As was the case for many Catholics, Deacon Bob Wagner’s season of Lent was far beyond the norm.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic stay-at-home order, Deacon Wagner was unable to attend Mass at his home parish, St. Wenceslaus in New Prague, or participate in his current volunteer commitments, which include leading support groups for the separated, divorced and grieving, and conducting Communion services at a local nursing home.

So, Deacon Wagner, 67, who recently retired from 42 years of church ministry and has long worked with music, began a new mission, drawing upon both his experience of caring for the vulnerable and his musical talents.

“I began to compose music that I thought might grant some feeling of peace,” Deacon Wagner said. “Music has the ability to calm us during our most frantic times, and allows God to embrace and comfort us.”

Since the pandemic began, Deacon Wagner has composed 10 works on the piano, dedicating his music as an aural prayer of calm and peace for those suffering through illness, anxiety, unease, loss of loved ones, loss of work and loss of security.

One of the songs, “Prelude For Those Who Are Suffering,” was composed for the people trapped aboard a cruise ship anchored off the coast of San Francisco in the early days of the pandemic.

“The song is in simple AABA form, similar to a hymn, and unified by a four-measure harmonic ostinato — a repeated pattern of chords,” Deacon Wagner said. “The combination of the melody and chords elicits the empathy that welled up within me for the plight of those trapped on that cruise ship. … There is a feeling of isolation, heartache, the notion that one has been abandoned by others, and having little to no one to whom to turn for help. The question, ‘What do I do now?’ underlies the music, and the answer to that question is to trust only in God.”

A native of Chicago, Deacon Wagner began piano lessons in the third grade, picking up brass instruments along the way before zeroing in only on piano, earning a music degree from the then-College of St. Thomas in St. Paul. He went on to graduate from The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity with a masters in pastoral studies, and was ordained a permanent deacon for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis in 1994. He has served in numerous ministries, including music educator, catechist, director of liturgy and music, director of pastoral ministry, parish life coordinator and pastoral associate.

Deacon Wagner’s lifetime of compositions includes 30 choral settings of psalms for church choirs. His 109 piano compositions, which he calls “psalm offerings,” were composed for others as gifts or in memory of those he has admired and loved.

“Like an artist (uses) a variety of primal colors, combination of colors, brush strokes, shapes and imagination, a composer uses tempo, note lengths, crescendos, decrescendos, dynamics and articulation such as accent, staccato and rhythm to paint an emotion or a story, only in sound,” Deacon Wagner said. “Composing is certainly helping me through this pandemic.”

A father of four children and grandfather to five, Deacon Wagner is married to his wife of 45 years, Ruthie, a retired nurse, whom he met while attending then-
St. Bernard’s High School in St. Paul. He’s experienced some major health issues over the years, including injuries suffered in a head-on car collision in 2002.

“It nearly killed me and injured my right hand so badly that the surgeon could only restore 60% of its use,” Deacon Wagner said. “That pretty much ended my playing piano professionally.”

“I mourn losing some of the use of my hand, but rejoice in that I once was able to perform at a very high level, and God has shown me a new way by which I can perform music,” he said.

That new way: composing music on his computer. Deacon Wagner’s new project, “A Paschal Journey,” is a collection of 13 songs to help bring some clarity to people who are in the midst of suffering due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“As St. Paul writes in Romans, we are immersed into a pattern of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection,” Deacon Wagner said. “As a nation dealing with COVID-19, we are now immersed into the Paschal Mystery of Christ.”

“There are many individual paschal journeys happening now throughout our nation,” he added, “and my hope is that parts of these 13 songs will impact others along the way.”

HYMNS FOR NEIGHBORS

Deacon Wagner isn’t the only local Catholic writing music.

Philip Robert Nelson, a retired music teacher and choir director in public schools and longtime music volunteer and minister at several parishes and schools in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, is offering recordings of his own faith-filled compositions on YouTube.

It’s an effort 20 years in the making to evangelize and teach the faith, and it can also offer comfort, reflection and support to people staying home to help prevent spread of the novel coronavirus, said Nelson, a fourth-degree member of Knights of Columbus Council 10138 in Coon Rapids and Knights Assembly 529 in Maplewood, who is tying his project to the national Knights’ coronavirus initiative “Leave No Neighbor Behind.”

“People (are encouraged) not to go church if they are over 65, so the Knights are calling on them, providing food, visiting, reaching out,” said Nelson, 71. “I decided that, here I am, a retired music teacher, I’ll do my part.”

Nelson is a member of Epiphany in Coon Rapids with his wife, Cheryl. Nelson was inspired by St. John Paul II’s idea of the new evangelization, he said, and for years he has been composing songs based on Scripture and Church teaching and using them in his service to youth groups and student choirs at parishes and schools including St. Alphonsus in Brooklyn Center, St. Peter in Forest Lake and Academy of Holy Angels in Richfield.

Spurred by a 2019 Pew Research Center study that found fewer than one-third of Catholics believe the Eucharist is the actual body and blood of Jesus, he began last year recording the compositions with his wife playing the piano and Katie Jonza of Guardian Angels in Oakdale as vocalist.

They finished the recordings in December, with titles such as “The Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity,” “Mary, Queen of Heaven” and “Eucharistic Miracle,” and in March began releasing them as music videos with religious images, just as COVID-19 cases were increasing in Minnesota and stay-at-home orders went into effect. The music videos can be found by searching Nelson’s name at youtube.com.

Now, Nelson said, his apostolate of music with the visual arts and Church teaching and the Knights’ COVID-19 outreach are combined in a fortuitous way.

“This is a perfect fit,” he said.

— Joe Ruff