Singing Men 2 - Dead Men Don’t Sing
My earliest memories of church place me in a dimly lit Episcopal church. Whatever you are now envisioning of an old Episcopal church is exactly what it was including the smell of End-Dust.
I quickly learned the stand-sit rhythm that marked the spiritual progeny of high Anglicanism. There was a red book and a blue book. The red was for singing the blue was for praying. Simple enough. Since my father was usually absent from my Sunday morning memories, I took my mother’s cues for how one was to sing in church. And sing I did–kind of.
I learned to mouth the words to hymns that I now know to be drawn from the waste basket of mediocre theology. It wasn’t that the singing was uninteresting. It was that the notches in the rope above the preacher crusher–which we affecitonately called the dome hung over the pulpit–was more interesting. How it never fell on Rector-who-ever was a childhood mystery to me.
Two things should be noted. First, my ears were thoroughly dampened with my own impenitent sin. At that point, I was what the Apostle Paul called “a child of wrath”. I was unconverted, dead in my sin, a stranger to the promises of the gospel. I had no idea who Jesus was–the real living Jesus. For that reasons and others less important I had no true knowledge of the contents of the red book. Which meant the red book was boring. Second, I don’t recall anyone ever challenging me to think otherwise. I don’t ever remember being told what the gospel was or why my own empty hypocrisy might be damaging to my soul. My own spiritual deafness would have kept me from hearing the gospel but I honestly do not remember it ever being spoken.
I relate these early childhood memories–that would mark my youth till the age of 16–because they evince the truth that I am trying to explain. I did not know the gospel and I did not see any value in singing. I was far from the cross of Christ and found in the red book Jesus jargon set to 19th century tunes.
Whether it was that these years marked my entrance into manhood or my own father’s absence from the pew, I quickly equated singing–especially singing about Jesus–to femininity. Singing in worship was not for me and apparently not for any of the other men I knew.
I didn’t sing because I didn’t have anything to sing about. But Young Life would change that during my sophomore year of High School.
