Stringy Bliss by Rachel, member of Second Unitarian Choir and Band (for more of Rachel’s musings go to her blog, riding the pale cow)

I like choir. 

It began early today. In my murky pre-coffee haze, I stumbled into Intelligenstia and ordered a large cup of pure bliss, which appears as a latte on their menu. Even contact with the caffeine-riddled air had begun to perk me up. As I stood patiently by the counter, listening to the hiss and rattle of the baristas doing their espresso dance, I heard another more familiar dulcet tone. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was being warbled out over the speakers. Instinctively, I began to sing with it under my breath. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until a few glances my way clued me in that I was not being a proper, patient, placated patron. They weren’t threatening, so I ignored them. My large cup of pure liquid joy, topped with a beautifully marbled froth, was slid across the counter. As I walked over to the bar to get my requisite extra jolt of raw sugar and a cover, the song ended, and soon “Cecilia” was running. She was breakin’ my heart, but my confidence seemed to be intact, despite all the shakin’. I grabbed the raw sugar, and, being the obsessive that I am, carefully poured it in a ring around the marbled latte design, taking a moment to take in the beauty before I wrecked it all. This maneuver was accomplished while shaking my hips to the tambourine smacked beat of a song for a woman who had obviously cast a spell on these men. I capped my bitter foamed delight and sashayed out of the store, by that point overcome by the music and singing along outright.

Now to be clear, I have no clear vision of God. I am quite certain it is not some fellow with a flowing beard perched up above us, ready to smite at a moment’s notice. I am quite certain God would have a better sense of humor when someone made a golden bovine statue to honor him, and would have just laughed bemusedly like a parent of a toddler, patted them on the head encouragingly, and said “Well, honey, it’s not quite correct, but I really do applaud you for your attempt.” I do know that I am fairly certain there is some force out there larger than we mere humans, and lacking better language, I’ll just call it God. It’s far more convenient when writing about musings on it.

I have been reading Eat, Pray, Love, and fortunately not a copy endorsed by Oprah. While she may have excellent choice in books for her “book club,” I still find it disturbing that there are legions of people out there who are only reading books because an influential celebrity has told them so, not because they are out there exploring bookstores, fondling spines, poring over summaries, and discovering the beauty of books for themselves. But I digress. At some point during her “Pray” phase in India, the author describes at great length the feelings she got when she finally hit full blown meditation. (And, for the record, I am borrowing her idea of God as a force out there, and in our particular vernacular, “God” is the best term to use.) In my best swift interpretation, it is that she was hit by a sensation unlike any she has ever experienced, and it was surrounded by bliss and a brief disconnection from her own self for that moment. I apologize to the author if I have bastardized her explanation, because I am trying to summarize pages of experience into a few sentences. And today, it occurred to me that this whole music and choir thing for my Unitarian church has been bringing me to the edge of these sensations. The energy that wells up during a choir rehearsal, and especially during a service, is sweeping and overwhelming.

It started early today. I danced with my coffee. I twirled. I laughed as I sang the first song, all of us tentatively strutting down the aisle (we have mastered the art of clapping, but marching down the aisle swaying to a South African hymn’s beat… needs a little work.) The congregation as a whole busted out (of course… “busted out” being relative… it came right when it was supposed to as printed in the order of worship) with a rousing tambourine smacker “Spirit Says Do,” which inevitably got us bouncing and swinging. At least, the choir was having a grand ol’ time. We sit in the front row, so I had no clear view of the rest of the congregation. The song ended, and we all sat down, and I realized my entire body was buzzing. My heart was racing. I thought it might have been my dark decadent coffee goodness finally kicking in, but a large latte, sad as it may sound, would not have that kind of effect. It just makes sure I know how to form complete sentences. The energy from singing is what had me vibrating. And it got me pondering music and its role in many a spiritual quest.

The Rev had been preaching on love, but in the opening of her sermon she had been talking about what brought people there in the first place, and they all involved searching in one way or another, but one she did not mention, because of course, we are Unitarians (and some might get twitchy about this,) is people searching for God. Now it’s true, if you are searching for the big smiter in the sky, you might be better off at a Catholic church or something, but if you are searching for a spiritual path that you can only vocalize through that loaded word of “God,” we might be the place for you. I struggle daily, trying to take lessons of spirituality from every spare tidbit I hear from public radio to the back of prettily packaged organic shampoo to try and pull myself together long enough to make it through the day, but I noticed that when we hit that singing groove as a choir, when we hit that energy, I start to vibrate. I hit that brief disconnect of bliss for a split second, and then it’s gone. And that’s enough, it makes me happy, and it’s a start.

But today I started thinking of it in the larger whole. It started with little thoughts, like the string of music through Christian religions, and how important hymns seem to be in the grand scheme of worship. How people seem to revel in the harmonies of a choir, and how a perfect vocal chord can echo through a hall, carrying rousing energy or calming hushes to the throngs willing to hear it. Take it further… the Gregorian chants of medieval times, a way of honoring God (this time definitely the smiting one,) Jewish prayer, which is primarily sung, Buddhist monks chanting to transport the mind to meditation, another concept of communing with the Universe as a whole, Sufi whirling (the dervishes of much renown,) an attempt to become “perfect,” a person symbolizing themselves as a part of the cosmos as a whole, some even feeling that Allah is overpowering them. I could go on forever. It matters not the religion, you will find a musical thread, and virtually always related to prayer, some way of finding that connection to something deeper, something more, which, for the sake of my argument here, we will call God.

Sitting in service, my body still humming, pondering the harmonies we had hit, I drew another connection. Now, to be clear, I have a BA in theatre and and MFA in digital art, so when I start whipping out the physics, it is only with what limited capability I have to understand it. I just love it dearly, so I keep trying to understand it. One of my favorite areas of physics is quantum physics, and one of the newest theories of physics, which I think might even be an evolution beyond quantum, is string theory. In classical physics, they determined the smallest particle is an electron, part of an atom, and electrons, protons, and neutrons are what create the Universe. Enter the 20th century and a bunch of feisty physicists aiming to prove Einstein and his new theories wrong. Voila quantum physics (this, of course, being my oversimplified statement of it.) Suddenly electrons weren’t the smallest things. These strange things called quarks apparently exist, are even smaller, and it turns out they make up all matter. Thing is, we can’t see them, but mathematically, they make sense. A friend’s father, who actually is a physicist, said quantum physics was easy. It was a leap of faith. You believe in it or you don’t. I believe. And then… then came string theory. Which is an idea that the universe is not really made of atoms or quarks at its base, but an unfathomable number of strings, all vibrating in this harmony to create, well, everything.

And somewhere some overexcited neuron in my brain fired a warning shot over the bow of my frontal lobe, signaling the giant stretches of logic that were about to take place in my mind. Music can be seen as a part of a universal human experience in searching for the divine, whatever you are wishing the divine to be. Music tends to make harmonies that buzz through and rattle all the various fibers of your being, particularly if you are listening to or creating music with a spiritual search in mind. Those fibers of your being could very well be those same vibrating strings that string theorists think vibrate in harmony to create all matter. So those harmonizing vibrations that we can hear audibly in music really are part of the larger structure of our universe as a whole, and since all of the theory behind this is a leap of faith and spirituality tends to be a constant questioning of faith, this perception of mine, this feeble meandering of an overexcited mind, fresh from bouncing to the music, might actually have come across, well, pardon the pun, but a thread of an idea worth exploring further.

No wonder I like choir.