The Pastor’s Wife Took My Choir After 31 Years Because My Hymns Were “Dated.” On Christmas Eve, Her Own Grandmother Stood Up And Sang Every Word

I directed the choir at Westmoor Methodist for thirty-one years, and I found out I was finished from a slide.

It was the second Sunday of October. Our new pastor, Zander Swope, had been with us since June. He was thirty-four, earnest, with a soft voice and a habit of saying “Amen to that” when he agreed with you, which was most of the time. His wife, Taryn, was thirty-one. She had come from a big church outside Phoenix where she ran something called “Worship Experience,” and from her first week here she wore a little headset microphone even when she was only making announcements about the potluck.

After the late service, the council stayed for a “Vision Lunch” in the fellowship hall. I was invited because I always am. Somebody has to tell them which Sundays the choir is off.

Taryn stood by a rolling cart with a projector on it. The first slide said OUR NEXT CHAPTER. The second slide had a photograph of one of our red hymnals with a big red X drawn across it. Underneath, in a curly font, it said RETIRE THE DATED.

A few people chuckled. I did not, because I recognized the hymnal. It was a picture of number 230, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” I could tell by the coffee ring on the corner. That was my copy. She had taken it off my music stand to photograph it.

“Nobody under fifty is walking into a church because of a pipe organ and a song from 1868,” Taryn said. “I’m not saying the old stuff is bad. I’m saying it’s a museum. And people don’t go to museums every week.”

Vester Trimble, our organist, who is seventy-four and has played that pipe organ since 1979, put his fork down very carefully, the way you set down something you might otherwise throw.

“So what are we saying?” he asked.

“We’re saying the nine-thirty and the eleven both move to the worship team model starting in Advent,” she said. “Band, tracks, screens. We’ll keep the organ for funerals.”

“And the choir?” I asked.

She smiled at me. She had very white teeth and she used them a lot. “Vivienne, I want to talk to you about that privately. I have so much respect for you.”

That is the sentence they say right before.

Hook Number Nine

She talked to me privately on Wednesday night, after rehearsal, in the choir room.

The choir room at Westmoor is not much. It’s a long room behind the sanctuary with a radiator that knocks, a battered upright piano, and a wall of wooden cubbies where everyone keeps their folders. Along the back wall there’s a row of brass hooks for the robes. Hook number nine still has my husband’s robe on it. Webb sang bass in that choir for twenty-two years, and when he died in 2019 nobody moved it, and I never asked them to. The sleeve is a little faded where the sun hits it from the window.

I had just finished putting the folders away. We had been working on the Christmas Eve music since September, the way we always do. Fourteen of us that year. The youngest was fifty-eight.

Taryn came in without knocking and sat on the piano bench.

“So,” she said. “First, I want to say thank you.”

She handed me an envelope. Inside was a certificate printed on heavy cream paper that said LEGACY VOLUNTEER, with my name spelled right, which I’ll give her, and a twenty-five dollar gift card to a craft store.

“We’re not going to need a choir director going forward,” she said. “Our worship leader, Tavish, is going to handle all the music. He’s amazing. You’ll love him.”

I said, “The choir is fourteen people who have sung together for decades.”

“And they are so welcome to worship with us,” she said. “From the congregation. Honestly, Vivienne, I think it’ll be freeing for them. Nobody wants to be standing up front in a polyester robe when they could just be present.”

“They want to,” I said. “That’s why they show up on Wednesdays.”

She tilted her head. “I hear that. But we have to think about who we’re reaching. The hymns are dated. The robes are dated.” She glanced at the back wall. “We’re going to turn this into a green room for the band. So if people could clear out their cubbies by the first of December, that’d be awesome.”

I looked at hook number nine.

“There’s one robe back there that nobody’s going to clear out,” I said. “It belonged to my husband.”

“Oh.” She had the decency to look a little sorry. “Of course. Take all the time you need. Like, before December.”

After she left I sat on the piano bench she had warmed and played the first line of number 230 with one finger. O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie. Webb used to say the bass line of that hymn sounds like somebody walking home in the snow.

I did not cry in the choir room. I drove home and cried in my car in my own driveway, with the engine running, for about as long as it takes the heater to warm up. Then I went inside and called Sukie.

Fourteen Folders in a Grocery Bag

Sukie Weatherly is sixty-nine and has sung second soprano beside me since 1997. When I told her, she said a word I will not print, and then she said, “Well. What are we going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s their church.”

“It’s our church,” Sukie said. “They’ve been here five months. I was baptized in that font in 1957.”

I told her we were not going to start a war. I have seen church wars. Nobody wins them. The only thing that happens is that a few more people stop coming, and they never tell you why.

But I’ll admit I thought about it. I lay in bed and thought about all the things I could say at the next council meeting. I thought about writing a letter to the district superintendent. I thought about the fact that we had a Christmas Eve candlelight service every year at eleven o’clock, and that for thirty-one years the choir had sung the third verse of “Silent Night” alone, with every light in the building off except the candles. People drove in from three counties for that verse. Some of them only came to church that one night a year, and they came for that.

Now there would be a band, and a track, and a screen with the words on it in case anybody had forgotten “Silent Night.”

On the first of December I went in with a grocery bag and cleared out the cubbies myself, so nobody else would have to. Fourteen folders. Webb’s robe went over my arm. Vester was in the sanctuary, practicing for a funeral on Thursday, and he stopped playing when I walked past.

“You know she’s not a bad girl,” he said.

“I know,” I said. That was the worst part. She wasn’t. She just thought old things were finished.

“You know what I keep thinking?” Vester said. “Every one of those dated hymns was brand new once. Somebody had to like it first.”

The Woman by the Window at Sweetgum House

Here is a thing I knew that Taryn didn’t know I knew.

In October, right around the time of the slide, Taryn and Zander had moved her grandmother up from Kansas to Sweetgum House, the assisted living place on Route 9. Her name was Wilda Vantreese and she was ninety-one. Taryn had told the whole congregation about it during prayer requests, with her headset on, and her voice cracked, and I liked her more in that one minute than I had in five months.

“She’s just not herself since she moved,” Taryn had said. “She doesn’t talk. She won’t go to any of the activities. She sits by the window. Please pray she finds some joy here.”

I go to Sweetgum House every Tuesday. I have for nine years. My friend Thea Spindler lives there now, and before Thea it was my mother. I play the piano in the day room for an hour, mostly requests, mostly songs older than me. So I had seen Wilda Vantreese. Small woman, white hair pinned up, a lavender cardigan buttoned wrong, sitting in a wingback chair by the big window facing the parking lot. She never came to the piano. But she was always in that chair on Tuesdays at two o’clock, and the chair was always turned a little toward the day room.

The second Tuesday of December, I was playing “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus” for Thea, and I looked up and saw Wilda’s lips moving.

Not singing, exactly. Just moving. Like a person reading along.

I didn’t make a fuss. I’ve worked with old singers for a long time and the surest way to make one stop is to notice her. So I played it again, a little slower. And then I played “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” which nobody ever requests, and her right hand came up off the arm of the chair and moved in a small, flat beat. Four beats to the bar. Exactly in time.

That woman had sung in a choir. I’d have bet my house on it.

I went home and I called Sukie again.

“I have an idea,” I said, “and I need you to tell me if it’s petty.”

A Rehearsal in My Living Room

It was a little petty. I’ll be honest about that. Part of me wanted to show Taryn exactly what she had thrown out. But mostly I wanted to see that hand move again.

The plan was simple. Every year on Christmas Eve, Sweetgum House has a little party at four in the afternoon, with cookies and that sherbet punch with ginger ale in it. Usually a family from somebody’s church comes and sings two songs. I called the activity director and asked if fourteen people in robes could come and sing for half an hour instead.

“Fourteen?” she said. “Honey, our residents would come out of their rooms for four.”

So we rehearsed in my living room. Wednesday nights, same as always, because that’s when everyone’s body expected to sing. Fourteen chairs from three houses. Vester brought a keyboard he kept in his garage and set it up on my dining table and complained about the action on it all night. Sukie brought lemon bars. Thora, our oldest alto, who is eighty-two, brought a seat cushion shaped like a donut and said, “Don’t anybody say one word about it.” I’m not going to pretend that wasn’t the best rehearsal we’d had in years.

Somebody brought up hook number nine. I think it was Sukie. She asked me what I was going to do with Webb’s robe.

“I’m going to wear the stole,” I said. “The robe’s too long.”

I’d taken the gold stole off his robe that week and pressed it. It still smelled faintly like the cedar closet in the choir room. I put it on over my own burgundy robe, and Vester looked at it and said, “Well, that’s not dated. That’s just right.”

I didn’t tell Taryn any of it. I didn’t tell Zander either. It was not a secret, exactly. I just didn’t think it was any of their business where fourteen retired people chose to sing on a Tuesday afternoon, or a Thursday, which is what Christmas Eve was that year.

Christmas Eve, Four O’Clock

We walked into the day room at Sweetgum House at ten minutes to four in our robes, all fourteen of us, and I swear you could hear walkers squeaking toward us from every hall in the building.

Thea was in the front row with her hair done. The man from room 12 who never takes his hat off took his hat off. The activity director had set out forty chairs and ran out of them, and the aides started bringing in the chairs from the dining room.

Wilda Vantreese was in her wingback chair by the window. Somebody had buttoned her cardigan right. She did not turn around.

We started with “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” because you always start with something everybody knows. Then “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” The residents sang along on the first verses and hummed the rest, the way people do. Thora sat on a stool to sing and kept time on her knee.

Then I nodded to Vester and he played the opening of number 230.

O little town of Bethlehem.

I wasn’t watching Wilda. I was watching my altos, because the second line of that hymn is where altos get lost. And then I heard a voice behind me that was not one of mine.

It was thin and a little sharp, the way old voices get. But it was dead on the alto line. Not the melody. The alto part, the harmony underneath, the part you only know if you sang it for years in a loft somewhere with a folder in your hands.

I turned around. Wilda had stood up.

Nobody had helped her. She had one hand on the back of the wingback chair and the other hand flat against her chest, and she was singing with her eyes shut. Verse one. Verse two. On verse three, “How silently, how silently,” Sukie started crying and lost her place, and Wilda didn’t. Wilda knew all four verses. Most church people only know the first one and fake the rest.

When we finished she opened her eyes and looked straight at me.

“You took it too fast,” she said. “Everyone always takes it too fast.”

I laughed. I couldn’t stop myself. “Yes, ma’am. Would you like to sing it again slower?”

“I would,” she said, and she came across the room on her own two feet and stood between Thora and me, in the alto section, where she obviously belonged.

The Granddaughter in the Doorway

We sang it again slower. And then she asked for “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” and then “In the Bleak Midwinter,” and she sang those too, and in between she told us, in a voice that got stronger every time she used it, that she had sung alto at First Methodist in Hutchinson, Kansas, for forty-four years. Her director’s name was Mr. Unruh. He made them sit on the edges of their chairs for posture and he hit the piano lid with a pencil when they were flat.

“I haven’t sung a note since Walden died,” she said. “There was nothing to sing out there. They had a man with a guitar.”

I didn’t see Taryn come in. Sukie told me later she’d been standing in the doorway with a plate of cookies she’d brought for the party, still wearing her coat, for at least two songs.

When I finally noticed her, she was crying. Not pretty crying. The kind where your mouth goes square.

“Grandma,” she said.

Wilda looked at her and smiled the biggest smile I had seen on that woman’s face in two months of Tuesdays. “Tare,” she said. “Come here, honey. These people know the real ones.”

Taryn put the cookies down on a chair and came over and hugged her grandmother, and over her grandmother’s shoulder she looked at me. I knew she was thinking about the slide. I knew she was thinking about the red X. I didn’t say anything. Some things you let a person carry by herself for a minute.

When we were packing up, she found me by the coat rack.

“I didn’t know she could sing,” she said. “I didn’t know she knew any of those.”

“She knew all four verses,” I said. “Most people only know one.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I thought about that. The honest answer was that she hadn’t asked me anything since June except to clear out my cubbies.

“I wasn’t sure she’d do it,” I said, which was also true. “Old singers are shy. You have to give them the songs they already know and then get out of the way.”

She looked at the gold stole on my shoulders. “Is that from the choir room?”

“It’s from hook number nine,” I said.

She closed her eyes. “Vivienne, I’m so sorry.”

Number 230 in the Dark

I’d like to tell you we marched back into Westmoor that night and took the church back. We didn’t. That’s not how it happened, and I’m glad.

What happened was this. At ten-thirty, while I was at home taking my robe off, Taryn called me. She had my number from the church directory and she had never once used it.

“We have the eleven o’clock in half an hour,” she said. “Tavish’s got the band set up. We have a whole thing planned for ‘Silent Night,’ it’s a new arrangement, there’s a track. And I keep thinking about my grandma standing up out of that chair.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Would the choir come?” she asked. “Would you sing the third verse? Like you used to? I’ll turn the track off. I’ll turn everything off.”

Here is where I was supposed to be gracious, and I was, mostly. But I’m sixty-six and I’d earned one little bite.

“We’ll come,” I said. “But we’ll sit in the pews. That’s where you told us we’d be welcome. Front three rows. When it’s time, you turn the lights off, and we’ll stand up where we are.”

There was a long pause. “Okay,” she said. “Front three rows.”

I made eleven phone calls in eight minutes. Twelve of us made it. Thora had gone to bed, and her son said if we woke her up she’d never forgive him, but she’d never forgive him if we didn’t tell her in the morning, either.

Westmoor was full. It always is on Christmas Eve. The band played its songs, and they were good, I’ll say it. Tavish can really sing. The screen showed the words over a picture of a snowy field. And down in the front pew on the aisle, in a wheelchair the Sweetgum House aides had loaded into Zander’s minivan, sat Wilda Vantreese in a lavender cardigan, buttoned right.

When the ushers lit the candles and the lights went down, Tavish played the first two verses of “Silent Night” on his guitar, soft, the way it ought to be. Then he stopped. And Taryn, standing by the side door with her headset off, looked at me across the dark and nodded.

We stood up in the pews. Twelve of us in our street clothes, and one old woman from Kansas who stood up from a wheelchair with her granddaughter holding her elbow.

Silent night, holy night, Son of God, love’s pure light.

No organ, no band, no track. Just us. You could hear the candles. You could hear somebody’s baby in the back go quiet to listen. I had sung that verse thirty-one times in that building and I had never heard it come from the middle of the people before, instead of from up front. It sounded like it belonged to all of them.

When we sat down, nobody clapped. Methodists don’t clap on Christmas Eve. But a man I didn’t know in the fourth row reached forward and squeezed my shoulder, and Vester, who was sitting in the congregation for the first time in forty-six years because they hadn’t asked him to play, blew his nose so loudly that Sukie elbowed him.

What “Dated” Means

On the Sunday after New Year’s, Taryn came to my house. No headset. She brought the craft store gift card back and set it on my kitchen table.

“I want to un-retire you,” she said. “If you’ll come.”

“What happens to the band?”

“The band keeps the nine-thirty,” she said. “The choir gets the eleven. Your music. The organ. The robes, if people want them.” She hesitated. “And Tavish asked if he could sit in with the tenors on Wednesdays. He says he’s never sung parts before. He’s twenty-eight and he’s never sung parts.”

“He’ll hate it,” I said. “Then he’ll love it.”

“And I want to ask you something else,” she said, and she looked about twelve years old. “Can I join? I sing alto. Kind of. I mean, Grandma says I do.”

I thought about the red X over my coffee-ringed hymnal. I thought about the word “dated,” and how she’d said it like it meant spoiled, like milk.

“Here’s the thing about dated,” I told her. “Everything in that hymnal has a date on it. It’s printed right there in the corner. 1868. 1599. 1872. That’s not the date they went bad. That’s the date they started, and they’re still going. Dated just means it lasted.”

She laughed, and then she wiped her eyes, and then she said, “Okay. Can I still join?”

“Wednesday, seven o’clock,” I said. “Bring a pencil. And you sit on the edge of your chair.”

“Why?”

“Posture,” I said. “Ask your grandmother about Mr. Unruh.”

The choir room is still the choir room. The band uses it on Sunday mornings and we use it on Wednesday nights, and the cubbies are full again, plus two. Wilda’s folder is in the one next to mine. The aides bring her the second Wednesday of every month, and she sits in the alto section and tells me when I take things too fast, which is always.

Hook number nine has Webb’s robe on it again. Taryn asked if she could be the one to hang it up. I said yes. The sleeve is still a little faded where the sun hits it.

If somebody in your life has a voice they haven’t used in a while, give them a song they already know. And if this story made you think of your own church choir, share it with someone who sang in one.

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