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Happy Hundredth Hymn! Thanks, readers, for being here, commenting, engaging, and occasionally educating.  Only 390 more to go!

Now… this song is a unquestionably a zipper song. It is highly repetitive and easy to learn. What’s fun about it is when people start harmonizing – it turns it from ‘dear god make it stop’ (with flashbacks to 60 prepubescent campers on a bus singing ’99 Bottles of Beer’ until you die a little inside) to fun, communal sing-along. And the lyrics move – joy and sorrow intertwined.

And here’s a little bit of fun that I discovered this morning quite by accident while waiting for the coffee to brew: “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” is a perfect countermelody. I’m not sure what the point of the mashup would be, but it’s a reminder of how similar songs can be when the appear to come from the same root, the same locale, the same peoples.

There’s not much else for me to say musically. That being said, I am always surprised when a simple song like this suddenly gets to something deep. Because emotionally, this song reflects what I suspect many of us long for these days – moving, active, forceful peace, joy, love – to help us through the pain and tears – to help give us towering strength. There are a lot of hard days ahead, and we need peace, not like a stagnant pond but like a moving, thriving, ever-changing river.

I’ve got peace like a river,
I’ve got peace like a river,
I’ve got peace like a river in my soul. (2x)

I’ve got joy like a fountain…

I’ve got love like an ocean…

I’ve got pain like an arrow…

I’ve got tears like the raindrops …

I’ve got strength like a mountain …

May we have all we need.

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Oh my goodness. I forgot this was in our hymnal.

So… it’s a familiar song, one that has been recorded by such notable singers as Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Sam Cooke, and Mahalia Jackson. It’s appeared in countless movies. For some reason, it appeals to many across racial lines, perhaps because everyone at some time or another can relate, at least to the chorus.

It is a song of pain, of lament. A song borne of the struggles in the fields, on the plantations. And it is a song of aspiration and promise. You see, this is one of those songs that, if we had the real – not the UU-ified – third verse, we’d understand that this was a song not of first world problems but of the terrors of slavery and the belief that one could escape. Here’s what we have:

(Chorus)
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,
nobody knows my sorrow.
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,
glory, hallelujah!

Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down, oh, yes, Lord!
Sometimes I’m almost to the ground, oh, yes, Lord! (Chorus)

Although you see me going ‘long so, oh, yes, Lord!
I have my troubles here below, oh, yes, Lord! (Chorus)

One day when I was walking ‘long, oh, yes, Lord!
The heavens broke and love came down, oh, yes, Lord! (Chorus)

But the actual third verse is this:

 If you get there before I do, Oh, yes, Lord
Tell all-a my friends I’m coming too, Oh, yes, Lord

This isn’t about heaven – although I suspect many of the field masters assumed so, particularly with that tantalizing “glory halleluiah” at the end of the chorus. This is about going north to freedom.  Now it may not carry as much actual code as some other spirituals – some, like “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and “Wade in the Water” make surprisingly direct references to where to go and what to look for if you escape and want to catch the Underground Railroad. But this is one of the “yes, I’m in” songs.

Which changes things. This isn’t about modern problems and hoping to hear the voice of the Divine. This is about lament and freedom. And in that context, it is heartwrenching and hopeful. But not because it speaks to my problems, but because it speaks to the problems of the enslaved in the 19th century…and to those in the 21st still seeking freedom.

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I’m gonna start right off and say, Gentle Reader, if you have an opinion on this hymn, please share it. If you use this hymn…ever, tell me when and how. If you feel a connection to the lyric, or in general the poetry of AE Houseman, please describe it.

Because hooo-boy, I don’t get this one. I mean, I get what Houseman is saying: I’m 70, I won’t be a child again, 50 adult years haven’t been long enough, wah wah wah, gather ye rosebuds or some such inanity. And yes, I am a fan of storytelling, finding universality in particularity, the living human document as a way to understanding. But frankly, I found myself (a) wondering whether this was really an Easter hymn, (b) wondering why we would ever sing this, and (c) doing the math.

Now I love the tune – Orientis Partibus is a gorgeous little medieval French melody used in countless hymns. These lyrics, though…

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
is hung with bloom along the bough,
and stands about the woodland ride
wearing white for Eastertide.

Now of my three-score years and ten,
twenty will not come again,
and take from sev’nty springs a score,
leaving me just fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
fifty springs are little room,
about the woodlands I will go,
seeing the cherry hung with snow.

Anyone have a more helpful insight than mine? Because unless I am preaching to just a group of 70 year olds in the late spring, and I want them to feel (a) old and (b) superior, I don’t get this. Not one bit.

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This is a beautiful, complex, heart-wrenching lament, which brings up a thousand beautiful, complex, heart-wrenching memories. In fact, I can’t imagine not crying or at least getting a little choked up, even if a memory doesn’t come, simply because the tune and the origin story – again, a song born out of slavery – is so moving and haunting and bypasses the mind and goes directly to the heart. Even writing about it, after having sung it tearfully, I am getting choked up again.

Oh, there are a thousand memories I could share, and a thousand stories I could tell. I don’t want to bypass the import of the song’s origins – the 19th century image that serves today’s post reflects the harsh realities of the slave trade in America.

But I also want to share a particular memory of a time that honors the song, honors an ancient victim of violence, and honors an amazing colleague.

My master’s thesis was about theatricality in worship, and I created a half-hour service through which I explored aspects of theater that inform good worship. The service itself was on a topic that I found myself nearly obsessing over while in seminary, the huge swath of unnamed women in the Bible. Called “Nameless,” I told the stories of eight out of hundreds of women – women without whom a story could not progress but whom the male scribes could not be bothered to name – women like Lot’s wife, Pharaoh’s daughter, Job’s wife, and others. I set it in a cemetery the evoked Arlington, and we had a eulogy and a celebration (click here to read and see the service).

Once the tone was established by Sampson’s first wife (the one before Delilah), the women told their stories and asked “what’s my name?” The last was Jephthah’s daughter – a young woman whose excitement over seeing her father return from war results in her death, simply because Jephthah swore an oath to God that he would sacrifice the first living thing he saw on his farm if he returned victorious from battle. (Seriously – this a thing that’s in the Bible, in Judges 11:34-40.)

While the other women sat back down, the stunning Natalie Renee Perkins, who played Jephthah’s daughter, brought a rose to the grave marker with the ancient woman’s name on it, kneeled down, and began singing this spiritual….

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
a long way from home, a long way from home.

Sometimes I feel like I have no friend,
sometimes I feel like I have no friend,
sometimes I feel like I have no friend,
a long way from home, a long way from home.

Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,
sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,
sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,
a long way from home, a long way from home.

There was not a dry eye in the room.

Not just because Natalie sang it beautifully – which she did.

Not just because we were at a memorial service – which we were.

But because the power of this song to speak for those who are a long way from home – emotionally distanced, kept prisoner, even those murdered out of hate – the power of this song is that it speaks to something within all of us and to the bigger, scary realities out of which this song comes and to which this song belongs.

This is a beautiful, complex, heart-wrenching lament.

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I fell asleep last night thinking about the questions about end of life stuff that my sister raised about one of my cats, who is about to have major surgery to remove a malignant tumor (Shea is with her, five hours away, so I won’t be there the day of surgery if things go awry).  In my dreams, with death on my mind, I dreamed of my mother in her final hours and how heartbreaking it was to see her go.

Needless to say, I was not at all prepared to open the hymnal to this first hymn in the Transience section, and I cried through the singing.

I cannot think of them as dead who walk with me no more;
along the path of life I tread they are but gone before,
they are but gone before.

And still their silent ministry within my heart has place
as when on earth they walked with me and met me face to face,
and met me face to face.

Their lives are made forever mine; what they to me have been
has left henceforth its seal and sign engraven deep within,
engraven deep within.

Mine are they by an ownership nor time nor death can free;
for God has given to love to keep its own eternally,
its own eternally.

These lyrics are lovely, and I think for many – Unitarian Universalist and otherwise – they would be equally comforting. And what made it possible for me to cry was a simple but beautifully crafted tune (“Distant Beloved”) by Frederick Wooten. This gentle melody  both matches the lyric and gets out of the way of the lyric so that the meaning can rise up and spill out – in my case, literally spill out as tears.

(Fair warning: the next few days may feature some powerful memories and unleased sentimentality… such is the power of music. )

 

 

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So many choices this morning…

Do I talk about the person for whom this tune is named, Steve Biko, the South African activist who spearheaded the Black Consciousness movement and died from injuries sustained while in police custody?

Do I talk about the handy term zipper song, which indicates a song, often sung a capella, with nearly identical lyrics and one word or phrase changed for each verse?

Do I talk about how this song was the one that led me to another (1002, Comfort Me – which we’ll get to in November), which led me to hear the voice of the Divine calling me to this path?

Or do I talk about how a song like this is incredibly radical, suggesting that what’s in front of us isn’t everything, and there’s always more for us to do, explore, resist, and open ourselves to?  Do I talk about how this song is a song of resistance, from the time of slavery?

There is more love somewhere.
There is more love somewhere.
I’m gonna keep on ‘til I find it.
There is more love somewhere.

There is more hope somewhere…

There is more peace somewhere..

There is more joy somewhere…

Maybe I talk about those things, but what I really want to talk about is the problem of white Unitarian Universalists changing the lyric of this spiritual to “there is more love right here.” It shifts this from a song of lament and aspiration to a song of declaration, and that’s both frustrating and just plain wrong. Peter Boulatta say it best in his blog post “More Love Somewhere: The Unedited Hymn”:

These songs give theological voice to those who endured slavery, making meaning and spurring resistance as they are sung. When (in my case) white people ask for word changes in such a song, my alarm bells start ringing.

Are white Unitarian Universalists not capable of identifying with Black experience? Not willing, perhaps, to imagine the context out of which this song originated?

Glibly rewriting a slavery-era African American expression of hope and determination should give us all pause.

There’s an air of hubris in this wordsmithing, and a lack of insight.

Joining together to sing “there is more love right here” to me smacks of self-satisfaction and self-centredness.

Go read the whole thing – because he’s absolutely right. Now I have sung it in groups with the changed lyrics, and when I have, the entire mood of the room shifts, perhaps more comfortably than I realized. Sure, there’s something to be said for saying “and all that stuff you’re looking for? You might find it here.” But in my experience, that sets up groups, congregations, and individuals for failure – because what if they don’t find it here? And the truth is, even in a loving community, there is ALWAYS more love, peace, hope, and joy to be found, as long as there is hate, oppression, war, and injustice in the world. There are so many other good songs to sing, why change this one?

Let us be careful about what we do with music, especially when it is not our own.

 

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“Sweet” is the word I would use to describe this hymn.

Sweet lyrics, sweet sentiment, sweet tune. It’s not saccharine sweet, but rooted, old timey sound and wisdom sweet. It’s the kind of tune (another shape note tune, this time from the collection Missouri Harmony) you’d hope to hear played by a guitar, or maybe a violin, or perhaps even a banjo as you walked past a creek from that little cabin tucked in the woods up in the distance.

I don’t have a lot more to say about this sweet little hymn – except maybe a reminder of its message: take time to notice. Take time to meditate. Take time for spiritual practice. Take time.

What is this life if, full of care,
we have no time to stand and stare —
no time to stand beneath the boughs
and stare as long as sheep or cows;

No time to see, when woods we pass,
where squirrels hide their nuts in grass —
no time to see, in broad daylight,
streams full of stars, like stars at night;

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
and watch her feet, how they can dance.
A poor life this if, full of care,
we have no time to stand and stare.

Amen.

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Dr. Grathwohl would be proud.

You see, while I was a political studies/theater major at Meredith College in the 1990s, some of the courses that stick with me the most are the English classes – writing and composition, journalism, American literature, and everyone’s mandatory class, Major British Authors.

While many of my fellow students groaned and wondered, while hammering the first 18 lines of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (in the original middle English) into their noggins (“whan that Aprill with his shoures soute…”), what possible purpose any of this could have, others of us reveled in some of the most delicious writing in the English language. We got Chaucer and Shakespeare, of course, but also all the poets. Herbert, Donne, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Burns, Browning, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and of course, Blake.

Now the reason I say Eloise Grathwohl would be proud is that I opened the page, sang the first couple of lines, and thought “Is this William Blake?” To which my answer was a glance at the bottom of the page to confirm my answer. I can’t help but wonder a little if I was already conditioned toward that reaction, since this appears to be the Major British Authors section of our hymnal.

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
all pray in their distress,
and to those virtues of delight
return their thankfulness— return their thankfulness.

For Mercy has a human heart,
and Pity a human face;
and Love, the human form divine,
and Peace, the human dress— and Peace, the human dress.

Then every one, of every clime,
that prays in deep distress,
prays to the human form divine —
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace — Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

Interestingly, this is only three verses of the five in the original poem – Blake’s second verse is, in spirit, a fairly UU sentiment, but I suspect the hymnal commission was struggling with how to make it not quite so male-heavy:

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.
 The fifth verse is also very First Principle, but also with troubling-for-our-time lyrics:
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.

Yikes. What do we do with that, other than omit it? I mean, the sentiment is right – but yikes.

Maybe this is one of the reasons we studied Major British Authors in undergrad – not just to understand the growth, beauty, and truth in the language and the art created with it – but also to understand the growth, beauty, and truth in the bend of the moral arc, the expansion of our understanding, the widening of our scope.

Dr. Grathwohl would be proud.

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Just before 5am I was awakened by a disturbing dream where a group of supervisors demanded that I quantify what percentage of myself was actively engaged in the resistance; I kept coming up empty because none of them accepted any of the ways I was engaged as valid, and both in my dream and in my waking, I was scared and exhausted from trying. I never went back to sleep, instead my mind worrying over the next four years and wondering if any of us will ever get a good night’s sleep again.

I finally dragged myself out of bed to make coffee and sing today’s hymn – another one that I tend to flip past, not because it is unknown but because it doesn’t ever seem to connect with what I’m looking for.

Well, tie me to a fence post and stick my head in mud. This was exactly what my soul and my dreams needed. Take a look, and I’ll explain.

Mysterious Presence, source of all —
the world without, the soul within —
thou fount of life, O hear our call,
and pour thy living waters in.

Thou breathest in the rushing wind,
thy spirit stirs in leaf and flower;
nor wilt thou from the willing mind
withhold thy light and love and power.

Thy hand unseen to accents clear
awoke the psalmist’s trembling lyre,
and touched the lips of holy seer
with flame from thine own altar fire.

That touch divine again impart,
still give the prophet’s burning word;
and vocal in each waiting heart
let living psalms of praise be heard.

You see, over the last month or so, it’s become vitally clear to me that what I can bring to the resistance is art – art in our congregational lives, in our worship, in our public witness, in our spiritual practices. Visual arts – drawing, painting, sculpture, graphics. Performing arts – dance, theater, music. Written arts – poetry, prose, spoken word, sermons. Liturgical arts. Circus arts. Burlesque arts. You see, when a society loses its art, it loses its soul. When we engage artistically, we cross borders, we connect, we forge relationships, we engage the difficult, we take risks, we are reminded of who we are and what is true. We find the truth in beauty and remember the beauty of truth.

And this hymn reminds us – reminds me – that the mysterious presence not only lives in all existence but inspires both the singer and the prophet, the poet and the sage. We need inspiration. We crave inspiration. In this incredibly uninspiring time, we need inspiration more than ever.

How engaged am I, Dream Supervisors? A lot more than zero… in fact, much closer to 100%. Because while I am tired and scared, I know that resistance looks like many things, and sometimes it looks like art.

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Confession: the first version of this blog was nitpicky and judgy, and by the time I got toward the end, I was really annoyed with myself. “Why can’t I just let this one be?” I thought. And so I looked not only at how critical I was being but how humorless I was also being and thought “if I’m this annoyed with me, everyone else is gonna be too.” So I decided I could do better, deleted the whole supercilious mess, and started again.

And, apparently, felt the need to confess this to you. I think it’s partly because there’s something about this hymn that does bug me, and I don’t know what it is, so I went on a quibble hunt. I don’t know if it’s because there’s still binary language, or because the Alexander Pope poem that lyricist Michael Young riffed off of is troubling (third line of the original is “by saint, by savage, and by sage”), or if it’s because the tune is too cheerful to be a mystical/meditative song.

I don’t know. I suspect this is someone’s favorite – and it’s a decent piece, all in all. And I can imagine perhaps using it in a service that needs a more theistic view of the seventh principle.

Mother of all, in every age,
in every clime adored,
by saint, by poet, and by sage,
your praises high have soared.

Goddess of nurture and of love,
all nature sings your care.
In life’s extravagance you prove
the gift of giving fair.

O spirit of unfolding grace
and deepest mystery,
teach us compassion’s gentle face
and wisdom’s mastery.

Teach us to cherish this proud earth,
its fragile beauty praise,
and for the dreams your joy gives birth,
a hopeful future raise.

It’s a fine hymn. It doesn’t inspire me, but it’s fine. It surely is not worthy of my snarky criticism – and sometimes, as I taught a troll yesterday, just because you can snark doesn’t mean you should.

Thus endeth the lesson.

 

PS: I couldn’t figure out what image to use, so here’s a nice picture of Nature in Winter. With a bridge.