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Dear SALT Readers, We invite you to sing your way through this issue of SALT or, at least, to play your favorite music in the background as you read about the delight in and passion for music among BVMs from the early days until now. We have frequently marveled at the fact that, although a piano is a very cumbersome item, Bishop Mathias Loras in 1843 wrote from Dubuque to Father Donaghoe in Philadelphia advising him to “not forget your good piano.” Knowing that piano lessons would provide income for the community, perhaps Bishop Loras’ encouragement to bring the piano was solely for economic purposes. However, the next phrase of that same letter advises Father Donaghoe to not forget “some good paintings,” either. Clearly more than finances are at stake here (cited in M. Jane Coogan, BVM, The Price of our Heritage, 170). In this issue of SALT we see that the famous piano names the truth that the survival of the human spirit depends upon beauty. We get a glimpse that this was true for Mary Frances Clarke in an anecdote written in Our Herald about Sister Mary Aimee Watson who, as a novice, delivered the mail to Mary Clarke’s room. In the article, Sister Mary Mechtilde O’Reilly recounts: Often while she was arranging things in Mother’s room, Sister Mary Aimee would sing some songs her mother taught her at home. Mother Clarke enjoyed the singing and would not interrupt the child. When Sister Mary Aimee went out to her first mission, Mother once remarked to Mother Gertrude, “I miss that little child’s singing.” In summer, when the novices returned for their profession, Sister Mary Aimee was sent to sing for the revered Superior General, whose eyes dimmed at hearing the blithe singer (cited in Kathryn Lawlor, BVM, ed., The Gift and the Call, 27). The music from that first piano and the voice of an early member has continued to echo in BVM life and ministry, stirring the music-maker and the music-listener to something more. Music creates communion. In giving musical expression to their own souls, BVM composers have tapped into that deep place where souls resonate one with the other; the songs caught on. Through the years BVMs have sung those songs at congregational gatherings and taught them to thousands of others. That music connects us with our past and binds us together in the present. Music liberates us to be ourselves. As the songs we sing or the instruments we play sound through us, we give outward expression to the person we are; we discover who we are. Music is a way of hearing our soul’s originality, of being freed to claim our own gifts, and of releasing the unique song that we are into the whole of our lives. Music awakens our emotions. Singing, playing or listening to good music puts us in touch with a whole range of feelings and so widens the scope of our humanity. As music, with its own array of spirit and kind, moves us to joy, sadness, peacefulness or restlessness, it opens us to experience the varied texture of life within us and beyond us in our world, and so makes us more compassionate. Music leads us into God, into Mystery at the heart and horizon of life. Music originates from that place in us that eludes and refuses containment in ordinary statement. We sing out the heart of who we are in voice and violin, piano and percussion, duet and drum, aria and organ and, as we do, something of the divine energy, delight, healing and love overflows from us into our world. Through music we pray a transformed world into being. Hopefully in these SALT articles, you will hear music stirring the soul to communion and connectedness, self-understanding and originality, feeling and compassion, participation in and proclamation of life’s holy mystery. Perhaps you will be reminded of the place music holds in your own life. As you follow the lilt of music from grade school to college classrooms, through concert halls and places of solitude, and into parish churches and retirement centers, may you find yourselves echoing the refrain, “How can I keep from singing?”
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