Sing your heart out.

If you can't find the words to convey what you feel, it's time to belt out a song, says culture columnist Patrick McCormick. If the occasion is important, there's bound to be a song to help us find our one voice.

I don't know about you, but for me the feel-good movie moment of last summer was the rehearsal-lunch scene in the otherwise lackluster romantic comedy "My Best Friend's Wedding." In the scene, an entire table of guests and relatives break' into a jubilant and nearly giddy version of Burt Bacharach's "I Say a Little Prayer." And before you can ask the way to San Jose, the whole restaurant has joined in on the chorus in a foot-tapping, hand-clapping harmony that sounds like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on a sugar rush.

Even in the darkened theater I wanted to get up on a table and do the chicken dance, wishing it didn't feel quite so silly to clap in an octiplex. Though not as extravagant, my wife and I had a similar experience at our wedding last July. Hoping to set a joyful and inclusive tone to our celebration, we invited the assembled guests to warm up their voices by joining the parish choir in an upbeat rendition of the Dixie Cups' "Going to the Chapel." And while this slightly unorthodox preliturgical overture may not have reached the harmonic heights of the scene in "My Best Friend's Wedding," in some small way that campy little ditty helped transform a mixed congregation of guests and family into a jubilant community that suddenly found a voice for the joy and love they had come to share with us. It also let them know that we had invited them there to celebrate, not just observe, the sacrament of our marriage.

What is there about singing with others that seems to tap into such passions, that brings us so suddenly and immediately into contact with our emotions? Why is it that singing together can evoke such joy or sorrow, or that it can bridge the distance between ourselves and others with such apparent ease? Why is it that children coming home from summer camp seem to bubble over with all the silly songs they learned around the campfire, or that after having listened to these looney tunes a hundred times you suddenly catch yourself humming them in the shower?

Even those of us who don't sing well carry around fragments of childhood songs, Broadway or pop tunes, and half-forgotten hymns inside of us. And there's pleasure being in a strange church and suddenly stumbling on an old familiar hymn whose melody and lyrics have long since worn their way into our heart. Singing does something to connect us to one another.

Shakespeare argued that "music soothes the savage breast." Perhaps, but music, or song, also gives voice to our passions--mournful and joyous. In singing we find a way of saying the things that are behind and between our words. Whether our songs are Christmas carols, love ballads, soulful spirituals, or the hearty marches that send young men off to war, singing does much more than share information or express a point of view.

It allows us to get in touch with and express our mood, color, and tone. And many of us find a voice in singing that is usually reserved for poets. In "Singing Our Lives" (an essay in Practicing Our Faith, Jossey-Bass/San Franciso, 1977) Don Saliers notes that "whatever people can say with passion and in heightened speech they will end up singing in some form. When our language is used to move beyond the mere giving of information, we come to the threshold of singing."

I like the feel of that phrase, "the threshold of singing." It reminds me of tapping feet at the edge of the dance floor, or of children who have just spotted an ice-cream truck. Something very sweet is about to burst open, something impish is getting ready to kick things into a richer, livelier gear--like Dorothy and Toto just about to shift from black and white into Technicolor. On "the threshold of singing" we've reached a place where our words have taken on a bubbling passion that not even a quiver full of exclamation marks can contain, a place where the only punctuation needed comes in allegro, fortissimo, and piano. As the old Quaker hymn noted, we've come to a place where we cannot keep from singing, where our hearts too have found a voice.

While the emotional richness of singing comes from the fact that music is the language of the heart and soul, much of the real pleasure of singing flows from the fact that singing is also body-talk par excellence.

After all, we don't need to listen too attentively to the beat of the songs we sing to hear an echo of our own pulse, the rhythm of our breathing, or the cadence of our footfall. Whether we're talking about the songs of children skipping rope, the rhythmic blues of a road gang laying asphalt under an August sun, or the chanted litanies of a church procession on the solemnity of Corpus Christi, we like music because it has a beat and because it sings out the sounds of our bodies at work and play.

Even more, our songs give voice to the joys and sorrows of our bodies. We can hear the grunts and groans of our aching bodies and broken hearts in spirituals, blues ballads, or melancholy drinking songs, just as we can hear their pleasures and joys in Broadway tunes, campfire songs, and Easter melodies.

"Old Man River" and "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" tell us what it's like to be weary and sick of trying, while Handel's "Messiah," Gershwin's "I Got Plenty of Nothin'," and Disney's "Zippa-deedoodah" remind us what it feels like to have "Mr. Bluebird on my shoulder."

Christians and other religious folks have long known that singing gives us a richer voice, a voice fit for thanksgiving, lamenting, repenting, and praise. Charles V of Spain once argued that Latin was the language for prayer, but in scripture, when people speak to God, they come to the threshold of singing.

As Saliers points out, both early Christian liturgies and the letters of Saint Paul are littered with canticles, psalms, doxologies, and fragments of eucharistic hymns. In fact Luke's gospel barely gets through the second chapter without bursting into song four times.

It's no wonder then that Saint Augustine would argue that the one who sings "prays twice," or that so much of our worship finds its voice in music and song. Theologian and liturgist Julie Upton says our hymns and canticles "bear" and "bare" the mystery of the sacred in ways that words alone cannot. Songs give us a fuller voice for talking about and with God. It's a voice we can feel in our bones, a voice knit of our own pulse and breath, a voice fashioned in the chambers of our hearts, bellies, and lungs.

Whether we are talking about the plainsong of Gregorian chant, the polyphony of a Renaissance Mass, or a choral rendition of "Amazing Grace," religious music expresses an embodied theology, one that we feel and express when singing an old familiar hymn, one that goes beyond the theology of the lyrics.

Maybe this is what Kathleen Norris is saying when in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton Mifflin, 1994) she writes that "I am just now beginning to recognize the truth of my original vision: we go to church in order to sing, and theology is secondary." Embedded in hymns are traces of things that cannot be said--things that are too important to be defined, that point beyond words to mystery.

For myself, I know that on many a morning when I had not made time to sit and pray, to read a passage from scripture or something from a spiritual writer, I have been glad to have the chance to sing a couple verses of "Morning Has Broken," "Amazing Grace," or "For the Fruits of All Creation" while walking or riding to work. The songs I do know give me a way of offering a morning prayer that comes from the heart and of experiencing some fragment of the beauty of the God I praise.

Singing together is a fundamentally human act that celebrates and forges our ties to one another. After all, when we all try to talk at the same time, we sound like the Tower of Babel, but when we sing together, our voices harmonizing with and complementing one another, the baritone, alto, and soprano filling out a lush scale of sounds, we fashion something richer and fuller than most of us (with the possible exception of Bobby McFerrin, Ella Fitzgerald, or Mel Torme) could ever hope to create alone. In singing together we manage momentarily to fashion that harmony that so often eludes us in religion, politics, and economics.

In Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination (William Morrow, 1997), composer and essayist Robert Jordain reports that humans have been relying on music to forge communities for ages. And that the very part of our brain that enables us to create and enjoy music is also the part we use to cooperate with other persons. Some anthropologists even believe we first developed music and song as a means of negotiating differences between competing groups.

Perhaps that's why even today when we gather at wakes and weddings we don't just break bread and lift a glass to old friends but we also raise our voices in song. Look, for example, at the close of films like "Babette's Feast," "It's a Wonderful Life," and even "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." When the characters (human or cartoon) in these stories want to find a common voice to express the communion they are experiencing with one another, they inevitably turn to song. And it's hard to forget the end of A Night to Remember (1958) when Clifton Webb and his son join hundreds of other doomed Titanic passengers and crewmen in a heartbreaking rendition of "Nearer My God to Thee." Like our shared meals, the songs we sing together form bridges between us and fashion something larger out of our various parts.

People in my parents' generation have mentioned from time to time the sense of connection they used to get from the Latin Mass, from knowing that they could enter a Catholic church anywhere in the world and still feel "at home" with the liturgy. My own experience of comfort in strange churches, domestic or foreign, has more often come from the hymnal. Whether on vacation or in transit, being able to join a congregation of strangers in a couple of verses of "0 God Our Help in Ages Past" or "Be Not Afraid" provides a visceral connection, a sense of being "church" with folks I do not know and may not see again.

More than a quick shake of hands or a whispered greeting, singing together is a real sign of peace. After all, people you sing with you also pray with. And in doing so I feel the truth of Norris' assertion that "we go to church to sing." Aside from a chorus of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh-inning stretch or a rushed version of "Happy Birthday" at a franchise restaurant, church is really the only place most of us can go to sing together anymore. Once we're too old for summer camp, it's one of the few places those of us without trained voices can sing something familiar and important.

Half a century ago the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued in Life Together (HarperCollins, 1954) that when we sing in church, "It is not you that sings, it is the church that is singing, and you, as a member ... may share in its song."

In the mid-1980s French archeologists discovered that prehistoric caves with the richest collection of ancient murals were also the ones with the best acoustics for group singing. It suggests that humans have been gathering to offer praise in story, art, and song for a very long time.

We may have come a long way from those singing prehistoric ancestors gathered in their limestone caves, but for the past two millennia Christians have continued to fashion their churches, basilicas, and cathedrals with naves and choirs that hold, echo, and reverberate with the sounds of our songs, psalms, and canticles. And gathering in those places we join in singing a litany that has lasted 2,000 years, without missing a beat.

By Patrick McCormick, an assistant professor of ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.