One of the things I often hear people appreciate about St. Stephen’s is our broad and beautiful range of sacred music. We have a gifted Director of Music, Grace Sung, who makes intentional choices alongside our clergy about how we will sing of God together – from ancient psalm tones to hymns written with fresh lyrics that proclaim “blessed be the holy other whose sacred worth we know, who teach us where and when and how God’s telling us to go”. We know that what/how we sing says something about what/how we relate to God and one another, worthy of our care. What does our music say about who belongs here and what we value?
We draw from a diverse well that is both reflective of our own ever-broadening people and drawn toward people beyond us. This past Sunday we sang “I want to Walk as a Child of the Light” which was composed through the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer right here in Houston and we learned to sing of the light of God in Zulu and the Gloria in Spanish. In another season you might hear the Kyrie in Korean, or a Hebrew blessing, or “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, gifts of beauty and struggle that we may or may not connect to with the same familiarity or shared lived experience.
Growing up in this city, I learned to sing “You Have Come Down to the Lakeshore” most often in its original language as “Tú has Venido a la Orilla”. I sometimes wondered to myself why my mostly white home congregation would sing this way. Was it good and right and salutary for us to sing a song that didn’t feel like “ours” with accents and rhythm that I’m sure paled to its originating culture? But when I started spending more time in communities different from mine, those experiences gave me an even-imperfect literacy of worship that opened up greater connections locally and around the world. It also confronted me with a realization that the “us” of my home wasn’t as monolithic as I imagined and for some of my neighbors in the pews and hallways, this song was spiritual home.
In his book, “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” James Cone writes about how critically black art in music has been a vessel of life and death from Tupac’s “Black Jesuz” to the spirituals of the enslaved like “The Welcome Table”, which we’ll sing this Sunday. (You can actually find a great write up from the Diocese about its history and meaning here. Cone is exasperated that the churches run by white America could read this same Bible and be exposed to this particularly black expression of faith and still miss the connection to the Gospel and each other’s lived reality.
That seems harder to change if our sacred stories in music are kept in their separate corners or the fear of singing it “wrong” and causing harm keeps us altogether silent. Even if our individual pronunciation is off or we have more to learn about the stories behind the songs, I am grateful for a community that wants to point to the goodness of God this way and gifted singers who help us learn and grow in our expression of faith.
-The Reverend Ashley Dellagiacoma, Associate Rector
