The evening of Friday, November 10 opened a rich and joyous weekend of learning, singing, and worshipping at our first Civitas-hosted event, the Theopolis Institute Regional Course “How to Sing the Psalms.”
Paul Buckley and Brian Moats led us in chanting numerous Psalms and in four services to mark the times of day, Vespers (Friday evening), Matins (Saturday morning), Sext (Saturday noon), and Vespers again (Saturday evening).
Between services we delved into the hows and whys of Psalm chanting, as Paul encouraged us to view chant as a vehicle for embodying and inhabiting God's very words—as opposed to a metrical adaptation of them—and allowing those words to embody and inhabit us.
For the more we chant the Psalms, the more we memorize the Psalms, and the more those Psalms shape the way we think, speak, and act. Singing the Psalms will, through the power of the Holy Spirit, renew our minds and refashion us into the image of Christ, who is the Word himself.
We don't need to say that chanting Psalms is the only or best kind of singing to do in worship. We don't need to denigrate or dismiss hymns and metrical Psalms. But we can agree that chanting Psalms is a very good thing to do, if only we knew how.
It turns out that although chant may strike our modern musical ears as alien and difficult, it's actually easy to learn—and once we grasp the principles, chants can be much simpler to sing than hymns. Many at the event agreed that even the unfamiliar musical style grew on them.
The best part, of course, was being able to sing text after text of unmodified Scripture.
Aside from lots of practice chanting the Psalms, Paul and Brian gave us vision and practical ideas for incorporating Psalm chanting into our lives. Psalms—particularly if we know them by heart—can be our companion in times of joy and agony, in times of praise and frustration. We can teach them via call-and-response to young children and sing them over the dying. We can chant them as the outpouring of our hearts on our own behalf or, if we aren’t experiencing the emotion or situation described in the Psalm, in sympathy with others who are.
The event was exhilarating and refreshing. Speaking from my own experience (which it seems many shared), I came away with a renewed delight in the Psalms, new tools for singing them, and the powerful experience of having sung so many of them in community and worship. I ended the weekend with my experience broadened, my affections expanded, and this question on my lips: “How can I keep chanting Psalms after the event is over?”
Curious to hear what the chanting sounded like? We made an impromptu recording of Psalm 103 at the end of the event on Saturday.