Sing to Life
Dementia is awful. When one person around us faces the deterioration of brain function, it usually involves everyone around them. Increasingly around the world, music is being used as therapy. Music has the power to touch our souls, lift our spirits, and to delay mental decline. Studies suggest that music improves cognitive function by stimulating areas in the brain related to memory recall. This is why, whenever I visit a nursing home, the residents can often sing every verse to Amazing Grace without remembering their birthday.
A friend of mine, who struggles with cognitive decline, said to me “singing is the last thing I know how to do.” Recently, I attended her performance. She was not lying… it was stunning! Suddenly, for a moment, she was completely her familiar self. Singing brought her to life!
If you’ve ever had an unfortunate experience of accompanying someone through the agonizing stages of death, you’ll know that hearing is also one of the last sensory functions to go. I think God knows what God is doing. It cannot be a coincidence that hearing music and singing music are designed to stay with us until the final stages of life.
Notice, the act of both hearing and singing requires two people. We are meant to be beside one another, in a loving community, at every stage of life. I invite you to flip open your closest Bible. Do you see all the paragraphs that are indented? Those are meant to be sung! As a community of faith, our mission goes hand-in-hand with singing. There’s no doubt that our choir and Juliana bring life to our community but so do all our voices when we lift them together.
If there’s one thing that I am certain about, it’s that death comes for us all. None of us are getting out of here alive. What matters most is that we do not face the Cross alone. When we are afraid, we sing together. When we are overcome with joy, we sing together. When we are stressed, overworked, or outraged… we sing together. May our Holy Week be filled with songs! May our music rattle through the rafters. We are not just singing for pleasure. We are singing to literally bring life into the world.
Belting a tune,
Pastor Lucas
Photo by Lorenzo Spoleti