The gentle summer day my friend made her journey from home to hospice was marked by a little parade of loved ones. As the medics carried her to the ambulance, her sisters, husband, and daughter filed out into the sunshine behind her, and for reasons I cannot explain, I felt the need to sing. Perhaps it was the significance of the moment combined with the warmth of the sun, but more likely it was because I knew my friend’s faith and the comfort it would speak to her. So, even though I’ve never been much of a singer, I unselfconsciously began to discant “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”: “I bind unto myself today, the strong name of the Trinity, by invocation of the same, the Three in One and One in Three . . .” *

Saint Augustine of Hippo is widely credited with the saying “The person who sings, prays twice.” Since all we have is a quotation without context, we don’t know what led Augustine to coin that wonderful little phrase. We do know there is something pensive, and sacred, about the process of singing. As we become aware of our every breath, and our words slow to a rhythm not our own, as our voices glide (or sometimes stumble) across notes and sounds that add texture and beauty to ordinary human speech, singing becomes an intimate, and vulnerable, form of prayer.

This may be why so many people who are not in the least shy about their speaking voices will either claim to be unable to sing at all or are demure about singing in public. There is, after all, a shocking intimacy involved in singing, as music massages and undergirds the language of poetry we encounter in the lyrics.  So much can fracture the singing voice, so much frailty can reveal itself.

Shyness, in the moment of my friend’s final journey, seemed a foolish indulgence and was rendered irrelevant as she was carried out into the bold contrast of a sunny afternoon. It was my voice that sang, but the words I knew were hers. Bound for only a little longer to earthly things—the beauty of creation, the joy of her loved ones—she had long ago bound her life to that of her savior and would journey at last to live only unto the Lord.

Often, when a Christian dies, or at least when he or she has shared their preparations for death, families speak of gathering around the bedside and singing hymns. It’s a romantic notion, but in reality, it is one I find most families are ill-prepared to carry out. The logistics of singing together are often too much to orchestrate. Who has the words? Who knows the tune? What was Grandma’s favorite hymn anyway? Or perhaps we know her favorite hymn, but it doesn’t seem to match the moment. And how on earth can people who aren’t used to singing together overcome their own shyness and rise to an occasion like this?

It was not until I was again attending a woman who was preparing to breathe her last, again in a hospice setting, but this time a woman I barely knew, for whom I was present in a pastoral care role, that I began to see what I had overlooked before. The rites of the Church in these situations are startlingly intimate. A person receives a final anointing of oil; human touch is part of the experience. The failing body is blessed—as it has been blessed countless times in a faithful life in the ordinary moments of the Church—and the fullness of the person, body and soul are commended to the Lord.

During this process, the minimally responsive patient acknowledged with the tiniest of crooked smiles the voices of her grandchildren as they announced themselves to her. Her husband held her hand and patted her arm. She was transformed, in the moment, from a mature woman to seeming almost as an infant. Her family and her faith community were present, not to watch her die, but to soothe her passing.

In the moment, it seemed right to ask her family if she had a favorite hymn. She did; a familiar one, as most people’s favorites are. In the moment, it seemed nothing more than singing an infant to sleep for us to sing what we could of her favorite hymn. In the moment, the frailty of our voices did not matter. No one cared if we had musical skills. It didn’t matter that no one had rehearsed and most everyone would not know all the words. What mattered was a family, singing to sleep their wife and the mother and grandmother who once cradled them. “Amazing Grace,” in the moment, sounded sweet indeed.

Three days later, a granddaughter played the same song on the flute at her grandmother’s funeral. A week later, the family still spoke of singing “Amazing Grace” in that hospice room. For years, perhaps, they will each remember that they gave this last gift of intimate tenderness to this woman who had loved them all their lives.

Somehow, in the act of singing, frailty and intimacy mixed, and another life was offered back to the God who made her. In that moment, that was all that mattered.