How Can I Keep From Singing?

Let's face it, you can't keep from singing. In the shower, in the car, while doing the dishes or mowing the lawn--maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but sometime soon you will break into song. It's normal human behavior.

It's also normal but exceedingly rare these days to sing out loud with a group. When do we do this? Two times: at a baseball game and at church. At the ball game we sing the National Anthem (at least a few people do, who aren't afraid of either the low notes or the high notes) and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Maybe some people who have had some beer sing We Will We Will Rock You. But primarily, outside of church, we sing two songs: O Say Can You See and Buy Me Some Peanuts and Crackerjacks.

Oh, and we also sing Happy Birthday.

The point is, we human beings need the outlet of shared song. We like it and we need it. We need to express ourselves together, and we need to share stories; that is is part of being human. But not since Motown was big has the whole American culture sung the same thing (though Dancin' in the Streets has been covered a zillion times) and ever since the Beatles went Krishna our music has been privatized, spiritualized, aestheticized and sanitized, till privatization has now possibly reached its limit extreme, in which subway cars full of pod people listen to personal digital playlists on their white earphones.

We never sing our songs together. Music-as-isolation--what an irony and a loss! So, when we go to church and sing together, we keep trying to sing our songs. OUR songs. Not songs for or about God, but the songs about life and the living of it, about memories and tragedies and heroes. We're starved for our epic poems so we sing them out of place, and they distract us from the reason for our participation in the church service, which is not supposed to be full of ourselves, but of God.

These songs are good, but they are out of place at Mass. They are the songs we should be singing in the carpool. In the pub. At the stadium. At home, after dinner. Together.