Give Me Your Breath

During the end of this Easter season as the Church celebrates the Fiftieth Day of Easter with the great feast of Pentecost, we offer still another song from our Lenten concert.  While "Give Me Your Breath" is not necessarily a Pentecost hymn, it is a "spirited" piece that is loosely based on Psalm 50 (or 51 in some bibles).  This psalm is normally sung when the Judeo-Christian community acknowledges human sinfulness while praising God's mercy in light of our continual need to experience it.  I suppose you could say that we took it in a slightly different direction.  What follows is the story of how it came to be written.

I've written before that in addition to my involvement in the music ministry at IHM, I am a hospice chaplain for Compassionate Care Hospice, a hospice that specializes in providing end of life care for those who wish to die in their own home.  One of the great benefits of a job like mine is that I get to meet a myriad of people from different faith traditions and various walks of life.  One such person, was a patient of mine named Carolyn.

Carolyn was that person in her church who published the church's bulletin and each day she would scour the internet for stories that inspired her and then she'd send a mass email to the members of her congregation.  Soon after meeting her, she begin including me in her distribution list.  She was an inspiration (a word that means taking in breath) to others and she certainly inspired me.

She confided in me that she had two very real fears as she looked at the end of her life.  She was fearful that her children would stray from their faith once she was no longer here to guide and encourage them with her own incredibly strong faith.  But as she was also suffering from ALS, she possessed a deep seated fear that she would come to the end of her life in a conscious thirst for air, drowning in her own fluid which she might no longer be able to swallow.

I grew to love this lady and in reflecting about it, I think what really hooked me about her was this combination of faith and fear that she so courageously shared with me as I too, am so often a complicated mixture of fear and faith.  We prayed about this frequently during the months that I was graced to know and care for Carolyn. 

So that summer Michael and I wrote this piece with her in mind and about a month before she died, I took two colleagues with me to sing it to Carolyn a cappella.  She had wanted me to sing it at her funeral, but in all honesty, I didn't have the courage to sing a gospel-style song as a solo.  Thus it was that when Carolyn died, I thought that was the end of this song, but we had occasion to bring it out again when a member of our parish's music ministry developed lung cancer. 

James Cunningham, a longtime, much beloved member of IHM had only in the past year and a half begun playing congos with us.  When he succumbed to the cancer that he had courageously battled, we realized that this hymn mirrored the experience of his prayer at the end of the winding journey that was his life.  In the end, so many of our music ministers took off work on a weekday to come and honor him, that we were able to sing it at his funeral.

The night of our concert from which the recording is taken, James' family were in attendence and we dedicated this song to both him and  Carolyn.  As it happened, the two chaplains who had gone with me to sing "Give Me Your Breath" to her were also able to be present.  Having my fellow chaplains Elaine Hoffman and Lesley Brogan with us that night was another of God's unexpected gifts to me like the opportunity to have known Carolyn H. and to have played music in my parish with the great James Cunningham!

Lyrics posted after the break...

Lord Say The Word

The piece I’m uploading today, Lord Say The Word, started as a prayer for patience and humility during a period of personal struggle for me.  My hope is that we’ve made it general enough that others may find it useful in their own prayer lives.

Last Advent, as Catholic churches across North America transitioned to the new English translation of the Roman Missal, I found myself reluctant to embrace this change.  For the first time in my life, I felt as though I were on the outside looking in to the Church.  What a terrifying place to be!  But in those moments of struggle and doubt, we always have recourse to pray.  This song was my prayer for joyful acceptance of all the things in life, great or small, that I cannot change.

The beginning of the refrain was inspired by one of my favorite responses in the old translation of the Missal.  The verses were very loosely inspired by the story of St. Paul’s conversion and the notion (that I first read in C.S. Lewis) that our own conversions, the acts of dying to our personal prides and selfish desires, are painful experiences, but necessary and worthwhile and joyful, nonetheless. I would humbly suggest that this song is most applicable as a Communion meditation.  For what better opportunity do we have to truly die to ourselves than to willingly and completely participate as a member of the body of Christ in the great sacrifice of the Eucharist?

The recording I’ve uploaded today was made at our 2012 Lenten concert.  Michael wrote the gorgeous string and woodwind accompaniment.  I would normally envision the counter-melody sung by the male voices as entering on the refrain after the second verse to help the song build a little more and as a way to better invite the congregation to participate more fully from the beginning, but in this setting we decided to use the counter-melody from the start, and it worked reasonably well.  In case you're interested, the lyrics are printed after the break.