Real Men Sing
Rocker gets over fear of singing at Mass
By Dan Lord
When I was in Catholic high school I did not sing at Mass. It would have been a major loss of cool points if I had.
“Cool points,” you may recall, were part of a meticulously calibrated social gauge used in the film Sixteen Candles. One strives to acquire large quantities of them, but can easily lose them by any one of a jillion pubescent hazards such as tripping in the hall, asking a teacher a serious question in class, or forgetting to zip up your fly after a trip to the bathroom.
For my friends and I the struggle to acquire and keep cool points was both a serious enterprise and a constant source of hilarity. We even invented an obnoxious noise to signal any perceived instance of cool point loss: a high-pitched modulating alarm derived from the board game “Battleship”. What can I say? It was high school, and we were insecure.
It doesn’t take an honors Calculus student to see how singing at Mass would suck out virtually every cool point a guy had. Therefore, since we had a school Mass every Friday, certain precautions had to be taken, which included a simian shuffle into church and hair-across-the-eyes apathy throughout the liturgy. The hymns which were played received no participation from us whatsoever. Girls sing hymns. Guys with cool points to maintain do no such thing; they stare down at the floor with hands buried in their pockets or scrawny torsos draped like wet noodles over the pews in front of them as if gravity was somehow stronger inside a church than outside. Nobody’s going to make an “I-sunk-your-battleship” sound at this kid!
That sort of attitude doesn’t leave easily, even long after high school. When I got married and came back to my faith at the age of 30, though filled with all kinds of zeal for Christ, I nonetheless found it excruciating to join my fellow Catholics in doing what should be completely natural: singing a song of praise to our God. It is relevant to point out that I had been the lead singer for a nationally touring rock band for years. I was by no means shy of singing in front of other people. But, of course, rock is cool. Hymns are for dweebs.
To be fair, some of the blame can be placed on some lame modern hymns, which I literally can’t sing on account of my gag reflex.
But then there’s Holy God, We Praise Thy Name, Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones, and Come Holy Ghost. These are powerful hymns, really beautiful compositions with lyrics that serve up the kind of rich, solid theology that sticks to your spiritual ribs. There’s no excuse for not singing them con amore, and yet I stood in my pew as soundless as a tin soldier, subconsciously guarding my cool points.
Thankfully, kids came along, and they don’t know a thing about cool points, or even about the finer distinctions between great hymns and mediocre ones. For them, to sing a song to God is as natural as splashing around in a wading pool. Give them the melody and a few lyrics and they will sing it everywhere they go.
You still have to initiate things. There are likely millions of ways to do that — for us it helped to connect a hymn to the rosary. We already had a tradition of reciting a decade of the rosary in the evening; we simply tacked on Immaculate Mary at the end. I challenge you to find a single little child in the world, Catholic, Protestant or pagan, who won’t respond instinctively with pure enthusiasm to Immaculate Mary.
After a while we substituted Salve Regina, and later Come Holy Ghost. Now my kids sing them back to me randomly. Sometimes they won’t shut up. One of my youngest girls still thinks that in the first verse of Immaculate Mary the lyrics are not “Jesus our king” but “Jee-jee sour cream.” So, it’s a work in progress.
The interesting thing is that it has all made its way back around to me. I now catch myself singing Come Holy Ghost at my desk when only my wife is in the room with me. And, no, she doesn’t make fun of me — I don’t think. Anyway, I wouldn’t care if she did — I ditched that dumb cool point system a long time ago, and I am now convinced that singing hymns to God is one of the earthiest, manliest and most natural things a man can do. As long as he does it with some manly gusto, of course.
Dan Lord is a musician who lives in Alabama with his wife and their five children.
