Together Alone

For Wilshire Baptist Church

If you saw the Wilshire worship service online this past Sunday, you saw the Wilshire Winds performing an arrangement of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” in one of those video collages that instrumental and choral groups have been doing around the globe during the pandemic. The first one I saw and still my favorite is the Toronto Symphony Orchestra playing an excerpt from Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.” My favorite moment is at the very end when a percussionist shows up in the collage with giant headphones and a triangle to play one single “ting.”

The Wilshire Winds recording was the first time most of us have participated in something like this, and all credit goes to Shana Gaines for getting us organized and motivated, and Mark McKenzie for blending our individual efforts into a unified piece of music. I’m looking forward to hearing more about that process.

In case you don’t know how these things work, each person played their part alone in their own home or whatever location they chose. They watched and listened to a prior performance of the piece on one device with headphones or earbuds so they could stay in tempo, and they played in front of another device — a smart phone or tablet — that was recording their personal video. Everyone uploaded their finished video to a Dropbox folder and Mark gathered them all, synchronized the audio recordings, and determined who to feature visually as the piece ebbed and flowed with our individual parts.

Talking about it together on a Zoom call after the recordings had been made but before we saw the finished piece, we shared our individual stories of the challenges we faced: finding a suitable location for the sound and visuals of our recordings; playing at a level that didn’t overpower our amateur recording devices; getting through a single take that didn’t have errors; and mostly just getting comfortable with listening, watching, playing and recording all at the same time. Some of us had trouble keeping our recording devices propped up and aimed. A couple of people made a great recording but then discovered they had forgotten to press the record button. But when you see the finished piece, you don’t see those struggles. And thanks to Mark and Shana, we sound pretty good and are mostly in time with each other.

I’d like to think this is what happens when we all pray for someone or something from wherever we are. Our separate, disjointed, pieced-together prayers mingle in the air and somehow combine and fall on the holy ears of a loving creator who shapes our hopes and desires into something good.

So why didn’t we just show a recording of the Winds from a previous Sunday? That certainly could have been done. The video that was used as our time-keeping recording was from Sunday, October 14, 2018, but there were only 15 players in the Winds that morning, and this time we had 27. More important than having more participants was the feeling of playing together while being apart. Aside from any personal issues any of us were going through at the time of the 2018 recording, life was rolling along pretty much as usual. In contrast, behind the scenes of this new recording was the tremendous weight of the pandemic that was keeping us apart. That added to our individual performances a depth of emotion and intensity that you might not be able to hear but we certainly could feel. 

That’s what makes these efforts so compelling and vital for those who are participating and those who are listening. That is why Wilshire is not just replaying old worship services but instead is creating and posting new recordings of music, scriptures, testimonies and sermons. That is why members have been invited to contribute to video collages of waving palms and opening shutters and passing the peace. We are demonstrating to ourselves and each other how we can still be a community even though we are apart. And we are reinforcing how much we desire and need to be together and will not be satisfied with some sort of perpetual online worship experience coming out of this.

While we are making the best of being together alone and alone together, the goal is to be together together as soon as it is safe. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to add our voices and even our little “tings” of sound to the melody of church.