How To Practice Multilingual Worship

Hello, everyone and welcome back to my blog! Though it has been a while since I last posted on here, I am excited to talk about a topic that I hold very dear to my heart: practicing multilingual worship to grow in my faith as a Catholic. No matter what your religious background is, I highly encourage you to read this post in its entirety, as it may benefit you, or someone you know.

For those of you who know me, I am very involved in our Christian and Catholic groups on campus. In fact, I am currently a Worship Team leader for our Intervarsity chapter on campus. So far, our worship team has sung songs in Spanish, French, Italian, German, and many different African dialects, but I hope to make our space even more diverse and inclusive during my last semester at Dickinson.

I have found that my faith has been spiritually, physically, and emotionally healing over the years, especially this past year, as I have been suffering from chronic migraines. That being said, I found worship music and specifically contemporary Christian songs to be my saving grace.

While I was abroad, I lost one of my grandfathers in Italy and had to pray for over a month for my health to get better in Cameroon. Though both of these instances were very emotionally draining, music healed me. It gave me hope that someday I would be cured and that I would feel better.

Given that languages are one of the most important parts of my life, I find international Christian music to be even more empowering. Not only am I increasing my vocabulary, but I am also working on my pronunciation, cadence, and tone. As I am sure most of you have noticed, learning a language is hard, but singing an entire song in a language that is not your first language is even harder, but even so, if you push through the highs and the lows throughout your language-learning process, you will persevere. You can even learn how to change your voice and the rhythm of a song when you become fluent in a language. That is one of the most rewarding parts of the process for me.

A lot of you have asked me what means the most to me and that is hands down my faith, so if you are currently on a faith journey, feel free to join me in this journey together. You may just be in the process of understanding what Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, or another religion means to you and to your identity, or you may be comfortable with that part of who you are. No matter where you find yourself, I highly encourage you to start incorporating worship music into your life.

You may be asking yourself, "That's great, Laura, but exactly how can I do that?" The easiest way to do so is by typing up "([INSERT RELIGION] worship songs" in your target language. Start listening to some songs that pop up. They will most likely be some of the most recent, or popular worship songs for your particular religion and once you start feeling comfortable with some of the songs that you listen to, make it a goal to learn a song by heart. 

Start off by looking up unknown words to slowly build your vocabulary. Practice it consistently and take it as slowly as you need to. It may take you a day, or three months to fully memorize a song, but the point is to never give up. Who knows? Maybe you will even develop a closer relationship with God, or with a higher being in the process.

As a bonus, I am sharing the link to my favorite Italian worship song that I sang while I studied abroad in Bologna, Italy in Fall 2017 (SEE ABOVE).

Grazie mille per tutto,

XOXO, Laura