How can I keep from singing?

This morning while the kettle heated for tea, I was thinking about this week's challenge, and the Midweek Meeting came back to me, when we gathered during the regularly scheduled Religious Education time and discussed the Query of "where is Spirit?" and "what is Spirit asking of us right now?" 

There was a lot of Silent Worship during that meeting, and several of the Friends used chants as part of their Speaking, and this seemed powerful then, and came back to me this morning as I thought about song. There's an old Quaker chant (like, sixteen hundreds) that got shared around and eventually written down by someone in the 1800s. It has been passed around and the lyrics modified to fit various faith groups. 

The line from that chant that came to me was:
"When Friends rejoice both far and near, how can I keep from singing?"

Folk singers have used this so often it has now entered the public domain and become something of a folk standard, but the version you might be most familiar with is the one by Enya, and that's the one I listened to this morning. I have carried it with me in my heart and am glad of this.

Rejoice, Friends.
We are together, come what may.

My personal favorite version, Pete Seeger in the 70s:

Some things

Some things:
I believe that grace is in our daily lives and in our choices if we so choose.
There is grace in integrity, a grace of dignity if we choose to make commitments and live by them.
There is grace in simplicity, a grace of elegance in finding the least that we need and living in that arc between too much and too little, an elegance of enough.
There is a grace to ongoing revelation, a grace of intimacy that comes only when there is an abundance of mystery without secrecy
There is a grace to presence, a grace of identity that happens when we are still enough to witness without ego.
This is how a utilitarian Taoist cyberpunk monk ends up in the silent meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.