One month ago, I was stuck at the 16-hour mark of a 45-hour practicum. My momentum to pack up my guitar and music equipment each weekend and make the trek to nursing homes where I sang for residents one-on-one had ground to a halt. After months of chipping away at my hours on and off, and 50 patient visits, I had reached a mere 16 hours. The door hadn’t quite shut in my face, but it was feeling very hard to swing open: covid surged in the healthcare facilities over the winter, I felt pressed for time and energy between two jobs, and even when I did visit patients, getting to the music was hard when they wanted conversation.

Stumbling upon the Music for Healing and Transition Program in the spring of 2022 was an answered prayer. As I felt the tug on my heart strings to cultivate my music skills so I could offer song to others, a Google search pointed me toward Music for Healing and Transition. It just so happened that this national program offered in-person classroom sessions right across the river in Cambridge during the summer.

From the first day of class, when we learned about centering ourselves to sing and play not as performance but as healing presence, to the culmination of the training, where we played for patients in the hospital, I felt the path opening wide to live into my God-given vocation. But as of this spring, the seeds planted at the program’s outset felt choked by the busy-ness of life teeming over them.

It was a pilgrimage to the Taize Community this April that changed things. In the weekend I spent in silence, with sunlight, starlight and song seeping into my bones, I felt a tender beckoning.

“I will be the Song,” God whispered. “I want you to be my singer.”

Humbled and overjoyed to be called–just as I was–to be a channel for God’s Song, my passion was sparked again. The encouragement of family, friends and mentors kindled the budding flame.

Over the past month, I completed 22 more hours over 55 therapeutic music sessions. I’m now at 38.25 hours, with just 6.75 left until I cross the finish line.

My fingertips are calloused from guitar strings, my voice has at times almost given out, but wow, my heart is full.

My courage has grown. When someone doesn’t want music, I don’t have to be afraid that I’m useless, because someone else down the hall will. Time and again, I pray for the direction to go, and I feel that God sends me where I need to be.

I have always carried love songs in my heart. As a child, I sang them on out on the bus and on the swings. As I grew, I hummed them inaudibly, or channeled those feelings into the wordless melodies of classical piano music.

But now I get to sing directly to the hearts of the people I serve.

For you, there’ll be no crying / For you, the sun will be shining (“Songbird,” Christine McVie)

You fill up my senses like a night in the forest / Like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain (“Annie’s Song,” John Denver

It’s amazing how you can speak right to my heart / Without saying a word, you can light up the dark (“When You Say Nothing at All,” Paul Overstreet & Don Schlitz)

So close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it’s all right (“You Can Close Your Eyes,” James Taylor)

Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down (“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Paul Simon)

The Song that has always bubbled like a spring within me now gets to cascade over–for whomever I am singing to. I get to sing when people are “weary, feeling small,” when “pain is all around,” when they just need some rest. I get to be in the moments of silence, in the moments of wordless melody, with them. I am often transported to a softer and stiller place.

As I prepare to move to Albany this August to pursue a CPE residency (chaplaincy training), this therapeutic music training feels like a crowning of my time in Boston. An integration of all I have been fortunate to experience here through studies, music and ministry. Just like packing up to leave when a patient has fallen asleep, I’ll leave Boston singing all the way out.