Story behind the video "You Are Not Alone"

For the past year and a half, I have been involved in a project of group learning with other hospice chaplains and bereavement ministers here in Atlanta.  We formed a cohort through a program offered by Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, who encouraged us to engage in acts of Study, Sabbath, and Service.  This video is our service project which we hope to make available to bereaved people in our respective communities and on the websites of the various hospice companies in which we are employed.

Michael and I chose to post it here in case some of you may know of someone who might benefit from the message of hope and comfort it contains.  The video also holds some of our original music.  It begins with a verse of a song, "Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep" that we hope to post in its entirety soon.  Also you will hear portions of some piano strains I recorded last fall to the tune of what is likely a familiar hymn to many, "All Creatures of Our God and King".  Finally, we included a recording of "Let Nothing Trouble You" that we posted a couple of months back.

This was a remarkable opportunity for all of us, inasmuch as a palpable sense of God's grace seemed to infuse each of us along the various stages of this shared endeavor. When I learned on a Friday that our filmmaker was unexpectedly available that weekend, we managed to assemble everyone we needed to begin filming the interviews on the same day as our fall Memorial service for my hospice company, Compassionate Care.  It was CCH who coincidentally had provided in-home hospice care for the husbands of the three women who shared the joys and sorrows of their hospice experience with us.  The audio recording sessions took place on two evenings in November and, again, God opened the hearts of so many talented people to give their time and inestimable talents.  In the first few months of this year, with the help of our filmmaker, Evan McIntosh we managed to get everything edited and fashioned into the work you are now able to view here as well as on YouTube.  We remain grateful for God's gift of inspiration, faithfulness and healing love which continues to hold us fast.

Please help us spread our words and songs of faith to all who have hearts that grieve.

You Are Not Alone: Journeys Through Grief

Today, we're posting a video recently produced by Michael Mullink and some of his fellow hospice chaplains for those dealing with grief over the loss of a loved one.  We're sharing it through this blog and other web outlets like Facebook and YouTube in the hopes that it may find those for whom it could be of some use.  God bless!

Let Nothing Trouble You

This song literally "dawned" on me on the morning of March 24, 2012.  I had been very concerned for my sister Donna's family back home in Illinois because my brother-in-law was receiving his first chemo treatments for metastatic lung cancer.  Due to the extreme stress on everyone, my niece Jenny was also hospitalized.  It had been a fitful night's sleep for me as I prayed for my loved ones from whom I felt so far away.  I arose before dawn and was doing some last minute research in the Catechism of the Catholic Church for a talk that Michael Vrazel and I were to give later that morning to the people who would embrace the Catholic faith at the Easter Vigil in two weeks.  The refrain seemed to jump off the page at me.  You may be familiar with these words that are taken from a quote by St. Teresa of Avila, a Doctor of the Church and mystic from the 16th century.  The descant bears similar words of comfort, but are even more ancient inasmuch as they paraphrase the Lord's final discourse on the night of the Last Supper as recorded in John 14.  

The verses came a little later, during Father's Day weekend, while on retreat in Dublin, Georgia at Green Bough with my fellow chaplain, Elaine Hoffman.  They are adapted from words I was meditating on from Parker Palmer's book, Let Your Life Speak, that my support group of hospice chaplains had been reading for discussions we would hold later in the summer.  I heard them as something I really needed to remember, but also as something I wanted to say to my niece, Jenny.  

We have so many to thank for this recording, starting with our sound engineer, fellow IHM musician, Bob Gillespie and his wife Jane, who sings on the recording.  Also recorded are my fellow hospice colleagues, Lesley Brogan and Elaine Hoffman.  Fellow IHM choir members Nimalie Stone, Julie Hiland, and Sarah Bolling can likewise be heard adding their beautiful voices.  We were directed by Jeff Bush, who is singing here along with Michael Vrazel and me.  The clarinet is beautifully played by another parish musician, IHM School's music teacher, Melissa Mecadon who is a music minister at our 11:30 Mass along with Jeff and Michael and me.  We are also grateful for Paul Tate's musicianship as he offered tremendous encouragement in the writing of this piece.  He supplied the instrumental part Melissa is playing and at his urging, we went on to write additional verses to make this piece adaptable to the seasons of Lent, for the Sacraments of Reconciliation and the Anointing of the Sick and at Masses of Christian Burial, though you will not hear the additional verses in this recording.

Click below for lyrics.

Come Home, My Love

In my hospice work, I share the wonderment of family members at the dying process and its surprises.  One familiar experience of the dying seems to be that loved ones who have already "gone on" tend to appear at their bedside to encourage them or perhaps to accompany the dying along their way.  In fact, I have had hospice patients try to introduce me to their visitors who remain hidden from my sight. By and large, these appearances seem to calm and delight the dying patient as the look on their face reveals a mystical serenity that seems to slow the pace of their breathing, even as they seem to "look through" their earth-bound family members and caregivers who likewise stand at their bedside.

Following the writing of "I've Gone Away," which was meant as a folk anthem to give voice to the comfort and hope that a dead young man sings to ease the grief of his intended bride, I began a process of writing lyrics for the actual dying process.  "Come Home, My Love" is the first such piece.  The tune may be familiar to you. It is adapted from a folk melody sung in the Appalachians, a variant of the earlier tune, Barbara Allen.  Now, you might hear it as the voice of Jesus, calling his disciple to enter at last into their rest.  Or, perhaps it could be heard as the song of a long dead parent or spouse who returns at the end of life to sing peace into the heart of their beloved.  

Our thanks goes again to Jeff Bush who sings with us in this death bed hymn that affirms our belief in the life that awaits us in God's keeping.

Click below to view the lyrics.

Prayer Of St. Ignatius

The song we're uploading today, Prayer Of St. Ignatius, is actually not all that new.  Inspired by St. Ignatius of Loyola's Prayer for Generosity, I wrote this piece before Michael and I began our songwriting collaborations.  I've always thought that St. Ignatius authored some of the most beautiful prayers.  His Suscipe is probably my favorite, but it already has a wonderful musical setting written for it by John Foley called Take, Lord, Receive (if you are not familiar with this classic, check it out here).

The Prayer for Generosity, on the other hand, is certainly a close second and has been a cherished prayer of mine since first hearing it used in a homily during Mass at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco many years ago.  I find that this simple and succinct plea for guidance and grace to live out the two greatest commandments is useful in all aspects of my life: as a Christian and neighbor to my fellow man, as a husband and father, and even as a professional.  Here is the original prayer:

Lord, teach me to be generous.
Teach me to serve you as you deserve;
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for reward,
save that of knowing that I do your will.

Looking back on the piece I wrote, I don't think I would be quite brave (or foolhardy) enough today to muddle as much with St. Ignatius' words as I did then.  But that being said, I do think it still holds together pretty well and remains in keeping with the sentiments of the original prayer.  We've used this piece a number of times over the years at IHM both during our capital campaign to raise funds for the new church as well as for stewardship Sundays.

This recording of Prayer of St. Ignatius, which you can hear by clicking on either of the music players on this blog, was a solo effort on my part.  What time Michael and I have had to collaborate this summer has gone into a different project that we hope to be making an announcement about soon.  In the meantime, I recorded this song over the space of a couple months, and so in this very intentionally rare case, you have a chance to hear my piano playing.

My adapted lyrics are posted after the break.

I've Gone Away

Late this past Spring, my family suffered another loss which left us speechless and searching our hearts and minds for answers to how something of this sort could happen to one of us. My niece, Erin was engaged to be married to a wonderful young man, Robert. Most all of the plans were set in place, but for waiting for the shower and for the time to come to send out the invitations for the September wedding. Then, one afternoon in April, Erin came home from teaching school to find a coroner on her doorstep with the tragic news that her beloved 25 year-old Robert had died at work from what we would later discover was a massive heart attack.

Driving home to Illinois for the funeral, I listened to a CD of folk songs arranged for flute and guitar. One of the songs was "He's Gone Away" and it set me to thinking of how these time-tested melodies that reside in our collective unconscious seem to have the power to express our deepest human emotions. Used for generations to express realities far more vast than the circumstances in which those who sang them were living, these melodies can still speak powerfully to us during times when our poor powers of speech fail us.

Coming home from the funeral, awash in feelings of grief that I was neither able to contain or successfully expel from my heart, I returned to "He's Gone Away." Playing it over and over, I felt inspired to write an arrangement of it, using words I could imagine Robert speaking to Erin were he able to communicate with her from his place in the kingdom of heaven. We hold firm to our belief that he lives now in the presence of the Lord and the hosts of heaven; among them, Robert's own grandpa who died not so many months ago and Richard, Erin's dad, who seemed to have found his way back into our lives in the remarkably familiar personality of Robert Connor.

My hope is that these words will comfort and bolster Erin's faith and that of the rest of my family. But perhaps others in circumstances of grief and loss may find inspiration and hope in the midst of their suffering as they search for meaning for love that survives the death of the beloved.

How grateful we are to Jeff Bush for the gifts of heart and vocal prowess that he brings to the singing of this tender piece.

Lyrics are posted below after the break.

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.