Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill, NC

Bless, O Lord, us thy servants who minister in thy temple; grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(Chorister's Prayer Royal School of Church Music)

Les Choristes ("The Choir") has turned out to be the most popular 2004 movie in France. Over 2.5 million tickets were sold and the film even out-grossed the latest Harry Potter extravaganza. Furthermore, it seems to have triggered a great national surge of passion for choral singing, swelling the ranks of every imaginable kind of choir as well as providing the impetus for the creation of many new "choruses." The story is set in the late 1940s in a boarding school for "troubled boys," a motley group of orphans, assorted miscreants, and downright juvenile delinquents. The atmosphere is repressive and generally hopeless as these boys have no reasonable grounds for expecting good and productive lives. Into this big mess steps an unemployed musician who organizes a choir and, in the familiar formula, turns these young lives around, building individual confidence as well as community, some measure of civility, and the exhilaration of finding one's personal "voice" and, with it, the life-long potential for true passion and soulfulness. Formulaic, perhaps, but compelling in an age where hysteria and fanaticism are mistaken for passion and self-conscious sentimentality for "soul." No wonder, one thinks, that Plato extolled the role of music in the moral life, and that the ancients placed the study of music on a par with the other "basics" of an education.

When one places this in a Christian context, the importance of "finding" one's voice becomes especially urgent. As someone has observed, the voice is the only instrument created directly by God. In all times and places people have seen the human voice as the essential medium for the soul's reaching out to God in exaltation, grief, or in the quintessential human desire for self-transcendence. At the same time, the personal voice, united with others, creates a true "body" of sound that is both an expression of and the very ground of community. Early Christian writers compared the sounding together of voices in prayer and praise to the sympathetic vibrations of the strings of a lyre. Saint Augustine (as church musicians never tire of informing the rest of the world) once wrote that "Those who sing, pray twice." If that is true, what a pity, then, if somebody can't or won't sing. Praying "once" would certainly be better than not praying at all, but what a tremendous spiritual loss if one never finds this authentic voice of prayer.

What a pity that so few children are seriously taught any kind of disciplined music making in our shockingly over-privileged yet superficial culture. No one, even the professionals, can play soccer for the whole of their lives. "Find" your voice, however, and you have a unique and priceless medium to express the depths of your soul as long as you live, as well as joining in unique expressions of human community. Children's choirs at the Chapel of the Cross provide a special framework for this important task. Not only will the choristers who apply themselves while working with us never look blankly and helplessly at a simple page of music in a hymnal, but they will have learned that the voice, like all of God's gifts to us through our fundamental attributes and talents, is intended for a higher purpose than simple pleasure or self-expression. One of our prayers states that we have been given hearts to love God. We have also been given minds to be mindful of God. And we have also been given voices to praise him and to use this universal instrument to build up the Body of Christ.

Send items for inclusion in future "Cross Roads."
The deadline is the first Thursday of the preceeding month.