If you were paying attention during the Eucharist on Sunday, or were here for Ash Wednesday, you probably noticed one striking difference from all the other Sunday Eucharists we’ve had here: I chanted (i.e., sang) the Collect of the Day and a large part of the Eucharistic Prayer! In keeping with the theme of my last few newsletter pieces (“Weird stuff in Lent and why we’re doing it”) I thought I’d say a bit today about chanted prayers: what they are, why we do them, and what they say about the very nature of prayer itself.

When I was meeting with some of our kids to learn about Communion on Sunday after the service, I told them that for almost everything in church, there’s a spiritual, churchy reason and a good, solid, practical reason. So, for example, the richly-decorated veil that covers the chalice until the priest sets the table for the Eucharistic Prayer symbolizes the glory and mystery of the Sacrament, whose inner nature is withheld from our sight until Christ reveals himself in the breaking of the bread; also, it keeps flies from getting into the wine. (And so on.)

Chanted prayers are common around the world: think of the muezzin’s call to prayer or the chanted Torah readings in a synagogue. They share a common and prosaic origin with our chanted Eucharistic prayers: in a world without microphones, it’s much easier to hear someone who’s singing than someone who’s speaking at a normal volume! In ancient and medieval Christian churches, large parts of the service would have been sung, with varying levels of complexity: from the Epistle sung in a simple monotone, to the elaborate chanted settings of various parts of the Mass. In the medieval Western European churches, in fact, the service essentially alternated between chanted prayers and virtually-inaudible prayers spoken or even whispered by the priest, standing and facing the altar with the people—which is to say, standing with his back to the people, making his words even harder to hear.

In a small space like ours, it’s easy to project and be heard. But sung prayers do change the sense of the service somehow. They can create a more solemn feeling, or a more festive one; the music colors the text and adds another layer of meaning and feeling. And more than anything, singing forces us to slow down, literally to focus on our breath and on our words. It’s easy to rush or stumble through a spoken prayer in distraction. It’s harder to rush through a chant, and—in fact—your body will warn you very quickly if you try to cram too much into a single breath! Modulating the speed of our prayer through this focus on breath can be one of the most spiritually-enriching changes to prayer; and I say “spiritually” quite intentionally, as the words “spiritual” and “Spirit” and “spirituality” all come from the Latin word spiritus, “breath.”

In a modern world of written words, many of us are used to thinking silently inside our heads. But the silence of our own minds can be an ironically-noisy place. Our silent thoughts and silent prayers can move at the speed of light, richocheting around the insides of our skulls and raising a whole cacophony of distractions and anxieties. It’s why it’s often so helpful to talk something out with a friend or therapist or priest; not because their advice or input is any good (it’s sometimes not), but because speaking out loud forces us to organize our thoughts into something more linear than silent thought often is. And because chant requires such attention to our breath, it forces us to slow down and organize ourselves even more, as the Spirit of God flows into our lungs and then out into our prayer.

So, anyway: if you hate the chanted Eucharistic prayer, don’t worry; like all things in liturgical life, this will rotate on and off. If you love it, take heart! And ask yourself (maybe out loud! maybe in song!) how it’s drawing you closer to God.