This past week, I attended the annual conference of the Association of Anglican Musicians in Cincinnati. As a former professional church musician, I have been a member of AAM since 2011, and I try to attend the annual conference most years. Also in attendance this year from Good Shepherd were Robert McCormick, our Organist and Director of Music, and parishioner Jack Burnam, who is himself a past President of AAM.
Good Shepherd, Rosemont, has developed a strong relationship with AAM in recent years. For three years, I served as chair of AAM’s Professional Concerns and Development Committee, where I worked intensively in efforts to strengthen relationships between clergy and musicians. I currently chair AAM’s Taskforce on Power Dynamics and Abuse in the Episcopal Workplace. Back in 2022, when we were renovating the former parish rectory to open our retreat house, we were given a generous grant of $10,000 from AAM. In fact, members of the AAM Board were the first guests in our retreat house! The Board held a retreat at Good Shepherd last year and will do so again this coming September. I hope there will be other occasions in which we can partner with AAM, especially as the organization seeks to build healthy relationships between clergy and musicians throughout the Episcopal Church.
I’m deeply thankful for my membership in AAM. At each conference, I enjoy seeing colleagues (musicians and clergy), and I’m inspired by the creativity of the organization. The good energy within AAM reminds me of the good energy at Good Shepherd, where there is a hopefulness for the future of the Church. AAM currently supports an organ fellowship for young organists to receive mentoring in church music in parishes throughout the Episcopal Church. And AAM is persistent in encouraging all who serve within the Episcopal Church to utilize just and ethical employment practices and to strive to live into healthy and mature relationships as members of the Body of Christ.
But each year at the AAM conference, I’m probably most inspired by the vigorous singing. This year, 250 attendees raised the roofs on several churches, as they sang hymns and psalms together, an audible reminder of the power of sacred music. In singing these hymns with fellow musicians and clergy drawn from across the United States, I thought a lot about music’s incredible power to unite a diverse group of people. Surely we’re all troubled by the rancorous and searing divisions we see among us. Surely we’re all heartbroken at the unending wars and the new ones that have begun in countries across the world. Surely we’re saddened by enmities in our own families, workplaces, schools, and communities. But when people sing together, it becomes much more difficult to be hard-hearted. When we sing together, our voices are literally vibrating on the same wavelengths, and physiologically and spiritually, something marvelous happens.
You have perhaps heard that music builds community. Of course, it does! Music is a keen agent of cohesiveness in our own parish life. Our new chorister program has knit families within the parish more closely together. And when we sing together in the liturgy, we become a countercultural witness to music’s power to unite in an age of great divisiveness. This is inherently of the Gospel. Where we see deliberate estrangement, we don’t see a visible expression of the Gospel. Where we see reconciliation and efforts at reconciliation, we see the Gospel come alive.
As a musician myself, I think it’s quite difficult to remain at enmity with someone with whom you are making music. This makes music a vital part of our own particular expression of the Christian life both within the Episcopal Church and within the Anglo-Catholic tradition. At Good Shepherd, most of our liturgy is sung. This helps neutralize our own personalities (especially that of the Celebrant!), and it enhances what we share in common—voice, breath, and a yearning to express ourselves in song. It may be that in a time when divisions permeate both Church and world, the witness of an organization like the Association of Anglican Musicians is most needed.
One of my favorite moments in Sung Mass is when we all face east together at the beginning and bless the name of God. And then half an hour later, we all face east again and sing the Nicene Creed, the ancient affirmation of our faith in God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the God revealed in Jesus Christ. This action, Sunday after Sunday, is one of the most profound ways in which we as Christians of different backgrounds and perspectives witness to a different way of being in the world, a way of being together in spite of difference, with hearts of flesh given by God rather than hearts of stone.
This Sunday, as we celebrate the Feast of the Corpus Christi (transferred), we will visibly proclaim our willingness to be united in the mind of Christ, a mind that invites us into selflessness for the sake of the Body. We will sing to the One who feeds us eternally, and who alone is our strength and stay. And we will sing to the One who comes among us in Bread and Wine to be the Source of our unity, to knit together those in heaven and earth into one fellowship of the mystical Body of Christ. I will look forward to singing with you this Sunday at Mass.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle