I'd sit in the quad, and think, "Oh my God..."

Two Ole Choir home concerts digitized, one to go...followed by some Christmas Festivals. Gotta dig up some concert programs, to make those ID3 tags...

I do miss being in choir. My years in the St. Olaf choirs were some of the happiest in my life. I made a few good friends -- not many, but that was more because I was (still am) kind of an introvert than any other reason. The people in choir were almost all easily approachable and friendly...and we were all working together for that common goal.

One year, before one night of the Christmas Festival, I signed up to do devotions before the performance. (We did devotions before every performance...sometimes silent reflection, more often one or two choir members giving food for thought. One memorable one from that same year brought up the idea of God as a verb.)

I took as my inspiration something a choir member said during the PBS broadcast of the 1989 St. Olaf Christmas Festival. He was talking about the Randall Thompson composition "Alleluia", and he discussed how Dr. Kenneth Jennings (then-director of the choir) described it to them.

The text of Thompson's Alleluia is simply the word, alleluia, over and over again until a final "amen." Dr. Jennings told the choir to think of "alleluia" as an endless river of praise to God, and to sing the Alleluia is to dip into that river for a short moment of time.

I extended the metaphor to mean the St. Olaf Choir itself. Begun almost a century ago as a church choir, nowadays the choir is made up solely of students of St. Olaf College, and thus is renewed completely every three years. During our time in the choir, be it one, two, or three years, we join in a mighty river of singing -- of praise, and of beautiful music. Upon graduating, we leave that river behind us, knowing that it will continue flowing far past the point where we depart, and we will never touch upon it in the exact same way again.

What I wouldn't give to be part of that once more...