LIFTING EVERY VOICE

I grew up with a love of music. Music can evoke powerful emotions often without using any words; the speed, the pressure, and the instruments all convey a wide array of feelings. I find music to be an amazing form of poetry. In my early years our household enjoyed all genres: jazz, classical, pop, and Broadway, and, being an Oklahoma native, we included country and Indigenous music. If you had visited my childhood home, my father would have pulled out any number of records and graced you with the sounds of John Coltrane, Ray Charles, Miles Davis, Wagner, Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, Verdi, Beethoven, Whitney Houston, Marvin Gaye, Kenny Rogers, and Native American flute music, to name a few. Music was the language that allowed us to communicate across numerous boundaries.  At a young age I was introduced to an African American opera singer who came to my hometown of Tulsa to record an album of gospel hymns. It was a wonder to listen as his voice filled the room with old time gospel spirituals. Since we did not regularly attend church when I was a child, my introduction to church music came from my mother. There were days that my mother would be talking to God through the songs her grandmother taught her. She would sing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” or “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” or “Steal Away to Jesus.” I could get a sense of the feeling she was expressing by how fast or how slow she sang the hymn. Spirituals would fill the whole house with joy, or grief, or thanksgiving. Gospel hymns would remind us that God was an ever-present help for all our cares. Our gospel repertoire expanded as Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle joined our Mahalia Jackson record collection. We had “church” at home as we listened to these voices cry out to God.

In my teens years I went on a spiritual journey to find the best community in which to explore my relationship with God. I visited Christian and non-Christian houses of worship until I found the space that would welcome my inquisitiveness without condemning me to the depths of hell or some equivalent fate. The Episcopal Church allowed me to ask my questions and still be an active member of the community. I loved the liturgy. I loved the fact that I could go to any Episcopal church and the liturgy would fundamentally be the same. Throughout my high school years, I attended the Episcopal Church and sometimes visited other churches. I was confirmed before I went off college. At the time, my relationship with God was intellectual. Yet, I yearned for a different, more rooted and more tangible connection with God. I wanted the soulfulness that I had witnessed through the singing of the Spirituals. I wanted to have that feeling in the Episcopal Church that I had when listening to the songs my mother sang. The overall musical church experience, while excellent, did not reach the depths of my being in the same ways the spiritual music from my early years did. 

I have claimed the Episcopal Church as the best liturgical and theological denomination for my journey with God. I also appreciate the organ and many of our extremely talented choirs, AND I wish that our music could more readily reflect the diversity that is found in the denomination. In my experience, the dominant musical expression in the American Episcopal church continues to rely heavily on white Eurocentric representations. Even in many of what we understand to be multicultural congregations, it is a rare or special occasion that there is a deviation from the European hymnody. When we gather for a convention or a conference, the liturgical leaders sometimes feel at liberty to access music from different ethnic groups. This is a great introduction, but that is where the experience stops. These musical languages are not carried over and readily used in predominantly white congregations. And while there are exceptions, the majority of congregational musical repertoires, in my experience, tend not to venture outside of European choral music. Even with the publication of the Lift Every Voice and Sing (LEVAS) II hymnal in the 1980’s, the book is still not found in many congregations; if it is, it is not used with much frequency. I have even had congregants and organists balk at the mention of using LEVAS II as a regular resource because the compositions within are not “Anglican” or because “they are not written for the organ.” I was told once that much of the gospel music they have experienced is poorly composed and was not suitable for that church’s definition of Anglican. 

Over the course of history, the Anglican tradition has spread over many continents. Christians who identify as Anglican reside all over the world and the music in those churches reflects their local cultural identities. In the United States, we understand ourselves to be a melting pot of cultures. We have many Episcopal churches that reflect the diversity of ethnicity and languages of the people who find themselves in the Americas. Among these are Latinx, African, Caribbean, Indigenous, and African-American congregations, and the music in those congregations is varied and expansive.  As ethnic representation in the church becomes more widely recognized, congregations must be willing to shift our musical languages. Spanish, Indigenous, and gospel music are all also Episcopal and deserve to be recognized as such. Our church has such rich and varied congregants in our pews, and they bring with them gifts of diverse musical languages. We dishonor the depth of how our denominational siblings access God when we do not share their musical expressions regularly. It also strikes a bit as tokenism when we hear this hymnody only at infrequent services. 

I would posit that the types of music that fill our worship services qualifies as a justice issue. How can we claim to be an actively anti-racist denomination, or even a church that “welcomes all” when we exhibit resistance to not even a liturgical change but full inclusion of all of our approved musical resources? I’m not suggesting that we shift from organ to piano or do away with choral music. I am saying that our musical identity is broader than what we have regularly allowed in our Sunday services. There is room for improvement as we discern how we will define our Anglican identity in our rapidly shifting cultural context. This is not to dismiss the ways in which we have defined Anglicanism, or to imply that our European musical roots have no place. There is also space for how other Anglicans experience God through music.  Many continue to point out that the most segregated hour in America is the Sunday church hour. And while we may not have a rush of different ethnicities entering predominantly white congregations, the work of being welcoming liturgically can begin now. Shifting the musical narrative is a small, yet bold step in justice work. How we use our music, the composers we choose, the hymnals we use, and the psalm settings we highlight can be a reflection of our commitment to inclusion so that we may better live into the welcome of the Episcopal Church.