When Elaine Stratton Hild was eighteen, she volunteered to play her viola at a local hospital. On her first day, a nurse asked her to go to the room of a woman who wanted to hear “Amazing Grace.” She found the woman alone, but closing her eyes and allowing the music to wash gently over them both, Stratton Hild played the song. When she opened her eyes, she saw that the woman had turned toward the window and stopped breathing. She had died with the sound of “Amazing Grace” in her ears.

More recently, Dr. Stratton Hild (PhD in musicology) has been engaged in a fascinating study of plainsong chants that different communities would sing to dying persons in the Middle Ages. There were entire liturgies to comfort the dying. The presupposition was that the whole community of friends and family would accompany the dying person on their journey through death and beyond. No one, it was assumed, should have to die alone. And no one should die without the support of the community of believers who would care for both their bodily requirements and their emotional and spiritual needs.

Medieval people were not alone in this conviction. Many cultures have developed practices to help “accompany” the dying both physically and spiritually. A mother of three children who had for a time been a novice with a religious community mentioned that, when a certain bell sounded in that community, everyone would leave whatever they were doing to come to the room of the dying sister. The entire community (spilling out into the hallway) would then sing a chant while the person died.

Most of us in the modern secularized world have, it seems, forgotten how to deal with the dying. Our tendency is to lock the dying person away in a room so that no one can see this “failure” of our modern technology.

. . .

The Church, I am now convinced, should offer its help and the consoling presence of the Body of Christ not only in burial, but throughout the entire process of dying. And by “the Church,” I don’t just mean clerics.

I don’t mean to diminish the importance of priests and nuns. I can think of few things more comforting in the hospital than seeing a nurse who is also a religious sister in her habit. Catholics used to see that all the time. We never do anymore. (Why?) But priests and nuns cannot do everything; they cannot do what only a community can do. And we should not presume to “off-load” this work on them out of our sight the way we have off-loaded it onto doctors and nurses.

The one thing every dying person I’ve known has wanted is to die at home. Not one of them did. And in a hospital, the likelihood of a person getting music, chant, a communal liturgy, or the simple presence of friends and family around-the-clock, is nearly non-existent.

We have allowed ourselves to be atomized by modern culture into little separate units. And when we do that, we have no power against the institutions that promise to care for us, but which are increasingly threatening us. The medical community has an invaluable role to play in treating the dying, but it is only a part. No one should have to die alone, in the hospital, far from home.

Music for the Dying

From the Dominican House of Studies in DC, via Dominicana

Also listen to Leaning on the Everlasting Arms and St. Anne’s Reel

I Shall Not Want, Lyrics

From the love of my own comfort
From the fear of having nothing
From a life of worldly passions
Deliver me O God

From the need to be understood
From the need to be accepted
From the fear of being lonely
Deliver me O God
Deliver me O God

And I shall not want, I shall not want
when I taste Your goodness I shall not want
when I taste Your goodness I shall not want

From the fear of serving others
From the fear of death or trial
From the fear of humility
Deliver me O God
Deliver me O God

Audrey Assad – Wikipedia | web site

Stan Rogers

“I’ve had to learn to go slow, much slower, to take things at the pace of prayer; to stand and to wait.”

Stayin’ Alive- It Takes 2 Inches of Compression at 100 Beats Per Minute

Darius Rucker on YouTube

“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased” (Lk 2:12-14). According to the evangelist, the angels “said” this. But Christianity has always understood that the speech of angels is actually song, in which all the glory of the great joy that they proclaim becomes tangibly present. And so, from that moment, the angels’ song of praise has never gone silent. It continues down the centuries in constantly new forms and it resounds ever anew at the celebration of Jesus’ birth. It is only natural that simple believers would then hear the shepherds singing too, and to this day they join in their caroling on the Holy Night, proclaiming in song the great joy that, from then until the end of time, is bestowed on all people.

— Pope Benedict XVI

It was impossible. Mary may have lived in a time before science, before the polite and clinical agents of reason had scrubbed the angels and demons and desert spirits away from all but the dark outer edges of our minds, but she was a woman — she knew where babies came from and how they got made. She knew that she was a virgin and that she had not become a wife to the man to whom she was engaged. She also knew what being pregnant and unmarried was likely to mean to her — socially, religiously, economically, physically — in first-century Palestine.

She’d probably witnessed her share of stonings.

Religious people sometimes get a pat on the head from their non-believing friends, who say things like, “All that stuff must be very comforting. I wish I could believe it.” But why would Mary have wished to believe it when the angel Gabriel visited her with that joyous and terrible announcement — “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus; He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High” — when it would have been so much more comforting to believe that she’d simply had a strange dream? “Mary was greatly troubled at his words,” Luke’s gospel says.

“Do not be afraid,” the angel said. Easy for you to say, Gabriel.

. . .

But step away for a moment from the manger scene at the Christmas pageant, which surely does not smell like a real barn smells, and dwell for a moment in the world of real people: the terrified young woman, her uncertain husband-to-be, the worried politician, the simple shepherds and great holy men alike wondering in the backs of their minds if they were maybe kidding themselves, if they might possibly have it all wrong, if they’d misunderstood something along the way. “Be not afraid.” Maybe they could endure the terror of the night and the cold, the rigors and dangers of travel, even the threat of Herod’s sword — but what of that other fear, the fear that they’d made a mistake, that this was all a bizarre misunderstanding or the work of credulous fanatics? A manger is a feed-trough for livestock. “Feed my sheep,” He would later say, to confused and fearful people still not quite getting the point.

“Well, they had faith,” we tell ourselves. “They believed.” As though these little words put together in that order would be enough to exorcise doubt, terror, and the unbearable loneliness at the heart of this story. (“All that stuff must be very comforting. I wish I could believe it.”) Try to imagine the physical facts of birth in that setting, the rigors of the long road to Bethlehem and the long road home.

‘He Himself Carried the Fire‘

The Choir of Saint Luke’s Ordinariate Parish, Washington DC