Photo by Todd Vogel '03
One of my favorite days of the year at Wabash is Chapel Sing. I find Chapel Sing so moving, in part, because it is so damned loud. It comes near the end of September, when classes threaten to become routine. Just when I start to despair that the semester will never end, I can venture out onto the mall and run smack into a sea of sound.
Fall is a good time to roar against the wind. Nature is preparing for winter, the days are getting shorter, and yet summer is still in the air. Shouting at the top of your lungs is one way of calling nature’s bluff. In the midst of a long semester, facing another Indiana winter, the students proclaim that they still have a lot of life left in them. Would that I could yell so loud.
When I was a student, Chapel Sing was a true rite of passage. It did not mean that pledgeship was over, but it did mean that we had passed a test that put our unity on trial. After all, Chapel Sing was not a one day event. We had to stand on the patio practicing the school song nearly every day. Singing together is a great way of establishing community, especially when the active brothers taunt you and the song you are learning is so long.
Chapel Sing has all the hallmarks of great ritual. Like all ritual, it is paradoxically excessive behavior that is nonetheless tightly controlled. It appears to be madness itself, yet there are a lot of rules. Thus, within a set of parameters, the students do what they would never do anywhere else. They shout until they drop.
The ritual actually begins even before the shouting. I still remember the long procession to the chapel, arm in arm, across the mall. The Chapel itself is a sacred building on campus, and it was made even more so by that long, silent walk.
Video from this year’s Chapel Sing
When I did Chapel Sing, we did not paint our faces. But that, too, is an aspect of all ritual. Wearing a mask allows you to get some distance on your everyday self. For a moment, you are allowed to express a vitality that ordinarily is kept in check. Chapel Sing is thus great theater. It is our own Wabash Opera, performed full throttle to the point of damaging your voice.
Rituals like Chapel Sing also leave you with a lot of memories. After many years, all the days seem to flow into each other, and it is hard to remember how one day differs from the next. Rituals are signposts that say, “You were here.”
They also connect you to the past. You do not stand alone. You have gone where thousands of others have been. Americans suffer from historical amnesia. We throw away the past as unusable. Rituals remind us that others, too, have been where we once were. It is good to remember such things.
So I look forward to Chapel Sing. I do not know any other day quite like it. When I see those guys singing, I know that I was once on those Chapel steps too, and time slows down a bit, and the world seems like a smaller place, a place where the generations can reach out and touch each other even as time keeps moving us further apart.
This post originally appeared in the Winter/Spring 2002 edition of Wabash Magazine.
This post was submitted by Stephen H. Webb '83.
Related stories:
- My Favorite Wabash Tradition
- David Blix, “That Was Then, This is Now”
- My Favorite Tradition
- Echoes from Freshman Year
As a freshman student, my favorite day of the year was definitely not Chapel Sing. We freshmen looked with fear and trepidation on that inglorious day. If we could not sing “Old Wabash” while being yelled at by upperclassmen or having cigar smoke blown in our faces, we were ushered into the chapel to see if we could write “Old Wabash” out in longhand. If we failed, we got the dreaded “W” haircut.
After the Chapel Sing in 1963 a poll was taken regarding Chapel Sing. Only 2 of 11 responding faculty were in favor of this tradition. Not surprisingly, the upperclassmen were overwhelmingly in favor of the tradition (389 to 29), while the vote was much closer among the freshmen (108 to 129).
Somewhere along the way, the traditional “W” haircut gave way to having a red “W” painted on any freshman’s t-shirt if he happened to not know “Old Wabash.”
My junior year (’04) and my first year in the Sphinx Club we went back to the “old” style of Chapel Sing. I remember brainstorming about what kind of repercussions we could come up with if freshmen didn’t know the words. The “W” haircut was out, if only because the pledges of Phi Kappa Psi all shaved their heads for chapel sing anyway. So instead we came up with “W” t-shirt and a photo at the end for anyone who earned a “W” to be printed in the Bachelor so that the entire Wabash world could know who was feckless about learning the school song.
Thanks for that nugget, Matt. I was a freshman in ‘04, but I didn’t know that the red “W” was new for us.