Joreen Kelly directs the choir at Good Shepherd Parish in Camp Hill during a recent rehearsal.About two dozen parishioners gather in the choir loft of Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Camp Hill on Thursday evenings. Outside of the parish, they live different lives filled with various challenges and moments of celebration. When they come together, they share a common purpose of praising God through song and having a good time.
“Nobody wants to join a sourpuss choir,” Joreen Kelly, Good Shepherd’s director of liturgical music, says.
Kelly should know; she’s been leading choirs in the Diocese of Harrisburg for 50 years. She recalls her path to the ministry not as a goal she set out to achieve, but one carved by a love of God and music. In sixth grade, she began singing the Latin Funeral Mass. A year later, a nun told her she was going to become an organist. And a few years later, while she was a student at Bishop McDevitt High School, the departure of the School Sisters of Notre Dame led to a call from the school’s priest.
“Father Mattern looked at me and said, ‘You’re it,’” Kelly recalls with a smile.
At the time, Kelly was unsure what she wanted to do with her life, but she eventually realized teaching music was her calling. She joined the staff of St. Catherine Labouré in Harrisburg as the parish’s choir director in 1975 and its school faculty a year later upon her graduation from Lebanon Valley College. Again, the move seemed natural because she always wanted to teach in a Catholic school.
Kelly prides herself on blending new and traditional styles of music. She remembers the strangeness of having to sing “Kumbaya, My Lord” and “Gonna Sing My Lord” with a straight face shortly after Vatican II, but decades later realizes those groundbreaking songs did not erase the Church’s musical past.
“I’ll do a song that is 100 years old in the same Mass as one that is new,” she said.
Adapting to change has kept Kelly spry. In the early 2000s, she purchased a laptop with a goal of teaching herself the Finale music program. She figured it would be easier for her choir members to understand sheet music if it were not handwritten. The school’s principal had another idea for the computer’s use.
“Sister Suzanne saw me walking with a laptop, thought I knew something, and said ‘You are going to teach PowerPoint to the eighth graders,’” she recalled.
The teacher and her students learned together and built a weather report using the school’s closed-circuit television.
“My best weatherman was Dan Tomaso, who now works for Channel 27,” she said.
Joreen Kelly sits at the organ at Good Shepherd Church in Camp Hill. This year marks her 50th year in Diocesan music ministry.Kelly thought she was being called to retirement in 2019 and submitted her resignation to St. Catherine Labouré. As she had been reminded so often throughout her life, God had other plans, and she soon found herself on the West Shore at Good Shepherd.
She spends several hours each week reflecting on the readings, selecting songs that convey their message, and collaborating with choir members to deliver a meaningful performance. Her part is just one of many.
“When a Mass works best, the music, the homily, the readings, the prayers, all form the message,” she said. “There is nothing better than a perfect liturgy.”
Those who attend Good Shepherd will hear its choir sing many songs familiar to Catholics across the country, but occasionally they will hear one unique to a choir led by Kelly. She has been writing music since she was a teenager and sometimes supplements the parish’s music library when she cannot find something that meets her expectations.
“My mother used to tell me, ‘Don’t complain about something unless you can do it better yourself,’” she said.
World Library Publications published her song “O Come and Mourn With Me” in 2016 and “For His Mercy Endures Forever” this year.
“I read somewhere that your 60s and 70s are the most creative time in your life, so I want to embrace that,” she said.
Kelly credits her husband John’s patience and understanding as key components of her success as a choir director. The job requires nights, weekends and holidays.
“Every Christmas of our married life, he has been a single dad,” she said.
She and John can occasionally be found performing together at local restaurants as the husband-and-wife duo Dovetail. For Joreen, it is another opportunity to embrace her passion.
“I spend my entire morning, noon and night doing music,” she said. “I can’t think of anything better. I love doing it.”
(Photos by Alex J. Hayes, a freelance reporter for The Witness.)
By Alex J. Hayes, The Catholic Witness
