This past weekend I spent the day singing shape note music, and there was a moment when I was sitting on the front bench of the bass section, and I looked up as the leader brought us in on a fuguing tune: the leader’s facial expression caught my eye — eyes rolled slightly upward, lids slightly lowered, cheeks slack, head tilted slightly back — it was subtle, but I recognized that facial expression. It was the expression that comes at peak experiences, at moments of religious ecstasy.
And it occurred to me that I had never seen that particular facial expression in a Sunday service of a Unitarian Universalist congregation.