Fellowship history · The funeral

The room we play softest of all.

Of all the rooms the venue-less years gave us, this is the one we are slowest to talk about, and the most careful with when we do, because a funeral is not a room you play so much as a room you are quiet in, with instruments in your hands. It was still the early years, before we had a place of our own, when a family from the Wednesday study lost their father and asked, through Pastor Connie, whether we might play something soft at the service — nothing grand, they said, just something to sit under. We said yes the way you say yes to that kind of asking, which is quickly, and without a single question about the room. There was no stage, of course; there never was in those years. There was a funeral home chapel with a low ceiling and a box of tissues at the end of every pew, a family in the front row holding onto one another, and the four of us at the very back, where we had asked to be put, because the back is where you belong when the grief in a room is not your own. We played one hymn, and we played it slower and quieter than we have ever played anything, so quiet that Brother Wesley lifted his hands off the keys for whole measures and let Pastor Connie carry it alone, the way you hum to someone you love who has finally cried themselves toward sleep. We did not play during the eulogy. We did not play into the silences. We learned that afternoon the hardest and gentlest lesson this fellowship knows: that worship pitched soft enough to sit beside grief is not a smaller thing than worship that fills a stadium — it is a larger thing, and a harder one, and we have never been prouder of any room we played than that one, where the point was never to be heard, only to be a little company for people having the worst day of their lives, and then to give them their quiet back.

• ✚Softer than the grief — We set the volume the way we learned to in the hospital lobby, only softer still: never so loud that a person's own weeping could not be heard over it, because in that room their weeping was the truer worship and ours was only there to keep it company. A hymn at a funeral should sit under the grief the way a hand sits under an elbow — steadying, and never once pulling attention to itself.
• ✚The fifteen unhurried minutes before — We came early, the way we always do, and found again that the truest part was before the service began: setting up without a sound, sitting a while with the family, saying little, mostly just being in the room so that when the hard part came they were not among strangers. The worship had already begun by then. At a funeral it nearly always has, long before anyone plays a note.
• ✚Know when not to play — The hardest thing we did that afternoon was the playing we did not do. We did not play during the eulogy. We did not play into the silences, though every instinct a musician has is to fill a silence, and we sat on our hands and let those silences run as long as the family needed them to. We have come to believe that a fellowship which only knows how to make noise has not yet learned the better half of its trade.
• ✚It is not our grief to perform — We stood at the back because the grief in that chapel belonged to the family in the front row, and we were only there to carry a little of its weight in the one way we knew how. We took no payment, of course, and we did not linger afterward or ask to be thanked. You do not make a funeral about the band. You play your one soft hymn, you fold your chairs, and you go.
• ✚Leave the room a shade calmer — This is the vow we carried out of that chapel and have kept in every room since, but we learned it there in its truest form: leave a room the way you found it, or a shade calmer than you found it. We do not know what that afternoon was worth to the people in it. We decided, on the long quiet drive home in the minivan, that it was not ours to measure — only ours to have offered, softly, and then to have left.

The tenderest of the venue-less years' rooms, and the one we tell most rarely, always quietly, usually only when someone asks. Fellowship in song since 2007. If a room of grief will have you, go — softly, and bring a folding chair for whoever needs to sit down.