Learning to Sing with God
THE REV. BLAKE SINGER
If you’ve been at church at all this fall, you might be getting tired of the word “discernment.” To be fair, it’s come up a lot lately. As you’ve probably heard, we’re entering into a season where we’ll be discerning the future of our space, music, and outreach ministries. Maybe, for you, the word has been used so much that it’s even fallen victim to “semantic satiation”—the psychological phenomenon where you encounter a word so many times that it temporarily loses its meaning. However, I doubt that’s truly the case, because in order for a word to lose its meaning, we’d need to know the meaning of the word in the first place. I fear that for many of us, unless you’ve been part of formal discernment process for holy orders or the calling of a new priest, the word “discernment” is just a vague and somewhat elusive Christian synonym for the word “decision.”
A few weeks ago, we began a forum series on discernment where I suggested that discernment is “listening for and responding to/participating with God.” The primary theological assumption in this definition is that God is already at work speaking and acting in our lives, in our community, and in our world. In other words, if the future is a song, God is already singing it into existence. The work of discernment then isn’t to compose our own music, but to, in the words of the old hymn, have our hearts tuned so that we might hear God’s voice and sing along. Discernment is learning to sing with God.
Notice my use of the passive voice. Not only is God the one whose singing precedes our own, but the tuning of our hearts is also something that God alone can do. Discernment, like the entire Christian life, has more to do with God than it does with us. At the same time, this doesn’t mean we’re completely off the hook. Once we hear God’s song, it’s our responsibility to sing along to the best of our ability, and even before that, there are things we can do to prepare our hearts for the tuning—things like prayer, engaging scripture, and having conversations with those both inside and outside of our community. These are some of, but not necessarily all of, the activities through which God has historically prepared God’s people to hear God’s voice. As a result, these are some of the activities that we will undertake as a community during this season of discernment.
As Mark and Virginia approach retirement, I find myself wondering how many children they’ve taught to sing. The answer is easily in the hundreds, if not the thousands. What’s perhaps even more amazing to me is all of the places well beyond the walls of St. James’s that these children have taken the gift of singing- cathedrals, college campuses, and countless other church communities across the country and even the world. While every Cherub, Children’s, and Youth Choir rehearsal has had a particular performance in mind, I have to think that the goal of Mark and Virginia’s work has encompassed so much more than any one performance. They’ve given each of these children a gift and a skill that will remain with them for the rest of their lives.
The same could be said for this season of discernment. St. James’s is discerning several specific things as a community, but as we engage these processes together, I believe that the work of discernment is as formational as it is practical. Like the countless children who have learned to sing at St. James’s, God’s voice isn’t contained by the walls of St. James’s, and neither is yours. Through engaging in the work of discernment together, our hearts become tuned to hear God’s voice and to sing with God not just at St. James’s, but in our homes, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and in all areas of our individual and communal lives. So, when in doubt, if at any point along this journey you encounter the word “discernment” so many times that it begins to lose its meaning, don’t give up. Just listen for the song and sing along.