Tonight’s weekly practice singing was nearly perfect:
— We had had a very good all-day singing the day before, and an excellent singing school the day before that, and you could see and hear the quantum leap in leading skills.
– There were only 21 of us, a significantly smaller number of people than we’ve been having recently, but we sounded bigger and warmer and richer (maybe less strident?) than we have in the past several weeks.
— You could tell that the singers were listening to each other; the singing was tuneful and harmonious, and the different sections were communicating with one another.
— Everyone was very supportive of everyone else, and there was no sense of competitiveness; you never had that sense that someone was going to disapprove of you or scold you, and you never had the sense that anyone was trying to show off or sound better than everyone else.
It’s hard to describe this without sounding trite: I felt a sense of joy, a sense of warmth and connectedness with fellow human beings, a sense of being a part of something larger than myself. Perhaps one could use an old-fashioned way of speaking, and say that we were singing for God and not for ourselves; or (if that’s not your theology) one could say that we were singing for something larger and better than our individual selves.
