Our first Nourishment Day brought together around 35 pastoral musicians from across the parishes for a day of prayer, conversation, food, friendship and, inevitably, a great deal of singing!

The theme was Living Music: “Music doesn’t live on the page. It lives in us.” After all, a hymn book left sitting on a shelf has never sung a note. Music needs breath, hands, voices, ears, hearts and occasionally someone brave enough to start when nobody else does.

The day began in prayer, with a reminder that pastoral music is about much more than getting the right notes in the right order. In a beautiful ritual, the musicians blessed one another’s hands with holy water, the hands that play, conduct, turn pages, press buttons, organise folders and occasionally frantically search for the missing piece of music five minutes before Mass.

 

With the feast of St Mary of the Cross MacKillop close at hand, the group also reflected on her wonderfully practical spirituality. Never see a need without doing something about it could almost be the unofficial motto of the parish musician: see an empty music stand, fill it; hear a congregation struggling, help them; discover there is no cantor, take a deep breath and start singing!

The morning offered time for formation, reflection and conversation about why pastoral musicians do what they do, led by Paul Mason from the Diocese of Wollongong. With their minds fully nourished, the group moved to another essential component of pastoral ministry, lunch, enjoying a fabulous home-cooked meal with plenty of time for conversation and fellowship.

Then came the afternoon’s activity: singing!

And what a joy it was simply to sing. The group explored repertoire, discovered new music and enjoyed the glorious sound that happens when a room full of people decides to breathe at approximately the same time and sing in roughly the same key.

The day reminded everyone of something easily forgotten amid rehearsals, rosters, photocopying and Sunday-morning scrambling:

The music isn’t the page: music is the people.

Nourishment Day gave those who spend so much of the year nourishing the prayer of others a chance to be nourished themselves, to laugh, learn, pray, eat and sing together.

And then they returned to their parishes, well fed, well sung and hopefully ready for another verse!