Breathe Deep and Sing

Many of you lately have been telling me that you feel anxious.  Anxious about your job situation, your family life, your health, the politics that divide us, or the future of the earth.  When we’re anxious, I am told, we often hold our breath.  It’s a protective measure, but instead of helping fend off what we’re anxious about, it just holds the anxiety in.  What would help heal us of those anxieties is to breathe, and the deeper the breath, the deeper the healing.

 

Singing is one of the best ways I know to breathe deep and begin to let our anxieties go.  And when we sing together in church, the healing is deeper yet, for we are releasing our worries to God, who has the capacity to carry those worries for us, and to breathe into us God’s own expansive Spirit – the Holy Breath of God.

 

However strong or weak our voices, all of us sing better when our singing – and our breathing – is upheld by the singing and the breathing of others.  Think how much easier it is to sing in church when we know the choir is there – voices young and old – to encourage us.  It is inspiring to sing with others, because as the verb inspire itself suggests, such singing breathes something new into us:  new hope, new life, and a sense of belonging to something – and Someone – larger than ourselves.

 

Today is St. Francis’ Day.  Most often, he is remembered for his deep love of animals and the whole of Creation.  But Francis is also remembered for singing out his joy to God, and so one of his nicknames is God’s Troubadour.  One of my favorite hymns has words by St. Francis: All creatures of our God and King.  (Hymn 400 in The Hymnal 1982) 

 

Part of what I love in this hymn is that Francis pours out his joy to God not only for the obvious blessings of life and nature, but also for the anxiety-provoking things of life —pain, sorrow, even death. As Francis pours out his gratitude to God, I find myself breathing out my worries about the tougher parts of life.  Francis helps me let them go, and take in joy and new life in their place.

 

I invite you to breathe deep, and – with the help of Blessed Francis, and the help of your fellow Christians at Trinity – sing out to God all your anxieties, small and great.  As we sing together, breathing in more deeply the Breath of God’s Spirit, I believe we will find some of the same joy that Francis lived.  And with him, we will sing our way deeper into the peace of God that passeth all understanding, and that leads us to the Christ-life that breathes even into the Life to come.

 

In gratitude for our company as fellow choristers of Christ,

Bill           

P.S. – Be sure to join us for the Hymnathon!