I am sometimes asked how my training as a professional musician has influenced priestly ministry. For one, my previous experience as a parish church musician has helped me to understand pastoral care. And chanting the liturgy is one way in which I can use musical skills in liturgical service. I have also found that a musician’s understanding of performance—in the best sense of the word—directly impacts celebrating and officiating liturgies. Presiding at a liturgy requires that the presider use body and voice to draw the congregation into reverence, prayer, and worship. But there is yet one more aspect of professional musical training that has influenced not just priestly ministry for me but also my own spiritual life. And that is the art of practicing.
From an early age, I learned the discipline of practicing, and I use the word discipline quite intentionally. Practicing is not always fun. Practice can, in fact, be very tedious. My earliest teachers taught me to turn a metronome on, slowly at first, with incremental increases in tempo until a technically difficult piece could be performed with ease. My first organ teacher was one of the best teachers of technique I know. When I first started learning the organ, I only practiced boring pedal exercises for months. Then I was allowed to put right hand and pedal together, then left hand and pedal, then hands together, and only after all that could I put both hands and pedal together. And then, it was as if I had always known the piece. Everything just fit together, and it felt very good.
One of the best testaments to the efficacy of the training I received is that even now, when I have very little time to practice, I can pull a difficult piece I learned twenty years ago out and play it after a modest amount of practice time. What I learned so many years ago is still there, in my muscle memory, in my heart, in my imagination. And that feels wonderful.
And this is very much like the art of learning to pray. The discipline of praying gets into our bones, our hearts, and imaginations. Prayer is frequently not easy. It can be boring. It can even feel tedious. And it takes a lot of discipline. Prayer requires that we show up to pray, make time to pray, and pray especially when it’s the last thing we want to do. I’m so thankful that my parents taught me how to pray. At first, I memorized a few prayers and said them each night before bed. But that rigid structure has allowed me to maintain spiritual structure in my life, has led me to love the Daily Office, and has spurred me to engage in more contemplative types of prayer. I am so glad that my parents brought me to church, every week, unless I was seriously ill. As a child, there were many times when I didn’t want to go to church, but now, I’m so thankful that my parents insisted that I go. I would feel completely out-of-sorts if I had to miss Mass for whatever reason.
The season of Lent is a time for going deeper into spiritual disciplines. But this can often lead to taking on more than we are capable of doing or should do. We would rather play the difficult piece of music at full tempo, hands and feet together without doing the hard, slow, tedious practice beforehand. Lent can easily become a time of diving headfirst into a plethora of spiritual practices for a week before crashing and burning. This is not the point of Lent, nor is it how we should approach any foray into spiritual practices. Lent is, more helpfully, a time to gently bring spiritual structure into our lives rather than trying to be superstars in spirituality.
Spiritual discipline starts slowly and with small efforts, like intentionally carving out time for prayer, giving attention to the Lord’s Day, and making God a conscious part of our lives from sunrise to sunset. This is both simple and challenging. It’s rarely glamorous. But through discipline and practice mixed with compassion for oneself, one’s life begins to change. One begins to see, in surprising ways, God’s hand and hear God’s voice in new and clarifying ways. Spiritual practices help keep our egos in check so that God becomes primary and God is allowed to speak in God’s good time. We find ourselves decreasing so that God may increase in our lives.
The discipline of spiritual practices is not relegated only to Lent, but Lent is an excellent time to make a renewed effort to bring structure to our spiritual lives. In these remaining days of Lent, what can you do to make yourself more available to God, who is always available to us? How will you offer yourself as malleable clay in the hands of the Potter? May God give you the grace and strength to pattern your life after the one who came so that we might have life and have it abundantly, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle