Beth Swick was a 40-year-old atheist with warm childhood memories of singing in the church choir when she found herself drawn by a one-word event notice taped to a door: “Chanting.” Inside, she found something called a kirtan, or group devotional music.

That experience 12 years ago — joining a call-and-response song in the unfamiliar holy language of Sanskrit with a group of strangers and a beautifully voiced leader — blew the doors of nonbelief off the disaffected Presbyterian.

For decades, Swick had thought that she wasn’t religious unless she identified with “some man-God off in some alternate universe in the sky somewhere.” Yet in that room, enveloped by the rich music and the group repetition of a single sacred phrase (although at the time indecipherable to her), Swick felt powerfully connected to something divine.

She was soaring.

She was praying.

“It was an expression of a feeling there wasn’t room for in my life at the time, some of those feelings of praise. Where does the word ‘praise’ fit into an atheist’s life?” said Swick, a project manager for architecture and design firms in Montgomery County who no longer considers herself an atheist.

After a few years of seeing kirtans only sporadically in the Washington area, Swick launched a monthly one in 2009. Today, there are about 15 such groups meeting regularly in the region; one can find several kirtans most weekend nights, held in homes or yoga studios. Last February, Sirius XM Radio launched a channel largely devoted to kirtan-style chant, which has morphed to include hip-hopper MC Yogi (whose popular chant-songs include “Ganesh Is Fresh”). Some 4,000 people come each January to the California desert for a four-year-old Zen-out called BhaktiFest that’s heavily centered on kirtan.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/kirtans-call-and-response-chanting-draws-a-growing-number-of-washingtonians/2013/01/08/ef2cc87a-59a9-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html