such liberating singing praxes within the long line of liberationist theologians who choose and affirm the embodied participatory nature of the work of the people. These theologians are opposed to “hierarchical structures of power [which] have in many cases alienated the people’s participation in liturgy and worship, and have walled them off into a state of being no more than receivers of the holy things.”9 Spirit driven, such a liberating praxis witnesses to people’s concrete lived experience just as it illuminates God’s work in the midst of that reality. It also forms and enfolds the participants into a vocal community prepared (or “conscientized”) for the work of liberation.10 As such, it affirms the collective experience of the people as a place for doing theology, as a locus theologicus , drawing on the embodied knowledge acquired in the struggles and joys of daily living. When people sing thus engaged in a social praxis of liberation their very act of singing is a living out of God’s image in us. We then more fully express and form our identities, enabling the transformative purposes of liberation to emerge and be actualized, all animated by the liberating action of the Holy Spirit.
Methodology and Outline
In order to examine the multiple ways in which congregational singing can become liberating, I work with liberationist, decolonial, and postcolonial frameworks to analyze the implications of the colonizing legacy of Western European and Anglo North Atlantic hymnody in liturgy. Each of these intellectual traditions represents vast and deep histories and trajectories. I draw on them with appreciation for their rich inheritances.
A clarification is in order at this point. I understand liberating praxis along the lines of Paulo Freire and others as “reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed.”11 For Freire, liberation entails a conscientization which provokes people to act to change their social context in order to dismantle structures of poverty and oppression. This Freirian bedrock undergirds my interpretation of liberation. But my understanding of liberation is also enriched by communities of liberation theologians. They have insisted on unmasking, interrogating, and unsettling the social forces of oppression which are predicated on theological understandings that privilege the rich and neutralize the poor, preventing them from gaining agency to struggle against those same oppressive social structures. Their aim has been to create the conditions so that the poor, the marginalized, and the excluded can gain their historical sense of agency (praxis) so that they can contribute to the establishment of a society that more closely resembles the divine promise of the realm of God.
Liberation theologians in their multiple expressions drew on the Marxist notion of praxis but reconfigured it to include the reflective a...