Written by Chaplain Cindy McCalmont

“There is the music of Heaven in all things.”
–Hildegard of Bingen

Many years ago, when I worked as a Chaplain on an Oncology unit of a hospital, I had an experience I still can’t explain. My pager had gone off at 2:00 AM, and I’d made my way bleary-eyed to the hospital. 

When I got there, I found that a young woman had just died, and her mother stood motionless by the bed. “Can you hear it?” the mother had whispered.  I tried to keep the confusion off my face. I didn’t hear anything. The room, the hallway, the ward were absolutely silent. A few seconds passed. I opened my mouth. But before I could say anything, I heard it too.

Music. Tender, haunting, wordless. As if the veil of heaven had been slit and something of the eternal had slipped out. 

Believe me when I say, there was absolutely no source for that music. No television. No radio. No cell phone. I can’t explain it–and yet it has stayed with me all these years–as have other less mystical, but equally improbable moments of music:

• An unhoused man playing hymn after hymn on a junked piano with stuck keys.

• Children in Juarez, Mexico drinking Coca Cola with lime and singing Spanish songs outside their cardboard houses.

• A man with schizophrenia strumming his guitar under a cathedral of redwoods.

In these days when the slash of one man’s pen makes everything seem so fragile, we must continue to focus on the work that needs to be done: medical research; international aid; affordable housing. And the essential work of deepening our connections with one another–especially across all that divides us.

As the HAUMC Chaplain, I’m here to listen, to care, and to support. But I’m also here to bear witness to the one glorious melody of which we’re all a part.

Cindy