Brother Mickey McGrath, an artist and author from Camden, delivered the July 12 plenum address at the recent National Association of Pastoral Musicians Convention in Reno, Nev.
The title of his presentation, “You Gotta Make Your Own Kind of Music: How a Physicist, an Opera Singer and a Houseplant Led Me to a Cosmic Christ,” took audience members on a musical tour of how a lowly begonia plant intersected with the lives of renowned physicist Albert Einstein and famed African American singer Marian Anderson.
Brother Mickey, an Oblate of St. Francis de Sales, began his hourlong address by posting the lyrics to John Denver’s “Annie’s Song,” explaining, “God’s grace is everywhere, even in pop music. Music and beauty help us move forward.”
During the pandemic, a friend gifted Brother Mickey with a cutting of a begonia plant to ease the pain of his brother’s death, the ashes of whom he had to wait at least six months to bury. “We buried him on his 70th birthday,” he said, explaining that his brother was a child of the 1960s. As such, Brother Mickey changed the presentation’s soundtrack to The Beatles’ “Let It Be.”
Learning the plant had belonged to Albert Einstein while he lived and worked in Princeton, Brother Mickey researched the life of the famed Jewish physicist and learned he had escaped Hitler’s Nazi regime for the United States along with his wife, child and secretary. Einstein was horrified at how his adopted home was treating Black citizens and made a point to meet Anderson, a south Philadelphia-based opera singer, herself no stranger to prejudice.
“Einstein welcomed her into his home, and played the violin for her,” Brother Mickey said. “You don’t have to be in church to have music [be] a prayer.”
In 1954, Anderson became the first African American to sing in a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. Millions heard her on the radio, including a 14-year-old boy named Martin Luther King Jr., Brother Mickey revealed, switching the address’ soundtrack to “What a Wonderful World,” popularized by Louis Armstrong.
“Those songs are like psalms,” Brother Mickey asserted. “They praise God. It’s all about beauty; it connects us as humans. Music and art unite us.”
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