Tune my heart

Clarisse Mukashumbusho Cechetto remembers how a hymn she learned as a child spoke to her heart when she heard it in her new home in Canada.

I grew up in Rwanda. In the years before the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis, my dad was a devout Christian who never missed any of the very long Sunday services at the small Episcopal church near our home. He especially loved the music. But hymn-singing was not just for Sundays in our family. In the evenings at home, after we finished our supper, he would gather us around him in the living room where we would follow his sweet tenor notes, singing Kinyarwandan words of praise and worship to God. His beautiful voice and our family ritual were well-known in the neighbourhood, and often others would arrive to join in.

People crowded into our house, sitting on the floor, leaning against each other, joining arms and voices. The women’s kitenge cloth dresses blended together in a kaleidoscope of vivid colours. I would close my eyes, letting the music wash over me, singing earnestly, trying to blend my voice with the lovely harmonies that filled the air. In those evenings, I felt something I had no words for. Was it the presence of God? The sense of safe one-ness with my family and our neighbours? The joy of music filling my heart? Perhaps all of those.

But the pleasure of singing hymns was inevitably followed by a somewhat less enjoyable prolonged prayer time. I always hoped that it might be possible to slip away after the singing and skip prayers, but my father made sure to open his eyes periodically to check that all the children were still there. One evening, I noticed a smudge of dirt on my foot that I had missed when I’d quickly washed my feet at the door when I got home. Surely this would be a good enough reason to quietly leave the room. I couldn’t go to bed with dirty feet!

“Clarisse,” my dad stopped mid-prayer. Everyone’s eyes popped open to look. “Where are you going? We’re not finished yet.”

“My feet…” I began. My voice tapered off as I saw the stern look on his face. “I have dirt on my foot.” I ended in a faltering whisper.

“Praying is more important than your dirty foot. Sit down.”

“Yes, daddy.” I closed my eyes, sighed softly, and tried hard to focus on the words of his prayers. Soon my head was nodding. A loud “Amen” woke me up. With a belated echo of “Amen,” I scrambled to my feet and ran towards my bedroom, hoping to get there before my little sister Alice.

“Clarisse,” my dad said with a smile, “Your foot?”

“Yeah, I think it’s OK now. I rubbed all the dirt off.”

“Good, then off to bed you go, and don’t forget to say a prayer of your own before you go to sleep.”

Fast forward to 2010. I had just arrived in Canada. After supper, I gathered downstairs with the people who were becoming my new family: my fiancé, Luke, and his parents. This room, warmed against the chill of the early spring evening by a gas fireplace, was thousands of miles and a lifetime away from my childhood. No flip-flops on my feet here – big fuzzy socks were needed.

Luke’s mom sat down at the piano.

“You know,” she said, leafing through a hymnbook, till she found the song she was looking for, “this is one of my favourite hymns. I love the part where it says ‘tune my heart to sing Your praise.’ I need that every day!”

She began to softly play the first few bars. I closed my eyes and once again I was back in the home where I had grown up. I could hear my father, feel the warmth of family and neighbours crowded around. Tears began to well up and soon escaped from my tightly-closed eyelids. They ran down my cheeks as I remembered all that I had lost. My father’s beautiful voice, silenced by a killer’s machete. My mother and four of my siblings, felled by bullets. I felt my fiancé’s arm pulling me closer to him.

“Clarisse, what is it?” Luke asked. “What’s the matter? Why are you crying?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I sniffled, “it’s just that this is one of the songs my dad would always sing at home when we were little.”

“ ‘Come thou fount of every blessing’ – do you know the words?” Mom asked, hoping she had found someone who loved them as much as she did, and would sing along with her.

“Yes, but only in Kinyarwandan…”

And then, I was not the only one crying. We all sat in tearful awe at the sweet miracle of a song woven faithfully through a Rwandan girl’s childhood by her father: the slender thread which had survived to be picked up again in a new family, a new country, a new language. I knew I was home.

Clarisse Mukashumbusho Cechetto is now an elementary school teacher in London, Ont. She and her husband Luke have two sons. Her mother-in-law Kim Cechetto is a retired college English professor who lives in the London area.