{"id":29073,"date":"2020-06-09T09:42:31","date_gmt":"2020-06-09T13:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/?p=29073"},"modified":"2021-09-01T14:46:45","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T18:46:45","slug":"an-open-letter-from-jared-stutzman-to-the-emhs-2020-touring-choir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/es\/2020\/06\/an-open-letter-from-jared-stutzman-to-the-emhs-2020-touring-choir\/","title":{"rendered":"Stutzman Writes to 2020 Choir On COVID Loss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jared Stutzman, choir director, shared the following letter with the 2020 EMHS Touring Choir members on June 8, 2020, the day they were scheduled to leave for a trip to Europe. The Touring Choir travels international every other summer.<\/em><\/p>\n

EMHS Touring Choir Parents and Students,<\/p>\n

Today, the 2020 EMHS Touring Choir would have gathered in the gym parking lot to board a bus to take us to the airport. There would have been high spirits, laughter, luggage, passports to check, blue Touring Choir shirts, and an incredible sense of anticipation and excitement. The next 17 days would have been filled with meeting new people, seeing new places, experiencing different cultures, seeing new approaches to faith and worship \u2014 connections to host families, to children at the four schools we were scheduled to visit, growing in knowledge, in faith, minds stretched, lives touched and changed (including our own) through our songs and our presence. <\/p>\n

Our weekends leading up to today in March, April, and May would have been filled with programs in local churches \u2014 our tour would have taken us across Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio, and some of you would have spent a long weekend in Richmond at Virginia All-State Choir. As each Sunday has gone past, I have thought of which church we would have been at that morning and evening. I could envision you there, in each place, bringing joy and inspiration to those who heard you, saw you, fed you (:-)), and interacted with you. We would have lived with our songs and each other for months, and we would have built and strengthened the connections at the heart of our choir \u2014 to the music, to each other, and to God. We would have come to understand ourselves in new ways, to understand God in new ways. Our songs would have grown and matured until they became a part of us, shaped us, formed us.<\/p>\n

Instead, we\u2019re here. We don\u2019t know what the future holds \u2026 the 2020 EMHS Touring Choir may still get to sing together in some way, shape, or form in the future. \u2026 later this summer, at EMS homecoming, or maybe even next summer. There\u2019s still hope. But by now, we all are only too aware that there\u2019s no substitute for the in-person singing we have missed. The virtual choirs we have worked on are cool from a technological standpoint, and the end result looks like we\u2019re together. But we sang alone. The connections that are the heart of our experience just can\u2019t be formed through a computer screen.<\/p>\n

So, what now? Well\u2026as ironic and difficult as this is, I\u2019m going to encourage us to cultivate a sense of gratitude. They say you don\u2019t know what you have \u2018till it\u2019s gone. Use this experience to create a hunger for real, personal connections that last \u2026 let it shape your in-person interactions with thankfulness, with a sense of how valuable and precious it is to be able to look someone in the eye and talk face-to-face, to feel the energy in a room of other hearts and souls. Maybe I never really appreciated what a gift it was to meet every day with a choir, to sing together and enjoy each other\u2019s company. Now I do. Perhaps I never fully understood how special the community we form in our choir is, how it\u2019s shaped through our travels and programs over the season. Maybe the unique togetherness of choral singing was something I took for granted. I never will again.<\/p>\n

As much as I\u2019d love to be on that bus with you today, I feel grateful for the way the pain teaches me about what we had \u2026 that we are a part of something so special that its absence hurts. C.S. Lewis says that God whispers to us in our pleasures, but shouts to us in our pains. God was there when we were together, and God is still here teaching us when we\u2019re apart. <\/p>\n

\u201cMay the Lord watch over you and be gracious unto you. May His life be seen in you, and may it be known through your deeds that Jesus is Lord of your life, that Jesus is Lord over all. May His peace be with you forevermore! Amen.\u201d \u2013 Benediction, Matthew Hunsberger \u201896<\/p>\n

\u2013 Jared Stutzman<\/p>\n

See videos<\/a> from past Touring Choir trips to Europe, rehearsal videos of this year\u2019s choir, as well as this year\u2019s choir performance with Voces8 in February 2020.<\/p>\n

Read about the virtual choir<\/a> that Jared Stutzman created during the COVID-19 shut down that featured Touring Choir and was viewed by more than 33,000 on YouTube and Facebook.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jared Stutzman, choir director, shared the following letter with the 2020 EMHS Touring Choir members on June 8, 2020, the day they were scheduled to leave for a trip to Europe. The Touring Choir travels international every other summer. EMHS Touring Choir Parents and Students, Today, the 2020 EMHS Touring Choir would have gathered in\u2026<\/p>","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":29074,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[323],"tags":[353,21,109,108],"class_list":["post-29073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faith-formation","tag-covid-19","tag-music","tag-the-arts","tag-touring-choir"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easternmennonite.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29073"}],"curies":[{"name":"gracias","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}