Ultimately SICM seeks to plant flowers at the base of a wall. The structure and beauty represented in the promenade and supporting gardens at Oshawa’s Parkwood symbolize something important.

The wall is a symbol not of obstruction, but of challenge: perhaps the challenges presented by the church to its musicians; perhaps the barriers church musicians encounter, and even erect themselves, whenever they seek to transcend the realities of their time and place, and inspire their choirs, ministers and congregations to do the same. The flowers represent those surprising seeds we know can be planted by ordinary people committed to extraordinary causes, with God’s help.

The benefits of SICM may also be understood in gathering. If church musicians must do much of their work alone, in practice, planning and other activities, the all-too-rare act of gathering returns much to them that can become lost in the normal course of their work.

At SICM we pray that God will continue to bless the use the Institute, enabling it to send forth seeds for planting at the foot of many walls. Ideally this will happen through each and every student, by virtue of freeing the individual and making him or her part of a community that may not be too visible from week to week: that of those called to voice the Church’s song to our time and place.

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