Beloved Friends-
Exactly a year ago I sat down to write this weekly blog and focused on the excitement we were all feeling on the eve of welcoming back our Trinity choir including our Jobst Choral Scholars and our dozen High School students from around Toledo making up our growing young adult music program. What a difference a year makes.
To be honest, I feel a sadness inside knowing that this Sunday we will not be “together” in that way- not yet.
-There will be no sounds of the choir warming up downstairs in the choir room below my office.
-There will be no opening song with a few hand-held instruments upstairs in My Brother’s Place as we welcome our guests to our free Community Breakfast.
-There will be no last-minute exchange in the hall with Nate as he and I can look at each other and convey a necessary change or adaption as only those connected through the language of music can do.
No, there will be none of that this Sunday.
Nate (our Director of Music & the Arts), shared the very first time he and I met, that music is his “connective tissue” – the way in which he has made and built lasting relationships and meaningful experiences throughout his lifetime. I too have looked to music to be the foundation, the source, the vehicle that ushers me into the presence of the Divine time and time again. Since childhood, music has been my constant invitation, solace and promise, keeping me connected to all that is sacred and holy—even when I have lacked words or understanding.
So amidst this sadness, I sit down today to also share that I am so very grateful that Trinity’s “soundtrack” is still alive and maybe even more robust than ever. Since the middle of March we have offered worship through the on-line format we are calling “Trinity@Home” and through that avenue we have been able to welcome a plethora of musical guests- new friends and members offering beautiful pieces of every genre. And THAT is a gift that gladdens my heart and puts a smile on my face week after week after week.
Here is a beautiful perspective on the gift of music from one of my favorite spiritual writers:
Music is perhaps the most divine of all art forms in that it creates an active, living and moving form that takes us for a while into another world. There is no doubt that music strikes a deep and eternal echo within the human heart. Music resonates in and with us. It is only when we become enraptured in great music, we begin to understand how deeply we are reached and nourished by sound. (John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)
So come home this Sunday (on-line) as our sacred soundtrack continues in this new form! Music at Trinity continues to be a vibrant, expansive, varied palette of genres embracing the best of what music is and can be creating a pathway into a universal language connecting and inspiring us to be more together than we can ever be alone.
And may you never forget that you are loved,
Lisa