Somewhere during today’s liturgy, please, please find a place for Antoine Oomen’s incredibly joyful “The Deserts Shall Bloom,” (OCP 10284) with a wonderful, evocative, hope-filled text by the late Bernard Huijbers. It’s a unison arrangement that your choir can learn in a New York minute. And the keyboard part is extraordinary.
Yeah, okay, it’s one of my all-time favorites.
“But wait,” you think, “the readings are about healing: ‘the eyes of the blind will be opened,’ and the healing of the blind man, and so forth.” Think again. Those who need healing, whose voices are mute, whose eyes are blind—are they/we not like desert lands in dire need of God’s profligate mercy raining down?
It’s also an opportunity to get your choir to discuss why they’re singing a particular song. Is it just because there are scripture references? Is it just because it’s labeled Ordinary Time or Healing in the hymnal? What ideas can music ministry members draw from your selection?
Such discussions are definitely not a waste of all-too-scant choir rehearsal time. It helps people know what they’re singing, and why they’re singing it, and how the scriptures relate to our daily lives here and now. When they explore these things, they sing more than just the notes—they sing with a living faith that cannot help but nourish thirsty ground.
Is such a discussion something you’d want to do every week? No. But once in a while, it can open the eyes and ears and minds of music ministry members and give them a whole new outlook on familiar scriptures.
M.D. Ridge
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