Praying in Song

I have a confession to make:

We do not pray at home, as a family, with any regularity. 

There, I said it. 

We don’t usually say grace at meals and we don’t pray with our son at bedtime. I feel enough guilt about this, worrying if we are somehow neglecting our son’s spiritual upbringing, that I can’t bear to talk about it.

{friendly conversation in the Parish Hall}
“So what is your favorite family prayer?”
“Er, um, well. … Look! Is that the verger?”
“The ver….what? We don’t even have a verger.”
“Oh, I’m sorry what were you saying? I’m going to go get some more coffee.”

Although it’s not like we haven’t tried: prayers before meals, at bedtime, lighting the Advent wreath candles. Fail. 

And it’s ironic because one of the things I truly love about the Episcopal liturgy is the comforting structure—and yes—the predictability of the prayers, but it seems our life at home isn’t amenable to the same.

I had all but given up until recently, when I heard our “type A” priest give a talk in which he mentioned his own struggles with always wanting to do something “the right way,” and I remembered a conversation he and I had years ago about options for my own personal prayer practice.

Then it hit me: we do pray at home! All. The. Time. 

We sing. 

The other thing I love about the liturgy is the rich and beautiful music and our son has always been enthralled with the hymns and service music since he was very young. We have a video of him singing “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord” while banging on a pretend piano made out of cardboard blocks in nothing but a diaper. (It sounds more like “Ho-yee, Ho-yee, Ho-yee!” and is liable to make you cry from laughing.)

Last year spent a long weekend on the Chesapeake Bay with some friends and were walking back from the beach one afternoon when a bagpiper walked out onto boardwalk by the dunes and started to play a tune. My son’s ears perked up and we paused to listen to her. He said, “I know this song…” and started to hum along searching for it in his memory. “We know this song, don’t we mama? What are the words?” I recognized it too and we started to piece it together on the way back to our cabin. She was playing Nettleton, the music associated with Come thou font of every blessing. We looked up the words on my phone and spent the rest of the afternoon memorizing the words. He can’t have encountered it more than a few times in his life before that day.

At 6, he has favorite hymns and songs that will rise up inside him and will stay with him for days, or even weeks. He’ll hum Jesus Christ is risen today or Hail thee, festival day! while he’s playing Legos or he’ll ask me to find videos of various hymns on YouTube. 

When his favorites show up in the liturgy at church, he gets really excited. We had a double whammy recently: Come thou font of every blessingone week, followed by O for a thousand tongues to sing the next. He was so happy he wrote about it at school.

His inquisitiveness about the songs has shown us that it isn’t just about the melodies (setting aside his somewhat excessive love of Christmas music). “What are fetters? Why are there one thousand tongues? Who is the dear Redeemer?” 

Now, the internet is not in agreement on whether it was Saint Augustine, Winston Churchill, or Albert Einstein who said “to sing is to pray twice,” but I first heard that quote from our priest and I don’t know why it took me so long to put the pieces together.

Singing is how our son is learning to be in relationship and conversation with God and our faith.

The tunes may get “stuck” in his head; the words are inscribed in his heart. It turns out he has been praying in song since he could string words together and through our support and participation, we have been praying along with him this whole time.