42 years of prayer through music

On a recent Sunday morning, Debbie Kelln played the keyboard at the rear of Holy Name Catholic Church in Shattuck, leading the congregation through the hymns and Mass parts.

It has been thus for more than 42 years.

“God gave me this talent, as small as it is,” Kelln said. “I don’t consider myself all that talented. But I can give back.”

She has been giving back since the early 1980s when she and her husband, John, moved their family to Shattuck from Woodward.

Raised in the nearby town of Fargo, Debbie started piano lessons in ninth grade. When Saint Peter Catholic Church in Woodward installed a pipe organ years later, she “couldn’t wait to get my hands on the thing” and began lessons.

She was taken by the instrument, going so far as to lay dinner knives in a pattern on the floor of the house to help her learn the organ pedals.

She played occasionally at Saint Peter but said she never planned to play regularly for Mass. That changed after the move to Shattuck, when the pastor, Father Alan Loth, stopped her one Sunday morning.

“I sat in the pew, and Father Loth eyed me as I was coming down the aisle and he waited at the door,” she said. “When I got to the door he said, ‘Debbie, why are you sitting there?’ 

“That was it.”

Debbie has been playing ever since, and gratis at that. The instrument is a clavinova, which produces organ and piano sounds. For the past 35 years at least, she has been joined by cantor Glenn Dorr.

“It’s real easy,” Dorr said. “We’ve been doing it so long together, we always know what the other is doing.”

Due to an eyesight condition, Debbie plans to step aside soon. She looks forward to being able to join John and their children and grandchildren in the pews.

“What I don’t like about being back there every Sunday is I never get to pray the Mass,” she said. “I don’t get to kneel, I don’t get to do the ‘Catholic calisthenics.’”

Music itself, she noted, “is prayer.” For more than four decades, Debbie Kelln has selflessly helped to deepen the prayer lives of those who have called Holy Name their home.

Owen Canfield works for the Catholic Foundation of Oklahoma.