This week I will be visiting friends in Chicago and working on a couple of music projects at GIA Publications there.  Hopefully, within the coming months I will be finishing up compositions that will become part of a new collection and recording of liturgical music.  Many of the songs will have first seen the light of day at masses here at St. Matthias parish. 
     People always ask composers what their inspiration is and how one writes a song.  For me, as a composer of liturgical music, my inspiration is our celebration of the liturgy, its musical needs and possibilities.  Also, as a priest-composer my inspiration comes from the many wonderful and challenging experiences I have in ministry.
     People often think that a composer just sits around and waits for inspiration to hit and boom!  A song is born. Ah, would that it could be so simple!  It is on the rare occasion that a composition comes flowing out like that.  But when a composition does come, whether through blood, sweat and tears or through pure inspiration, most composers humbly admit that it may have been written by their hand but it originated from a different place.  Often composers say that the music flows through them.  Those composers of faith would say that this is a gift from God.  When this happens it is a wonderful and humbling experience.
     Recently I attended the eastern regional conference of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians in Stamford, Connecticut.  While hanging out with some of my composer colleagues during the conference it was clear to me that conveying an expression of God’s love, compassion, forgiveness and justice is truly at the heart of the work of so many liturgical composers.  Like the composers of church music in early New England, many of today’s liturgical composers work full time within the church whether as music directors, pastoral associates or priests.  This certainly informs and inspires their compositions because they come forth from lived experience.  Take any composition in our hymnal that was written within the last 40 years or so and you will most likely find behind it a composer who has struggled within his or her own life to come to deepening faith through crisis, joy and most of all music. 
     I write about my composer colleagues today because they are oftentimes the “unsung” heroes of the liturgical movement, always striving through music to give more authentic witnesses to the gospel.  Surely not every composition that makes its way into a hymnal is a gem; however each composer, at least in my experience, crafts their music from a deep sense of discipleship. 
     While we liturgical composers put all this work into our songs we need you in the Assembly to make them come alive! After all, as Oscar Hammerstein once wrote in a lyric: “a song is no song ‘til you sing it”.