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November 22, 2024By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press
SHREWSBURY – Surrendering to God can be challenging, as composer Francesca LaRosa illustrated with her story about struggling with infertility.
She led the annual retreat sponsored by the Commission for Women of the Diocese of Worcester Saturday at St. Anne Parish.
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A preparation for Advent and Christmas, the retreat included Mass, audience participation, and group sharing. It drew more than 100 women from the Worcester diocese, elsewhere in Massachusetts, New York and New Hampshire, said Pamela Ashmankas, women’s commission treasurer.
Father Adam R. Reid, St. Anne’s pastor, set the stage in his homily about dispositions that can enhance one’s relationship with Jesus and the Blessed Mother.
Adopting “an attitude of littleness” we, like Mary, are comfortable with who we are, in our smallness before God, he explained. We regularly acknowledge that we are adopted children of God, who created us so he could love us. We are to know, love and serve him and spend eternity with him.
Tanya Connor | CFP
Judy Haley, a choir member at Holy Family of Nazareth Parish in Leominster, gives composer Francesca LaRosa a CD of her music at the retreat, as fellow choir member Brigitte Morin watches. “It excites me,” Ms. Haley said of the retreat. “I want to know how other people get their music … I get mine in dreams.”
Father Reid encouraged listeners to apply the dispositions of trust and obedience to their “to do” lists, seeking God’s will rather than trying to jam too much into their schedules. He also suggested having wonder and awe at creation and God’s work in our lives.
Ms. LaRosa shared about God’s work in her life.
At age 9 she started playing music at Mass with her father in Indianapolis, where she still lives, she said. Her parents encouraged her to write songs for church, and she recorded her first album in eighth grade.
After she graduated from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where she studied music education, her pastor asked her to be the parish music director. She protested that she was not a liturgist, but finally took the job and got young people involved in music, expanding the youth ministry from 30 to more than 200 members in her three-and-one-half years there, she said.
Starting to record her own music again, she sought a music producer. Discouraged at not finding one through her audition for the “American Idol” television competition, she returned home and reluctantly went to a Bible study, where she met producer David Rohrer.
They married in 2019, and she quit the music director job she loved, feeling called to write more of her own music instead.
But in 2020 her music events at churches were cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic and she struggled with infertility.
Photo courtesy of Pamela Ashmankas
Composer Francesca LaRosa, third from left, gathers with members of the Commission for Women of the Diocese of Worcester – Anne Dowen, Susan Zybert, Nancy Hughes, Pamela Ashmankas and Joan Talbot – at the retreat they sponsored Nov. 16 at St. Anne Parish in Shrewsbury.
She questioned God: “Why did you lead me out of this job? Why can’t we have kids?” But she couldn’t hear him.
Then she came upon Psalm 89 and composed a melody for the words “Forever I will sing the goodness of the Lord,” despite not feeling like singing that day. She realized the Psalmist David had lost children but nevertheless focused on God’s goodness.
“I want you to focus on the goodness of God,” Ms. LaRosa told listeners. “Let’s sing this together.” She encouraged them further, and exclaimed, “Oh, I love singing with you!”
After composing this tune, she told her husband she felt God was asking her to write music for the Psalms. But publishers’ websites said they weren’t accepting new music settings for Psalms. She felt like giving up.
About three weeks later she received an email from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which her husband had contacted on her behalf. The USCCB provided her with someone from the International Commission on English in the Liturgy to help her self-publish her Psalm settings, she said. She and her husband created a YouTube channel to share these settings, for which they got three weekly views – from her mother and their grandmothers. Now views for these Psalm settings, approved by the USCCB and ICEL and used around the world, exceed 7 million, she said.
On a more personal level, she said she saw six OB-GYNs in five and one-half years, but they couldn’t help her.
She cried and remained in bed for three days around Christmastime, thinking about the crib and rocking chair she had and how there was no room in the inn for baby Jesus.
When she attended a composers’ retreat, singer-songwriter Steve Angrisano encouraged her to write a song for teenagers suffering from depression.
She sang the song she wrote in response, “Calling You Back Home,” at last Saturday’s retreat and asked participants to sing it, laying hands on each other. She said she wrote it last year and started sharing it around the country.
“Then this year in February I found eight of the women in my life are expecting,” she said.
“What a gift from God,” but painful, given her infertility.
“This is my year of surrender,” she decided.
She asked listeners to clench, then slowly open, their fists, singing with her another song she wrote: “Oh Jesus, I surrender myself to you. Take care of everything.”
The day after she wrote that song, her friends urged her to see Dr. Christopher Stroud, a Natural Procreative Technology doctor.
At his office there were pictures of babies and of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Christian music played. Ms. LaRosa felt hope. She said Dr. Stroud thought she had endometriosis, which can affect fertility. The day after she finished filming the last of her Psalm settings for the three-year liturgical Sunday cycle, he operated on her.
After the surgery, she no longer had abdominal pain, and now says, “I know that there’s a child out there that’s waiting for us.” (She hopes to conceive and is also open to adoption.)
Ms. LaRosa had retreatants discuss in small groups their thoughts about surrender, Mary’s “yes” to being Jesus’ mother, and what they might do for Advent. She shared a song being released Nov. 29, which features Mary’s Magnificat, written by her and Sarah Hart, who gave last year’s women’s commission retreat.
