love letter to my church choir

St. Leo’s Choir, I love you. It’s time I told you. I carry you with me everywhere. Yesterday, I thought I heard you singing in a parking garage downtown: “WALK in the LIGHT/ the beaut-ti-ful LIGHT/come where the dew-drops, of MER-cy shine BRI-IGHT/oh—ohh—oh--” It was all I could do not to clap my hands and shout out loud as I walked to my car. Maybe I even did. I get like that when I think about you.

St. Leo’s Choir, you make our church into an honest-to-God Place. You take our beat-up, divided-up souls and sing them back together. You put me right with God and the world each and every week. God and I are very grateful to you. I am not kidding. St. Leo’s Choir, you stop looking at me like that. I mean it.

I’m always wanting to give you something, but I never know what. You sing like you have everything. I hear you reaching down past places of pain, of grief, of hope, of disappointment. I hear the loud, defiant, transformation when you exhale and the sound is joy, the sound is unbroken life, the sound is Jesus, and the sound is moving fast and it is moving outward and it catches me up in its unhesitating embrace.

St. Leo’s Choir, do know about Qawwali Sufi rituals in Pakistan? There is no reason why you should, except for this: When the devotees are particularly moved by the music and the words of the sung mystical poetry, they express their gratitude to the musicians by showering them with paper money. You should see the faces of those business-suited men as they throw their money into the air and let it rain down on the heads of the musicians in a show of joy and gratitude and release. They look ecstatic. Because they are. Ecstatic. Like me. They are in a place of oneness, of no-separation and the musicians are the ones who got them there.

Here is a secret, St. Leo’s Choir. Every week, when I am at Mass, and you are singing, my heart goes on overload and my soul leaves my body. A transparent version of me floats right up toward the front of the church, right up to the keyboard and the guitar and the microphones. In each hand, my transparent soul-self carries a large, fanned-out stack of dollar bills. I don’t know where she gets all that money. She is smiling. The transparent me looks you in the eye, and as the verse ends and the bring-it-on-home chorus comes around again, but louder, those dollar bills fly up over your heads and flutter down around you like a thousand legally-tendered thank you notes.

Blessings on your heads, St. Leo’s Choir. Blessings on your throats, blessings on your hearts, blessings on your joyful noise. Now you know.