adhan.

At Government Center train station, where I transfer from the green line of work to the blue line of home, I am privileged to hear free performances by a few of Boston's growing number of train station musicians. Some of these are quite talented (a guitar player at Park Street who sings country songs, a trumpeter at Davis Square who plays Beatles and Van Morrison tunes); others simply play and sing because they know how. Either way, they are hard to ignore - they are singing to get your attention, and hopefully, your money.

A few weeks ago someone got my attention - he was softly playing the guitar, looking down, not singing. Yet when I heard the notes my heart stood at attention, this familiar melody calling me to a deep peace that I'd known since childhood. The song was "Trust and Obey," a hymn composed by Daniel Brink Towner in the late 1880s. I have known every word of this song since I was a child, though I have never sung it in church. My mother used to sing my sisters and me to sleep with old hymns that our contemporary churches wouldn't dream of inflicting on a congregation demanding drum beats and guitar riffs. But this song, along with others, has stuck. It used to lull me into the slow, rhythmic breathing of a child's long night of sleep; now it lulls my soul to that same stillness, a call to peace.

This song, lullaby, call to peace - such power lies in this melody, heard out of context (my only context for the hymn is the top bunk in the room I shared with my little sister). When I do hear it, I pause, slow my breathing as if to sleep, and let the wash of peace and security overtake me. This is not a disruptive overtaking, as cacophonous music or shouting would be - it is calming, steadying, balancing, a soothing string of notes with a very simple message: trust God, obey God. I hear it, I am called to peace, and I can move on.

I experienced this in the Middle East, where it is impossible to be out of earshot of the hauntingly beautiful adhan, call to prayer. Countless minarets rise from the desert in the cities and along the highways. While a true muezzin and his voice make up the traditional call, many modern mosques have a recorded voice played from loudspeakers in the gallery of the minarets five times per day. The first call is when, according to tradition, you can first tell a dark thread from a white thread: daybreak. The remaining four are early afternoon, late afternoon, dusk, and evening; most people I saw were unaffected during the calls. Nobody stopped short in a car or on a sidewalk to pray, nobody stopped their conversations. I believe that for the most part people either ignored the call as a part of the soundscape of their daily lives, or they prayed silently in their hearts and continued with the day. They were called, and they moved on.

After the first couple days, it became part of my daily soundscape, too. While I always heard the long, almost chillingly drawn out Arabic, I no longer stopped to look around or consider what had pierced the noise of my conversation, or the car, or the Jordanian pop music playing in the stores. I was no longer disrupted, but I was no less affected: every time I heard the call I shivered, overcome by the spirit of devotion, obedience, and refusal to limit prayers to Allah to a two-hour slot once a week. And then I prayed to God silently. Short prayers, nothing scripted. But I prayed five times a day, responding to another religion's call to another worshipped deity's prayer. In Jerusalem I woke up both mornings at dawn, the clear low notes of the first call quivering in the air, reaching me on the top bunk in a shared room in a hostel, my friend sleeping soundly in the bed beneath me.

I didn't know what the adhan's beautiful lyrics meant until I Googled "call to prayer" back here in the States, but it didn't matter to me what they meant. The words weren't for me, nor was the requirement to pray five designated times a day. At home I have complete freedom to pray what I want, when I want - but over there, far away from the ocean and the coast I freely roam, I was on Middle Eastern time, and I allowed myself to be called.

"Trust and Obey" or any familiar, soothing, peaceful, lullaby-ing sound (an ocean wave collapsing, a gust of wind exhaling, a sheet of rain streaming) is a call. A pull. An unmistakable reminder that I am more than the body who gets up, goes to work, grades some papers, goes to bed. I am a soul, and a heart, and a mind, and a human who is in daily need of true peace and security. The guitar player in Government Center gave me a deeply needed call to peace. I gave him a dollar and moved on.