CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: God can be our director of music with song in us
Once in royal David’s city: the first words of the carol which opens the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Inverness Cathedral tonight at 5.30pm.
Adrian Marple, director of music at the cathedral, describes the impact the carol had on him during a visit to the Holy Land. The group he was part of were visiting the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and sang ‘Once in royal’ together. By the end of it, the whole choir were ‘almost dissolved in tears’ as they realised that ‘this is where it happened!’
Adrian was raised in a Christian family and confirmed as a teenager, but throughout his life various experiences – many of them involving music – have drawn him closer to God.
His uncle was a church organist, and he knew from an early age that he wanted to ‘do something in music’. Before taking early retirement and moving north with his family he was a music teacher and director of music and organist at St Mary’s in Bury St Edmunds.
In Inverness, Adrian is responsible for the cathedral choir, and for selecting the music they sing. He has also started a junior choir for 8-13 year olds, and created four music scholarships for young people.
These children and scholars have little experience of psalms and hymns and church music, or of the liturgy and the physical layout of the cathedral. ‘They’re coming in from the outside,’ Adrian tells me, ‘and everything is new’. They ‘ask questions about different aspects of faith, and it’s exciting for us as Christians to welcome them into that’.
He speaks of the sense of comfort brought by singing the old psalms, three millennia old, songs of questioning and lament, sorrow and hope. As we join our hearts across the centuries with that distant generation we realise that we are not the first to face uncertain times, nor are we the last, and that the hope which rests in God remains.
And he speaks about the gift sacred music gives – it’s a means of expressing awe in the face of the power and grace and greatness of God.
It seems to me that for Adrian music is a language of love through which he expresses his ‘Yes!’ to God and somehow God reciprocates.
Christianity may well seem archaic and irrelevant to us, but if we will only come in from the outside and reflect on the significance of the baby in royal David’s city, we may well discover that everything is new, that we’re given a song to sing, and that as we allow God to be our director of music, the song sings us.
