Music has a powerful ability to raise the human spirit. Even the simplest collection of notes and rhythms can evoke joy, strength, and hope. This is just one profound lesson I’ve learned during my time teaching piano at St. Vincent’s Cardinal Manning Center (CMC). CMC is a small homeless shelter (65 beds) for single men in the Los Angeles’ Skid Row area, home to the largest homeless population in the nation. CMC primarily focuses on helping men transition from the streets into permanent housing. Working at CMC profound lessons can come at you a mile a minute; it’s almost difficult to slow down and process the experience. Piano lessons provide that relaxed one on one time with residents to help me see clarity in the chaos. Usually lessons consist of something as simple as a C major scale, yet it’s in these lessons that I can’t help but see God’s presence transforming our lives. With some clients there are moments where it’s as if God is speaking directly to me. One time in the middle of a lesson, a client stopped playing and adamantly spoke to me: “There is a God. There is a God, Jon. I know there’s a God. And I’ve been given a second chance.” A couple months later, this client, after over a decade of homelessness, had moved into his own apartment, and I was blessed enough to witness his journey. Through the strength he has found in God, his life has been transformed. He has experienced a rebirth. At age fifty, he has discovered the joy of reading books for the first time– he runs a reading club at the center– he regularly attends fitness group to get in shape, and he is working to get his GED. And he is learning to play piano. “You know how they say don’t teach an old dog, new tricks? Well I’m an old dog, but I’m learning.”
Working in Skid Row, every day I am challenged by the problem of evil. If God is all benevolent, how can he allow someplace with as much suffering as Skid Row to exist? One resident that recently moved in offered me a particularly poignant answer to this question. “God didn’t take evil completely out of the world, but do you know what he did? He put people here to slow it down. He didn’t let us feel its full effect. He made organizations like this to help fight the suffering.” I believe God also put music in the world to fight the suffering. I believe it because I can see it in the faces of my students and hear it in the excitement of their voices. My time at CMC has shown me that God can use music to bring light to even the darkest of places.