Christmas Break

The services of Christmas Eve are fast approaching. There are soloists to rehearse, choirs to organize, organ registrations to select, and last stanzas to embellish. I will NOT be blogging for a week or two.

Merry Christmas, everybody! Sweet dreams.

"Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" versus Paganism

The best discoveries are sometimes made without intent, just from snuffling around in an area you like. I didn’t set out to look for the original lyrics to “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” I knew from coffee hour conversation that Wesley had written about a “welkin” instead of “herald angels” originally, but beyond that I had no idea I was missing lovely words. In poking through The New Oxford Book of Carols in preparation for a concert this weekend, though, I found several unfamiliar lines with the notation “adapted.” Our dear friend the Cyber Hymnal provided the original. Here ’tis:

Hark, how all the welkin rings,
“Glory to the King of kings;
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled!”
Joyful, all ye nations, rise,
Join the triumph of the skies;
Universal nature say,
“Christ the Lord is born to-day!”

Christ, by highest Heaven ador’d,
Christ, the everlasting Lord:
Late in time behold him come,
Offspring of a Virgin’s womb!
Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see,
Hail the incarnate deity!
Pleased as man with men to appear,
Jesus! Our Immanuel here!

Hail, the heavenly Prince of Peace!
Hail, the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
Risen with healing in his wings.
Mild He lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of earth;
Born to give them second birth.

Come, Desire of nations, come,
Fix in us thy humble home;
Rise, the woman’s conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
Now display thy saving power,
Ruined nature now restore;
Now in mystic union join
Thine to ours, and ours to thine.

Adam’s likeness, Lord, efface;
Stamp Thy image in its place.
Second Adam from above,
Reinstate us in thy love.
Let us Thee, though lost, regain,
Thee, the life, the inner Man:
O! to all thyself impart,
Form’d in each believing heart.

Look at the themes!

“Welkin” means “vault of heaven, upper air, sky.” It refers to the PLACE where the rejoicing occurs rather than the BEINGS who make the rejoicing. This is extremely important to the interpretation of the hymn. In Hebraic poetry, if you mention “sky and earth,” you mean also “everything in between”—in other words, “the whole of creation.” Wesley, no idiot scholar of the biblical languages, would have been aware of this. What the sky begins, the earth joins. “Universal nature” in the concluding thought means more than “that which is common to angelic and human beings.”

I suspect it means “all nature.” It rings with Watts’ line from “Joy to the World”: “He comes to make His blessings flow, far as the curse found.” Christmas is Christ’s coming to redeem the world, not just us humans. We as the stewards of creation are only the beginning of the glorious redemption of all the ladybugs and dinosaurs and parakeets. Redeeming us is a sign of the coming redemption for all.

It’s obviously important to the poetic thrust to keep the male gender intact: Wesley’s case for the power of Christ to redeem all of nature rests on Christ’s being the Second Adam, the fulfillment of the promise to the First Adam. (1 Cor. 15:22, 45: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. … Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.”) If you delete the last two stanzas (as is standard in most hymnals) and change the male references (for example, “Pleased as God with us to dwell”), you dissolve the power of the promise, the historical link between our first parents and their lost vocations with Christ and our restored vocations. Salvation is reduced, once again, to sort of a personal fling with Christ, rather than the restoration of universal harmony with a creation that is seriously out of whack.

Poor Wordsworth! Remember his “Great God! I'd rather be / a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; / So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, / Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; / Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; / Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.” He wanted to be connected to nature. So do most of the modern Pagans and Witches. Maybe they weren’t sung the full version of “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” when they were young.

Evangelism in Christmas Program

My church did a Christmas program last night. We had a small orchestra and maybe a hundred singers; we partnered with another church and held it in a high school auditorium. It was a great venue to reach unchurched people with the good news of Christmas.

However, somewhere back in the compilation of the musical the good news got a little mixed up. The narration stuck to evangelism but after the first couple songs, most of the music was straight-up worship: “Jesus, You’re beautiful to me”; “You’re wonderful, You’re powerful”; “I come to Bethlehem, I come to praise Him again and worship Him”; “If I can sing, let my songs be full of His glory.” As a member of the choir, I felt very self-conscious, like my personal piety was on display. I also wasn’t sure that a display of personal piety was the best way to evangelize someone, or to attract them to the gospel.

It was interesting how individualistic the worship songs were; maybe that’s what aggravated my feeling of “personal” piety. Maybe I have a different understanding of evangelism than the compilers of the musical do: I understand the good news as being welcomed into a family, as resulting in harmony with many people as well as with God. Also, because Christ created the universe that we inhabit but feel so displaced in, becoming reconciled to Christ further reconciles the Self with the Universe. We regain our ability to function as stewards of creation; we work toward harmony and justice in relationships with each other and with our environment; we gain integrity as we discover more parts of ourselves to turn over to the Lordship of Christ; we look forward to the peace of God (the Shalom) pervading all things in the new Kingdom. Therefore, our songs of worship express our reconciliation within the new community; we use the first person plural a lot in worshipping God—not primarily the first person singular.

It felt like the compilers of the musical understood Christianity as an individual reconciliation of the Self with God. Period.

In fact, towards the end of the musical, one of the narrators said, “If you’ve given Jesus that most precious of human gifts—your heart—then Christmas extends a second invitation. If you’ve received the gift of Jesus, you must leave the stable and open your arms to a waiting world. You must travel to the hills of the shepherds and to the cities of the kings. You must become a bearer of Christmas to a cold and lost world. You must bring them the wondrous gift of Jesus.” (Segue to the next song.)

The point of accepting Christ was here clearly stated as getting other people to accept Him, too. That made becoming a Christian seem pretty pointless, after all. “If I get reconciled to God, I try to get other people reconciled to God; what does being reconciled to God mean?” From the content of the musical, I think our imaginary questioner would conclude that being reconciled to God would mean having some warm feelings toward God and standing up in a Christmas show someday to try to get other people reconciled.

This is an odd message of evangelism because most non-Christians I know claim to have warm feelings toward God; they believe He/She/It is Love and totally approves of them. (They do feel a vague anger about “things”, but usually they don’t assign that to God.) They insist that they already feel “reconciled” to God—in an individualistic way.

But they are not part of a community of people reconciled to God and they are not whole in their relationship to Self, Others, or the Universe.

Anyway, I sang this mixed-up Christmas message with my church because I am part of that community (and God knows finding a good Christmas musical WITH orchestrations is nigh impossible! Other factors which I have not considered went into selecting that musical, I'm sure). Their actions are sometimes clearer than their words: they work toward harmony and justice in practical ways, like giving me and my husband gift cards for groceries.

Singing with people like this gives me hope. Even when we mix up the message, surely God will bless the intentions of people whose hearts are open to Him.

But we can’t stop at good intentions….

Children's Sermons: Valid as Worship Education?

Here’s a question for you: did children’s sermons do you any good when you were a child?

You know, the times when the pastor asked for “all the children to come forward,” and you all sat on the steps in front of the lectern, and the pastor crouched down too and spoke in an unusually mild and just plain unusual voice for several minutes.

I’m not asking about whether they do you good now, as an adult. In fact, children’s sermons seem entirely oriented toward the adults as they put on display “cute” answers blown into the microphone and the cute children themselves padding down the aisle and then wandering about the platform during their sermon. Who hasn’t giggled at the prim child who keeps raising her hand and the stagey child who keeps waving to his parents? Who hasn't experienced a thrill of righteous indignation against the particularly wayward child or its parents? I have enjoyed many children’s sermons as the best entertainment of the service. But do they meet any child’s spiritual needs?

My childhood was filled with object lessons from the children’s sermons. I remember sand pails and shovels, teddy bears and broken dolls, photographs of family members, paper hearts, paper shamrocks, rocks of many sizes, candy canes, doughnut holes, closed paper bags and empty paper bags—in fact, all the objects but none of the lessons. The moral of the lessons, based on my observations of children’s sermons as an adult, was something like “God loves you” or “Obey your parents” or “Be nice to each other” but was never presented meaningfully enough to sink in or change my behavior.

Mind you, these memories include many pastors and many denominations, too, whether my parents’ or people’s we were visiting—Christian Reformed, Covenant, Presbyterian (U.S.A. and Church in America), Baptist (American and Southern), Lutheran (Evangelical and Missouri Synod), Evangelical Free, non-denominational, Nazarene.

These lessons had three effects on me: (1) they intensified my smug sense of self-importance because I usually knew exactly where the pastor was heading and, if not, "Jesus" was a safe bet for an answer (I was the prim child); (2) they made me long to be dismissed to Sunday school; (3) they induced either a general sense of good will toward the pastor, if he produced doughnut holes or candy from the paper bag at the end of the lesson, or a general sense of resentment toward the pastor, if he did not.

What I really remember are all the Bible stories from Sunday school and every one of the songs from the Sunday school and the adult services. I can still remember the story of Zacchaeus and the accompanying song (“Zacchaeus, YOU COME DOWN, for I’m coming to your house today”), the story of Peter’s calling (“I will make you fishers of men, if you follow Me”), the lame men being healed in the temple (“Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I you; in the Name of Jesus Christ the Lord, in Jesus’ name, rise up and walk!”), and all the grown-up songs that I had to stand on the pew to sing out of my mother’s hymnal: “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “When Peace Like a River.” These songs and stories have stayed with me and enriched my life over the years far more than the object lessons and little talks with pastor up at the front of the church.

I believe that most of these pastors are of good will. I’m not accusing them of dismissing children’s needs when they struggle to create their “edifying” chats, but does anybody remember what it was like to be a child when they are crafting those dread object lessons? Has anybody surveyed children WHEN THEY ARE GROWN UP to see if the children's sermons stuck with them, or is the phenomenon of the children's sermon based merely on good intentions and the theory that children will remember an abstract moral message if it is linked to a concrete visual?

I have come to a decision; as an adult, I can make this difficult sacrifice: I could give up the weekly entertainment if it would free the children for Sunday school and singing.

"How Lovely Shines the Morning Star" 2: Scriptural Structure

Disappointment set in. The more I sang “How Lovely Shines the Morning Star,” the more I missed the presence of a story line. Unlike Nicolai’s other "greatest hit" "Wachet Auf", this seemed to have no beginning, middle, and end. Every stanza, though beautiful in its own right, sat like a pearl on a necklace without a clasp, an unending circle of the beauty of Jesus. Without an obvious progression, it’s been very hard to remember which stanza comes next.

For several days, I said, “Fine, that reflects the seventh stanza’s depiction of Jesus as ‘Beginning without end, the First and Last, Eternal.’ I can learn to live with that.” From readings on the German version of Wikipedia, I knew too that Nicolai was a mystic—into blessed feelings of oneness and theological arguments about the absolute unity of God and man—so I guess that kept me from looking further for a while.

But about twenty minutes ago, the light dawned. Although each stanza is intensely personal and full of the first person no matter the scriptural references, the general structure seems to be based on the Old and New Testaments.

These references are not comprehensive, but are noted as evidence:

Stanza 1—references to the Old Testament
Morningstar, Jesse’s root, David’s son from Jacob’s stem, king and bridegroom
Stanza 2—Old Testament and Gospels all mixed up together
Mary’s son, highborn King, Gospel as milk and honey, King as heavenly manna
Stanza 3—Gospels
Part of the Lord’s body as branch is to tree
Stanza 4—Gospels
Lord Jesus as giving me Spirit/Word/Life/Blood
Stanza 5—Epistles
God the Father has loved me from beginning of world, I’m wedded to Your Son
Stanza 6—Old Testament, (possibly Gospels), Epistles
All instruments praise God, Jesus is my bridegroom, everyone should be jubilant and thank the Lord the King of all the earth
Stanza 7—Revelation
Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, He will take me to Paradise; “Amen, amen, come…do not wait long” (reminiscent of second-to-last verse of Revelation)

Whew. Nicolai takes us through the Prophets right up to Revelation, even touching on the historical books through his references to David. Only one thing he neglects: he doesn’t seem to mention anything about the Law. Hmmm....

P.S. Here is the most helpful article (in German) on Nicolai that I struggled through!

Hymnbook Holder

A few years ago my husband bought me a most useful present--a cookbook holder. This is designed to extend from the shelf of a closed cupboard door and was intended to save me counter space in our tiny kitchen. I do use it for this purpose, but a few weeks ago, I thought of a new use: a hymnbook holder.

Now, I rig it up when I do the dishes, usually with a photocopy of whatever hymn I'm studying (to avoid the pages of an actual hymnbook getting wet).

This is a pleasant accompaniment to dishwashing, and really the only time I can fit hymn study into my present schedule.

"How Lovely Shines the Morning Star" 1: O Bother

For the past three weeks, my plan to memorize 100 hymns in a year has been stuck. Number 9, "How Lovely Shines the Morning Star," has fewer stanzas than Number 8, "Prayer of Saint Patrick," but it's bothersome for several reasons.

1) It was composed, words and tune together, in German. Unlike "Patrick," it did not wait around for a versified translation before being paired with its tune. That means, for a purist like myself, that the full feeling of the hymn would come through better in German than in English. But it's more likely to be of use to congregations in English. So I mulled it over for a couple weeks--German or English? English.

2) But there are so many translations of it in English, even more, it seems, than of Luther's "Ein' Feste Burg" ("A Mighty Fortress"). I finally settled on a "translation, composite" from a Lutheran hymnal. Composite translations are so bothersome, because the unifying idea is the editor's rather than the translator's; you get even further removed from the purity of the original text. But, courage!--the Bible itself was brought to us by "translation, composite": the oral tradition passed through God-knows-how-many-people, then the various compilers and editors for the written form, then the translators for our English version, and possibly other steps I have overlooked in ignorance of the process. Singing "How Lovely Shines the Morning Star" from "translation, composite" is a great way of challenging my prejudices about the superiority of the individual artist.

3) The melodic rhythm of 1599 is slippery for 2005 ears to grasp, ears that have "cut their teeth" on sixteen bars of quarter notes. The Lutheran version, usually more rhythmically robust than the watered-down non-denominational hymnals, apparently preserves the original rhythms, guaranteed to wake up a stultified congregation. It lifts off with a phrase of mostly half notes, after which the second phrase echoes the melodic theme with a volley of rapid-fire quarter notes, then mixes up these rhythms in the third phrase. After two half-note rests in which to brace for the next round, the whole thing repeats. Then it glides into four beautiful half notes, poetically matched to words of one or two syllables, like cease-fires in the middle of the music, and bang! Off again into three measures of little black quarter notes, peppering the page, when you suddenly find yourself over a peaceful plain, wafting down on a beautiful descending phrase, the exact same rhythm as the opening line, that serves as a summation and cool-down stretches at the end of an invigorating workout. My mind is simply not used to this level of artistry in congregational song.

4) The text is uncomfortably personal. I found myself crying after the first stanza. The shimmering text, the beautiful melodic lines, the rapturous expansion of the idea of the "Bridegroom" now "filling all the heavenly places," like light itself, was overwhelming. What with crying after each stanza and then recovering and then reflecting on connections to my personal life prompted by this experience and then recovering from that and then thinking that maybe that's enough emotion for today, I'm having a lot of trouble getting through this song.

Women, Abuse, and Inclusive Language

This is in response to JC, who left a comment under “Give the Dead a Vote” (other readers: please read JC’s comment first to get the context). JC, I don't know how you located this blog, but am delighted that you cared enough to read it and to comment. I decided that your argument deserves a fuller response than the “comment” section allows.

The quibble with "choice of language" doesn't originate with hymnody, but with the language of the Bible. The Bible is full of metaphors of "dark" for sin and "brotherhood" for humanity, from which hymnody is derived. My primary argument is that refusing to use these metaphors anymore means staying captive to our own prejudices and our own pains--confessing that our culture’s misuse of “dark” and “brotherhood” is too powerful and has overcome our congregation’s interpretive skills. The culture will continually misuse words, and if we keep giving ground to this, we will find ourselves in a very small corner of language indeed. I prefer to educate myself and my congregation about the true meaning of the biblical words--redeeming the language, if you will.

The Bible is replete with warnings to not be fooled by appearances, encouraging full acceptance of all people regardless of income or skin color or gender--and warning that Satan himself appears as an "angel of light". Part of my training in not being overwhelmed by peoples’ appearances is to not be overwhelmed by words’ appearances--to tease out the meaning of the biblical word rather than continually to read my own prejudices into it.

As a woman, I’d like to emphasize that educating myself at the level of the text, rather than constantly changing the text to match my current level of understanding, can be very healing. Most of the women I met during grad school were in favor of no longer referring to God as “our Father,” because of the abuse they or their friends had suffered at the hands of men and especially of fathers. However, although I’ve suffered at the hands of men, persisting in calling God “our Father” has redeemed the word “father” for me in a way that retreating from the word or burying it could never have accomplished. My heart aches for the women who are still trapped in feelings of rage, despair, and pain at the idea of “father” because they have been taught to see the word as evil rather than the particular manifestation of it in their lives. “Plenteous grace with Thee is found.”

When language is abused, when words are allowed to suffer violence and to be ripped from their context, people suffer, too. Rather than retreating from these wounding and wounded words, I have a vision of bringing healing to people through bringing healing to language--the language of our Bible and of our hymns.

Thanksgiving Break

I'm taking a break for the week of Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, y'all!

Give the Dead a Vote

Today a phrase popped into my head: "the democracy of the dead." My all-knowing husband informed me that it was from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Company, 1908; p.85).

The full quote has implications for church music:

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father."

As the body of Christ, we are composed of many millions who have gone before. We should think of our Christian family not only as those in the Sudan or Pakistan, across space, but as those who believed in the salvation God promised Eve, across time.

If only songs from our moment in time are called acceptable for worship, whether the latest hits in praise songs or the hymns with the most up-to-date language, we reject the worship of most of the body of Christ. "We don't need you. You're dead. You have nothing to say to us--and nothing to say to God with us." In refusing the music of past generations, we break the communion of saints.

The one who made us saints in the first place, the Holy Spirit, is also the one who inspires expressions of praise. It's extremely odd that Christians who insist they sing only contemporary music or drastically edited hymns in order to "get into the Spirit" or to praise the Spirit "better", refuse to look for the Holy Spirit or learn how to honor Him in His work of the past two thousand years. I think the Spirit just got slapped in the face.

"Prayer of St. Patrick" 3: No Tolerance for Evil

The sixth and seventh stanzas of "Patrick's Breastplate" are especially intense. Where most of the other stanzas began with a musically forceful, "I bind," these ones begin with "Against," making my opposition to evil as firm and pronounced as my assent to the good.

The vigor with which Patrick denounces "the demon snare of sin, the vice that gives temptation force, the natural lusts that war within, the hostile men that mar my course" and the seriousness with which he considers evil's power, a power capable of yielding him to "the deathwound and the burning", hold me steady when I'm tempted to minimize my own attraction to sin.

In addition, I'm relieved to hear Patrick identify the very things that bother me the most--the vice, my inner conflicts, the nasty attitudes of some of the people around me--acknowledging that these are real obstacles to peace and that I'm not alone in my struggles against them.

We need bold, forceful songs like this one, that name specific evils and that pray for protection against them. A constant diet of happy songs about Jesus or vague terms for the darkness we confront just doesn't keept us strong.

"Prayer of St. Patrick" 2: A Bit o' Binding

The lady who versified the "Prayer" from English prose translations of the Old Irish, about 1500 years later, was Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander, married to the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland--Patrick's ecclesiastical successor.

She used the phrase that scared me so much as a teenager--"I bind unto myself"--as a motif to begin or end most of the nine stanzas. Confronting my fears, I pulled out a magnifying glass and looked up "bind" in the Compact Oxford English Dictionary. I think this definition makes the most sense in this context: "To fasten round, to gird, encircle, wreathe (the head, etc., with something)...." That fits beautifully with the idea of Patrick forging himself a breastplate of prayer. ("Bind" was also used with this meaning in a poem by Tennyson in 1870, about 20 years before Mrs. Alexander picked it up for her own poem, so it may have been a fashionable poetic word.)

But what are we to do about Patrick's binding to himself all sorts of things other than the Trinity, like "the whirling wind's tempestuous shocks"?

A key phrase here is the fourth stanza's opening line, "I bind unto myself today the virtues of the starlit heavens." I remember from philosophy and theology classes that "virtue" is sometimes used to mean "power."

I suspect Patrick saw the glad power of the Creator in all these things. He wasn't worshiping the wind or rocks as gods themselves, nor was he attributing the power within them to some World Consciousness, but to Christ, the god with a name, a face, and a distinct personality who allows other personalities and forms to exist by His own power. (In some ways, Christ is the height of tolerance!) The whole song, especially the eighth stanza, sounds like an interpretation of one of my favorite passages of Scripture, Colossians 1:15-20. Christ's virtue in all things: we in harmony with Christ are restored to harmony with all things.

"Prayer of St. Patrick" 1: Spells and Incantations

This week I've been singing the "Prayer of St. Patrick," a.k.a. "St. Patrick's Breastplate." It's on my personal list of 100 Hymns to Memorize. It surprises me that in my late 20's, I'm singing the "Prayer of St. Patrick," because in my late teens, I wouldn't have anything to do with it.

It begins with "I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity." It sounded creepy, like reciting an ancient spell. I wasn't sure if Christians ought to be saying things that sounded like incantations. It went from bad to worse. By the fourth stanza, St. Patrick was intoning, "I bind unto myself today the virtues of the starlit heaven," like nature-worship or something really weird. If I sang this, would I be inviting demons or God's wrath, or would I be on a slippery slope toward paganism and dancing barefoot in a loose white dress at the Vernal Equinox?

It's quite the opposite.

Apparently, on Easter Sunday, March 26, 433, the druids of Ireland, already provoked by some bonfire incident on Easter Eve, caused a magic cloud of "Egyptian darkness" to fall around Patrick and his people. Patrick prayed, and the sun's rays broke through. Then the Arch-Druid Lochru levitated himself with demonic power--I don't know whether he came after Patrick or just spun around in the air--but after Patrick again prayed, the Arch-Druid remembered gravity and was "dashed to pieces" on a rock. And you thought Easter egg-hunting was exciting. After this spectacle, Leoghaire, the Supreme Monarch of Ireland, granted permission for Patrick to preach the Christian faith throughout the land.

Patrick had prepared himself for this spiritual battle against paganism much as ancient Israel did--through prayer. "St. Patrick's Breastplate" survives as a memorial of that prayer.

More to follow....

Voting on Topics

Some topics I've thought about covering in this blog include:

Overview of select hymns (AND praise choruses) with a study of their poetry and/or how their words relate to their musical settings

Definitions of hymns

Hymns arranged by topics

How particular hymns have been edited over the years, with speculations on why

Really bad hymns

Which topics would you enjoy reading about? Is there any particular hymn or question that's piqued your curiousity over the years? I'd be happy to do the legwork and check into it for you.

My goal is to keep doing this blog for at least a year. It's wonderful therapy--having to write every day or every other day should whittle down the proverbial "log in the eye" of perfectionism. Writing a blog is very different from writing for a newsletter or a professor because it's more conversational and, no matter how much you research the content that goes into a particular post, the actual writing and reading of blogs happens on the fly. There really isn't time to make every word perfect!

My husband, a professional writer and also a blogger for about a year now, chuckles. He's very encouraging, but curious to see what happens in a household of two bloggers.

Intro 6 (The Last Intro!): Emotions in Hymns

C.S. Lewis wrote: "If [a schoolboy] is an imaginative boy he will, quite probably, be revelling in the English poets and romancers suitable to his age some time before he begins to suspect that Greek grammar is going to lead him to more and more enjoyments of this same sort--but the grammar learned as a boy will lead to a deep adult enjoyment ("The Weight of Glory," from The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, reprinted in The Essential C.S. Lewis, ed. Lyle W. Dorsett [New York: Collier Books, 1988], 363).

It's time to get rid of the notion that praise choruses allow us an emotional connection to God while hymns afford us an intellectual understanding.

Every word we sing has meaning and yields either an emotional connection or the potential for it. With hymns, the potential may take longer to realize; the more words we sing, the more meaning we may need to process. The fuller meaning of so many words sung in one breath may fly by us in the first dozen or so times that we sing, and then begin to soak in.

Christians talk a lot about not being conformed to this world but being transformed by the renewal of our minds--but isn't our worship conforming us to our present culture of impatience for meaning with its quick fix of flashing images and sound bites and brief choruses?

The emotional connection is present. It is deep. It is waiting for us. I am convinced that the Spirit Himself is waiting for us in the hymns.

Intro 5: Wall Calendars for Hymns

3) We should consider with great care the core hymns that our particular congregation should know, and then plan how to teach these hymns over the course of a year or ten years.

After choosing the hymns and considering how to introduce each one, it's a good idea to hang a year-long calendar on the wall to keep track of how many times a particular hymn has been sung.

We can allow the hymn to mean more if we also take care in how we introduce it.

Examples of introductions include: a) a verbal explanation of a hymn's possible meaning or key words or biblical references, from the pulpit; b) a written explanation of the same in the bulletin or church newsletter; c) a Hymn of the Month that the congregation comes to expect to sing for four weeks (with reviews planned by the worship leader); d) a choral arrangement of the hymn in the week prior to the congregation's singing it, or a choral presentation of the first stanza before the congregation joins in; e) a lengthy piano, organ, orchestra, or band introduction of the tune, whether as a prelude to the service or as a simple introduction before the congregation sings.

Combinations of these methods can work very well.

Intro 4: Editing Hymns

2) We should be slow--to the point of inertia!--to change the words of hymns, whether for personal preference, enlightened theology, or updated language.

Hymns accrue meaning over lifetimes and generations; they cannot be yanked around without upsetting a congregation's or individual's memory and emotional connection to them.

Imagine what would happen to your, your family's, or your congregation's Scripture memorization if you traded in your Bible translation every few years for current, up-to-the-minute language, or switched to an alternate translation for your regular devotions rather than for an occasional refreshing perspective.

Intro 3: Kids Sing Hymns

Practical Implications for Music Ministry:

1) We should not have merely graded music for the different stages of life, trading in nursery songs for praise choruses for hymns as the members of our congregation age.

For either Scripture or hymns to have binding power over our lives, the power to integrate the many parts of our past with our present, they must span time and be spoken, sung, and memorized over a lifetime.

It doesn't matter whether we understand all the words or can sing the difficult parts perfectly at first. We grow in understanding as we grow in faith.

Intro 2: Growing Into "Silent Night"

A good hymn has the power to integrate our childhood with our adulthood, our past with our present, if we have sung it over many years.

Think of "Silent Night" and the candles glowing in the dark church on Christmas Eve. You sang it before you could anticipate that high note, before you understood what "virgin" meant; before you had a theological understanding of the holiness of the infant, you experienced it with your family and neighbors. When you are ninety years old and leaning on your neighbor for support, you will still be singing "Silent Night" and you will have a sense of the vastness and eternity of your life measured through all the Christmases past and all the Christmases to come. It is the Spirit's Christmas gift to you.

Now imagine that you have memorized hundreds of hymns, singing them by yourself and with your neighbors, over those past ninety years. You let them sink in more deeply with every new experience, as you come to understand their words in many new moments and apply them in many new situations, allowing the Holy Spirit to interpret and apply His Scriptures to you through hymns about working, raising children, being lonely, suffering agony, enjoying nature, falling in love, giving up a loved one to God, playing with your pets, planting flowers, surviving a terrorist attack, doubting God's presence.

(For the curious, I can propose off the top of my head: for working, "New Every Morning" by John Keble [KEDRON]; for raising children, "Commit Thou All That Grieves Thee" by Paul Gerhardt [HERZLICH TUT MICH VERLANGEN]; for being lonely, "God Is Love" by Timothy Rees [ABBOT'S LEIGH]; for suffering agony, any hymn about Jesus' cross that has a somber rather than a peppy rhythm; for enjoying nature, "All Creatures of Our God and King" by St. Francis of Assisi [LASST UNS ERFREUEN]; for falling in love, "Morning Has Broken" by Eleanor Farjeon [BUNESSAN]; for giving up a loved one to God, "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" by Isaac Watts [ST. ANNE]; for playing with your pets, "All Things Bright and Beautiful" by Cecil Frances Alexander [ROYAL OAK]; for planting flowers, the same; for surviving a terrorist attack, "By Gracious Powers So Wonderfully Sheltered" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer as adapted by Fred Pratt Green [LE CENACLE]; for doubting God's presence, "When Our Confidence Is Shaken" by Fred Pratt Green [LAUDA ANIMA]. Of course there are dozens, if not hundreds, of hymns for most of these categories. These are simply the first ones that come to my mind in this particular moment.)

Every new moment can become deep and familiar and charged with meaning, a continuation of our story rather than an unmanageable challenge or dull interlude or bewildering experience, through repeating a familiar song that instant.

This is the Spirit's refreshing of our souls, and it can be the beginning of heaven in His redemption of our tired lives and moments.

Intro 1: Fuller Humans, Fuller Prayers

This is a blog about hymns--what they are, what they do, how they get under our skin. In exploring hymns, we may also learn how to play them better and, especially, how to pray them.

I'm concerned that we not become shriveled Christians, our prayers limited to the few phrases that have sunk in through our choruses. The choruses can be drops of rain to our spirits, but the Holy Spirit has also provided a river, a full river of prayer, to satisfy our thirst through our hymns.

Hymns can become our prayer in a deep way, engaging not only our minds and intellects, but joining the "inward groaning" as we wait for our adoption as sons, and even the "sighs too deep for words" of the Holy Spirit Himself (Romans 8). Hymns have the power to integrate the many parts of our humanity--our need for the felt presence and emotional connection with God as well as our need for deep thoughts and tricky turns of phrases that challenge our intellects and imaginations--so we may offer one prayer from our many parts to God.