I unlock the door to a hot, quiet church. The lights are off. I am alone in the cavernous 127-year-old church.

I lock myself back in and turn on some lights. I breathe in the quiet of the empty Catholic church that I have attended since I was a child. The images on the massive stained-glass windows stare back at me, making me feel more welcome than people do on a Sunday.  I am filled with the Spirit in ways that I cannot explain. A peace comes to me in the quiet. I climb the twisty, carpeted stairs to the choir loft, crunching the plaster that has fallen from a deteriorating stained-glass window. I pull out my St. Michael the Archangel keychain again and open the choir loft door. The Kawai piano and the hybrid organ (digital and pipes) greet me.

This is my happy place. I am a church organist. I play for a number of Catholic Churches and served some Protestant churches when I was younger. There have been many choir lofts, many different types of organs, many different congregations, cantors and pastors to please. But, the organ never fails me.

I began studying organ at Penn State University in 1983. I was in a music building practice room going over and over J.S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier on the piano when a thin matter-of-fact, 50-something professor peeked her head in my room and said, “if you can play those, you could play pipe organ.” I started playing the piano when I was 10 years old on an old black upright my parents found in a church basement for $15. My first teacher was in her 80s. I took lessons in her home – which felt like my grandmother’s, with decades-old furniture and cookies and milk when I was finished. She put little gold stars on the pages of my John Thompson’s Early Learning piano books. My parents never had to tell me to practice. It was a place to accomplish goals, a place to let go of the stress of the day, a place to figure out who I was. I didn’t need quiet to practice. I could pound out scales, Chopin and Rachmaninoff with the sweeper running, the wall phone ringing and my brothers running through the house looking for their baseball cleats.

But, I did like to be left alone – just me and my piano.

Music provides discipline in a disordered world. It provides expression for an aching soul.  It makes sense out of the senseless. Ludwig van Beethoven said, “Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.”

As I write this piece in a doctor’s waiting room, while my teenage daughter undergoes some testing, instrumental piano is being piped into the space. My soul claims the notes, even though I haven’t produced them. An instrument will do that to you – it becomes a part of you that speaks what you can’t and fills pockets of your soul that long to be filled.

As I moved through junior high and high school, there were more teachers, more practicing, theory tests and recitals. My parents invested in a decent Baldwin piano. In high school, I was the choir accompanist. I often went to the band room to practice during my lunch hour. After school hours were filled with swim team practice and work; I rarely had time to practice at night.  Most of what I played was classical music. Recitals were stressful. I hated memorizing the music and sitting in front of everyone for a performance. There was always something a little “off” between me and the piano. I was a good pianist, but, something was missing.

When that Penn State professor stuck her head in my practice room I didn’t realize how she would change my life. I think about her every time I play – how a chance encounter and a person being willing to speak out, to invite someone into their world, can make such a dramatic difference.  I quit taking (college credit) piano lessons with the cranky, old white-haired, bespectacled professor who did nothing to inspire me. My new organ instructor, a tenured faculty member with a PhD, immediately became one of my favorite people. I wanted nothing more than to please her. Her short, black, hair closely framed her face and her dark brown eyes always seemed to be holding onto something ornery and mysterious. She was a staunch Lutheran who studied at Eastman and Oberlin colleges. She spent her entire career at Penn State. She was the only organ instructor; yet our department was quite active. Music majors, journalism students like me and quite a number of engineers took her for-credit lessons and participated in the Student Guild of American Organists.

Lessons began with repetitive drills for the pedal board and an introduction to the black leather-bottomed shoes that must be worn to play the organ. Ten years of piano study made the manual exercises easier.

When the hands and feet came together, it was like magic. Playing the piano was like visiting the beach without getting in the water. It was beautiful but I wasn’t fully immersed in it.

When the pedals and the manuals came together on the organ, I knew what it meant to be one with the music. I had found the instrument that felt like home. For the next four years, I would trudge from my dorm room in East Halls, across Parking Lot 80 (and later an apartment even farther away on Beaver Ave.), to the music building to practice the organ. At that time, Penn State had numerous practice rooms with small pipe organs in each. Time was lost when I practiced – usually two hours a day. My lessons were juried, which meant a recital had to be performed in front of the music staff before you could move to the next level. The music building auditorium housed a Holtkamp pipe organ, installed in 1963. It had 1,967 pipes and won an architectural award for its fantastic design. I played my senior honors recital on that organ, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor – one of the most famous pieces of Baroque music ever written, as my primary piece. I practiced that piece until my neck ached from hours on the organ bench. But, when I got it, the music consumed me. When you play the organ, your whole body is involved. From the minute you hit the “on” switch and the air from the electric bellows rushes through the pipes, it feels like it is “alive.” Electronic organs do not have this same quality.

It is believed that the first pipe organ was invented by a Greek engineer named Ctesibius of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC. It did not find its place in churches until the 10th century. The Benedictine order of monks first installed pipe organs in their cathedrals in an effort to make their abbeys centers of cultural and religious fulfillment. The action of a pipe organ is technical and mechanical. Each ‘stop’ at the organ console represents a set of pipes (a rank) of a particular tone color, with a different pipe for every note on the keyboard. Pulling the stop activates a slider under that specific set of pipes on the wind chest and particular sounds are made – violins, trumpets, flutes, clarinets, oboes, principals. A well-designed pipe organ is a full symphony of sound.

Playing a Bach Prelude and Fugue at a full crescendo in a church with admirable acoustics is a spiritual experience like no other. When the last notes are played and the reverberation continues, my soul melts into the music and dissolves like sugar in water. The piece is over but it remains a part of me. As a church organist, I primarily play sacred music, Mass parts and a lot of hymns. It can get boring. Rarely a Mass goes by that I do not think of my college organ teacher. She drilled Bach and Cesar Franck into our heads, but she insisted that every single lesson include hymn playing. It was easy compared to the classical music, but, she wouldn’t hear of us saying that. “Almost every one of you will go on to be church musicians. It is the rare organ student who makes a career with a symphony or as a solo performer,” she would admonish. “You must learn the hymns and you must learn how to play them so people can follow along.” And as J.S. Bach said:  “The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.”  Our professor never let us believe that our music was a selfish pursuit. She wanted us to leave the shelter of Happy Valley and be able to use what we had learned to inspire souls.

And so, I play the organ for several Masses every Sunday and for a lot of funerals. I have told my husband that if he has “On Eagle’s Wings” played at my funeral, I will haunt him. I often yearn for something more challenging than “Gift of Finest Wheat” or the “Prayer of St. Francis.” I learn new postludes and preludes to keep my musical brain from atrophy. I try to remember that what seems boring to me might be what takes someone in the congregation to a deeper place of prayer. That is my job. I still find my own spirit lifted when I play “Be Thou My Vision,” “Alleluia! Sing to Jesus,” “Crown Him with Many Crowns” or “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

In the poor community where I live, pipe organs are dying. Churches cannot afford the regular upkeep and constant tuning. Pastoral councils don’t see the need to spend that much money on music ministry. The beautiful Holtkamp I played my senior recital on was taken out and sent to a church in Philadelphia. My organ teacher retired and she was not replaced. The practice organs are gone too. The pipe organ at my home church, where I play funerals, is a hybrid now. The small pipe organ at another church where I also play is pitifully out of tune and damaged. The music is not a priority. Maybe souls aren’t either.