Thursday • 6/29/2023

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. 

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago.  

They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.  

“Redemption Songs: Plainsong Style”
 

As the credits roll in the movie I Am Legend, Bob Marley sings:  

Won’t you help to sing  
These songs of freedom? 
‘Cause all I ever have:  
Redemption songs, 
Redemption songs, 
Redemption songs.  

An artful choice. Marley’s reggae music provides the movie’s central character, Robert Neville (played by Will Smith) a slender line of hope. He’s reluctant to believe that in his post-apocalyptic world there’s a God with a plan, reluctant to believe even that any other non-zombie humans exist. Marley’s voice from a healthier world helps him fend off despair. 

Many of us know what it is to feel cut off — to have no sense that there’s a master plan. The driver from hell nearly runs you off the road. Cash flow is negative. A relationship unravels. Evil reigns in the world, good is thwarted at every turn. And you go: “Am I left alone?”

Will Smith had Bob Marley’s reggae. I have the book of Psalms — and I have them in the ancient church’s plainsong.  

The Psalms invite me to tell God’s people’s story as my own: Give thanks to the Lord …; make known his deeds among the peoples (Ps 105:1). Warnings made to others become warnings I send to my own unbelieving heart: … they did not wait for his counsel (Ps 106:13). Betrayals of David, then of my Redeemer, and now, to my astonishment, of me — I find I share — I mean really share — by virtue of taking David’s and Jesus’ words as my very own: Even my best friend, whom I trusted, … has turned against me (Ps 41:9). Promises made to others, I take for myself — Taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps 34:8) — as though they were intended for me in the first place. Wisdom aimed at people three millennia ago I sing as though I had thought it up myself: … my feet had nearly slipped … because I envied the proud (Ps 73:2a,3a).  

The power lies not just in the Psalms’ words, though. It lies also in their music. “He who reads the Torah without chant, of him can it be said as it is written, ‘the laws that I gave you were not good,’” says the Mishnah’s Rabbi Johanan. How much more true of the psalms. Ancient Israel chanted the psalms. The ancient church chanted them as well. “A soul rightly ordered by chanting the sacred words forgets its own afflictions and contemplates with joy the things of Christ alone,” maintained Athanasius of Alexandria in the 4th century. 

Fact is, when truth becomes song, you know it at a deeper level.  

I have began chanting psalms in my daily devotions. I’m do so using the eight ancient plainsong chant tones that have their origins in the Gregorian musical revolution of the middle of the 1st millennium, as recovered and restored in the late 19th century. James Litton has adapted them for church and individual singing in his handsome volume, The Plainsong Psalter (Church Publishing Inc., 1988; ISBN: 978-0809691627 — hardback, quarto-sized, $40).  

A couple of friends on the other side of the country have bonded with me in an arrangement of spirit. We’re simply following the course laid out in the Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer (which serves as the text base for The Plainsong Psalter). It takes seven weeks to chant through the psalms, a pace of about three psalms per day. It’s a tempo that works for me. 

The great thing about chant is that you don’t have to force the text into an artificial meter. Chanting allows the text to take its own meter and rhythm. In a given line, singers stay on a chanting tone all the way up to the last note (or two or three) of a phrase.  

The plainsong music is lovely. Tone 1 is the basis for the tune most of us know as “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” And if you’ve admired Allegri’s Miserere, you’ll recognize Tone 2 to be the cantor’s melody.   

In the early hours of the morning I enjoy the fellowship across 1500 years or so with folks who have shared these psalms in similar fashion. I love the bold aspiration of the original Gregorians: to create a music that all believers could sing and that was trying to be indigenously Christian, but that was in positive dialogue with the best music theory of its day. 

In this world that is beyond crazy I enjoy having my “soul rightly ordered” as I sing redemption songs, plainsong-style. 

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+