Singing
In the year 112, Pliny the Younger ― a Roman governor ― wrote to the Emperor Trajan describing the then-emerging band of Christians. They “meet before daybreak and make melody to Christ, as though he were a god.”1 This is the earliest description we have of Christians from the hand of one of their pagan neighbors. It reveals how the first Christians were viewed in the ancient world ― namely, as people who sing to Jesus.
Singing is fundamental to what Christians do, and not just because Pliny thought so. It is fundamental to what happens at Mass.
Christians are many. They are in many places and are about many things. At Mass, they come together for one thing. They come together to commune with God. They orient themselves around the one essential thing. “There is one body and one Spirit,” Saint Paul said. “One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:4-6).
Our music and our singing touches upon this mystery. We sing within different ranges and use different dynamics. We are baritones and sopranos; sometimes piano, sometimes forte. Within the score, even, there are high notes and low, fast parts and slow. But all of this harmonizes into one song, one hymn. Just as the Church unites and bonds from all its disparate parts and places, so the song comes together and harmonizes. As our prayer comes together and harmonizes ― as we unite to commune with God ― so our song harmonizes to “make melody to Christ.” Our singing is an icon of our unity.
There is a deeper union here than we realize. Vibrating beneath our own voices is another choir. Indeed, the Book of Revelation describes a choir of 144,000 singing before God’s throne with “a voice from heaven like the sound of many waters [or] the sound of harpers playing on their harps” (Rev 14:2). It is not just our sanctuaries that fill up with the hymns and melodies of worship. The music of the heavenly sanctuary spills over and harmonizes with our own.2
Singing at Mass, then, is not like singing in the shower. Neither is it like singing at a concert. The angels do not harmonize with the opera. When we sing at Mass, though, we sing with the angels. We sing with the saints. And we sing with each other. The Church, the whole Church ― bass to soprano, piano to forte, saints and sinners ― sings together, worships together, communes with God together, “makes melody to Christ” together.
Pliny the Younger, Letters, 10.96.
See Jeremy Driscoll, What Happens at Mass (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2011), 17-18.