Finding Joy in Making Music Together

During this time of quarantine, I have been watching lots of videos of families doing some crazy things together. I am loving it! This is one of the good things about this difficult time. I was talking on the phone with one of my daughters the other day and we were saying that if our family still lived together (my kids are all grown and moved out), we would definitely be doing some kind of singing and dancing thing right now. This was part of growing up in our house. We still insist on singing together when we gather for Christmas.

Singing together, which means being responsible for the singing, is different than listening to music on the radio – or on Facebook Live as we attend Mass remotely as best we can. We can hear the beautiful singing of the cantor, and we can sing along, we can even try our best to imagine that everyone else is singing, but it just isn’t the same as making our own heartfelt, imperfect music together.

I imagine many families are finding ways to do some things together, and doing so in goofy ways! What’s nice is that with your family you can be less concerned with image. If you haven’t tried, it, I encourage you to sing, dance, and act silly together. If you aren’t accomplished musicians, that’s OK. You have permission to play some music and sing and dance along. Then when the day comes that we can return to worship together, the singing should be really glorious after all that practice! Our worshipping community is really our big family, right? We can sing to our hearts’ content – no one will mind.

I was saying to someone recently, that I hope we don’t go “back to normal.” If we come out on the other side of this painful period unchanged, then shame on us. Let us use this time of distancing to reflect on what it means to be a community praying – and singing – together.