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That time I remembered my patrilineal ancestors were Lutherans…

Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices,
who wondrous things hath done, in whom this world rejoices;
who from our parents’ arms has blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
with ever joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us;
the one eternal God, whom earth and heaven adore,
for thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore.

While my parents were Unitarians, Mom grew up in the Anglican church, and Dad grew up a Lutheran. And Mom’s first husband was the son of a Lutheran minister,  I dated a Lutheran minister for a while, and two of my closest friends from seminary are Lutheran… so there’s something Lutheran/attracted to Lutheran in my DNA.

I don’t think about that a lot, but singing today’s hymn brought it to mind. This very German song, with these very Lutheran lyrics.

It’s probably surprising to many modern Unitarian Universalists that there are congregations among us who sing this, but I bet there are some – those who are comfortable with God language, those who embrace a transcendent, omnipresent Divine. And some days, in my own personal theology, I’m totally down with that. In my Universalist view of process theology, it makes sense some days to thank a Creator God who is involved in and should be thanked for this amazing creation.

And for those who might argue against this one, I would remind you that this is pretty much the same theology found in For the Beauty of the Earth – just with the G word and a little more explicit greater-than language.

I like it. My Lutheran DNA likes it.

This hymn brings me joy.

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Thank you, Sister Act.

Joyful, joyful, we adore thee, God of glory, God of love;
hearts unfold like flowers before thee, hail thee as the sun above.
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness; drive the pain of doubt away;
giver of immortal gladness, fill us with the joy of day.

All thy works with joy surround thee, earth and heav’n reflect thy rays,
stars and planets sing around thee, center of unbroken praise;
field and forest, vale and mountain, blossoming meadow, flashing sea,
chanting bird and flowing fountain call us to rejoice in thee.

Thou art giving and forgiving, ever blessing, ever blest;
wellspring of the joy of living, ocean-depth of happy rest.
Ever singing march we onward, victors in the midst of strife;
joyful music lifts us sunward in the triumph song of life.

I was about to go on another rant regarding lyric changes – how some of them made sense, but at what point are we taking the teeth out of another person’s song, and is it okay to do it when the words are from an dead white guy, and what does that mean… and at where is the line – is it okay to change ‘dark’ to ‘pain’ (I think so) and ‘Lord’ to “God’ (works for me) and ‘angel’ to ‘planet’ (less comfortable).

But the truth is, I could obsess about only this throughout the hymnal and miss the point of this practice – to sing every hymn, to start my day with music, to feel the power of song as a way to awaken and ground my spirit, to find meaning.

Because despite my stumbling through singing this as printed in STLT – this is indeed a joyful hymn.

The joy starts in the mastery of Beethoven – especially that early entrance in the final couplet – like joy is bursting through and can’t wait to be expressed. Brilliant.

And of course, the lyrics are joy-filled. I love the line “wellspring of the joy of living, ocean-depth of happy rest” – I talk a lot about the unimaginable expansiveness of God, and this captures it for me lusciously.

And then, of course, I start singing what I can remember of the contemporary gospel setting as we first saw in the film Sister Act II, featuring the incomparable Lauryn Hill…

How can you hear this and not be filled with joy? Barring the incredibly-90s outfits (the appearance of which causes a continuity issue for me – who thought that minor plot point made sense?) – this rendition is joy personified. It brings me to tears every time, tears from deep in the well of my soul, tears that tell me underneath the pain and sorrow, the stress and concern – my soul is ultimately made of and made for joy.

We are made for joy. And with music like this, we get to celebrate all the joy that is found above, around, and within us. Joyful, we humans adore thee – all that thee might be.

Joyful.

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Another edition of “why didn’t I know this one before?”

I am that great and fiery force
sparkling in everything that lives;
in shining of the river’s course,
in greening grass that glory gives.

I shine in glitter on the seas,
in burning sun, in moon and stars.
In unseen wind, in verdant trees
I breathe within, both near and far.

And where I breathe there is no death,
and meadows glow with beauties rife.
I am in all, the spirit’s breath,
the thundered word, for I am Life.

This is gorgeous. Everything about it is gorgeous – Hildegard of Bingen’s paean to the immanent God, the elegantly simple Renaissance tune by Josquin des Prés (Ave Vera Virginitas).

What I love most is that Hildegard has taken the God of Exodus 3 – the burning bush that declares “I am that I am” – and put that God in context with the whole of creation. Of course God is in the burning bush, because God is in everything, because God is everything, because – as she concludes – God is life.

Gorgeous. Powerful.

And for me, on a morning when I am full of doubts about my call, my spiritual life, my place in the world – this hymn has brought me home.

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Hymns that make you go “hmmm….”

Holy, holy, holy, author of creation!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee;
holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty;
who was, and is, and evermore shall be.

Holy, holy, holy, though the darkness hide thee,
hindered by our vanities we have not eyes to see.
Only thou art holy, there is none beside thee,
perfect in power, in love, and purity.

Holy, holy, holy, author of creation!
All thy works shall praise thy name in earth and sky and sea;
holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty;
who was, and is, and evermore shall be.

I need to say right off the bat that I have no problem with a transcendent, omniscient God reflected in our hymnal.  I don’t even mind when that God is reflected through famous hymns that are found throughout Protestantism.

What I’m not crazy about is when our propensity to change language to make it palatable to sensitive ears actually changes the intent and meaning of the hymn.

So – we’ve seen shifts already in this series; For the Beauty of the Earth’s original chorus reads “Lord of all, to thee we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.” We change it “Source of all” – which shifts out the language of empire for a more loving (and indeed, more Universalist) name for the Divine.  We also sometimes shift out gendered language to welcome a broader image of God and to remove the binary so trans* folk can find themselves (and cis folk remember that there is a spectrum). Recently, Jason Shelton himself rewrote language in one of his hymns to remove ablelist language – Standing on the Side of Love is now Answering the Call of Love.

I am glad we think about language in this way – because words do matter.

But what bothers me here is when we shift the original meaning right out the song, we are doing a disservice to the author and the meaning.  “Holy Holy Holy” is a ode to the Trinity. Full stop. Its original last line for some of the verses is “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” It extols the three natures found in the trinity. This is a Trinitarian hymn. And yet we include it, with words changed to emphasize one God, a Unitarian view. This isn’t just shifting language to include many, this is changing the intent and meaning of the song.

And if we’re willing to do this to the music of an old white guy, then how easy is it for us to do this to the music of other groups – women, people of color, indigenous peoples, etc.? For example…

  • Natalie Sleeth refused to let us change the lyrics of Go Now In Peace to read “may the spirit of love surround you” because her meaning was clear in the lyric “may the love of God surround you” – and yet congregations all over sing the unauthorized, changed lyric.
  • I remember a moment when a group of UU religious professionals misused I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table as a happy gathering song, and one of our group was brave enough to call us out, reminding us white folk that this was not a song of happy Caucasians, this was a song of righteously determined enslaved Africans.
  • In GA choir last year, we raised the question of changing some lyrics in a gospel tune, and Glen Thomas Rideout rightly refused, saying we would be changing the intention by changing the lyrics and thus would be colonizing the music of another culture.

We need to be very careful in our language of inclusion to not change the intent or colonize the meaning for our own comfort. Music is radical expression of our souls and spirits, our hopes and fears, our anger and determination, our joys and triumphs. Music is radical – and when we try to make it palatable, we take the teeth right out of it, and we miss the lessons and energy that music seeks to provide.

Okay, yes, I’m on a rant about this in a post about one of the whitest hymns we have – but maybe it’s not a bad thing to look at how white people even do this to each other, no less to others. Maybe we can begin to see how damaging a change of intent can be in a song like this, we can see how damaging it would be for songs that aren’t ‘ours.’

I couldn’t sing more than a verse of this hymn today before I got angry at what I saw that we had done. Maybe others are okay with this, but I’m not.

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Welcome to today’s edition of Hymn By Hymn, wherein Kimberley quibbles with the hymnal editors.

God of the earth, the sky, the sea,
maker of all above, below,
creation lives and moves in you;
your present life through all does flow.

Your love is in the sunshine’s glow,
your life is in the quick’ning air;
when lightnings flash and storm-winds blow,
there is your power, your law is there.

We feel your calm at evening’s hour,
your grandeur in the march of night;
and when the morning breaks in power,
we hear your word, “Let there be light.”

But higher far, and far more clear,
you in our spirit we behold;
your image and yourself are there —
indwelling God, proclaimed of old.

This has the potential to be such a terrific hymn – Longfellow’s lyrics are a wonderful reflection of the immanent God, that divine energy living in everything. Longfellow captures the living pulse that says God is in everything and that the love of this indwelling God is present, always, for all of us.

And then the editors screw up the rhyme pattern in the first freaking verse:

God of the earth, the sky, the sea,
maker of all above, below,
creation lives and moves in you

…YOU? Really? The original, of course, and as expected, is “thee.” And it isn’t like the word isn’t used in STLT – it appears 64 times – five times so far in the hymns we’ve just sung, and we’re only up to #25! Surely one more “thee” would not have hurt. Instead it hurts the ear and feels unnatural, and takes us out of the song.

And while we’re talking about being taken out, the hymn tune that’s being used here – Duke Street – is simply the wrong match. Yes, the meter matches (L.M, or Long Meter – a common meter of four lines of eight). But even if you reject (as our editors do) the commonly used tune St. Catherine (along with typical alternate Pater Ominum) – which isn’t a bad thing, as both tunes feel terribly out of date and a bit hokey – the choice of Duke Street feels incongruent. And it isn’t like there aren’t more LM tunes to choose from – there are 30.

Now admittedly, not all of the 30 would work either, and that’s fine (One More Step is in this grouping, for example). This is how hymnody works – multiple tunes in the same meter that have different emphases, different moods, different tempos. Ultimately, you want a tune that reflects and enhances the lyrics.

And this is where it is subjective, of course. (The change from “thee” to “you” was just silly.) Duke Street, the tune used in STLT, is somewhat strident. It’s a proclamation tune. And when we use it later in Unto Thy Temple, Lord We Come, it makes sense – we’re proclaiming our intention. But here, in this gorgeous language reflecting nature and creation and the indwelling God? Strident makes no sense.  Instead, I’d use Danby (also used for Let All the Beauty We Have Known and Let Christmas Come), or even Gift of Love (Though I May Speak with Greatest Fire) for a more folksy feel. These settings are more reflective, more mystical, more contemplative. And to me, there is Wonder in Longfellow’s lyric, and thus there should be Wonder in our tune.

I love this lyric – it’s grounding for me and harkens to something deep and primordial, something wholly of creation. I will sing it to a different tune, and I will sing “thee” – as Longfellow intended.

And thus endeth the quibbling.

 

 

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Be thou my vision, O God of my heart;
naught be all else to me, save that thou art.
Thou my best thought, by day or by night,
waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

Be thou my wisdom, and thou my true word;
I ever with thee and thou with me God;
thou my soul’s shelter, thou my high tower,
raise thou me heavenward, O Power of my power.

Riches I heed not, nor world’s empty praise,
thou my inheritance, now and always;
thou and thou only, first in my heart,
Sov’reign of heaven, my treasure thou art.

Commence theological whiplash in 3…2…1….

Yesterday, we sang a paean to the interconnected web of all existence. Today, we shall now sing one of the most theistic hymns we have.  We’ve gone from a recitation of things found in nature and among us (sun, wind, the lark, the seasons, rain and snow, play, sleep), saying “I’m as rich as rich can be, for all these things belong to me … to a singular focus on a transcendent God: “thou my inheritance, first and always.”

Like I said. Whiplash.

Not that it’s bad… in fact, it’s quite reflective of the vastness of our theologies and perspectives, and speaks deeply of who we are that these two hymns can be on facing pages, one touching the other almost all the time, getting our sense of the planet all mashed up with a focus on the Divine.

Oddly, it’s not entirely unreflective of my own theology – individually, they are what they are. But mashed up together (which musically would be difficult due to different time signatures and phrasing), they feel very much like the theistic process theology I find both comforting and challenging. Here’s creation and all the amazingness that it is, and we can celebrate our part in it, and… we can look to that which some call God as the source of vision, wisdom, comfort, protection to be key to that creation which we celebrate. It isn’t a perfect fit, of course; I’m not sure I’m completely down with this early 20th century picture of God, but some within our faith are, and I am glad we celebrate this transcendent God in our hymnal.

Musically, of course, this tune (Slane) is light, easy, familiar – I am sure most UUs regularly sing this to Thomas Mikelson’s words, “Wake now my senses and hear the earth call” (298 for those keeping score). It’s catchy – a tune I will probably find myself humming all day.

But beyond today, I will carry with me this juxtaposition, this theological whiplash, and continue to think about how we hold these differences in juxtaposition, put them in conversation, make space for the both outside a book where they don’t even know they’re connected. This is part of our work: making sense of the space where both these things are true.

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Every night and every morn
some to misery are born;
every morn and every night
some are born to sweet delight.

Joy and woe are woven fine,
clothing for the soul divine:
under every grief and pine
runs a joy with silken twine.

It is right it should be so:
we were made for joy and woe;
and when this we rightly know,
safely through the world we go.

William Blake. Swoon.

Seriously – an amazing poet, writing alongside Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Burns, Keats. Some of the most elegant poets of the English language, all exploring all manner of life, divinity, nature, and the essence of humanity… while Channing, Emerson, and Thoreau were exploring the same through theology and philosophy. A heady time of new thought.

But I digress. I was swooning over Blake’s poetry – wondering how it is I have spent all this time skimming past this hymn, not seeing its depth and beauty. It is something I deeply believe – that we cannot have joy without woe, nor woe without knowing there is joy somewhere, feeding and clothing our souls.

And how did I skim over this, knowing now that it is set to one of my favorite hymn tunes, the lush and delicious Ralph Vaughan Williams piece “The Call”? The two together are deep, and meaningful, and rich.

Part of this practice is about my own spiritual care – it isn’t just a daily homework assignment, although sometimes it strikes me as such. No, singing aloud to these hymns, in my kitchen while the coffee is brewing, is meant to be a spiritual practice to feed me and open my eyes to something.

And this one has brought me Right. Back. To. Center.

All of the insanity of the presidential election, all the tumult in the congregation, all the pain in the world, for a moment anyway, has been taken off my shoulders so that I may sit with my soul, full of joy and woe, and luxuriate in this beautiful hymn for this beautiful moment.

Mmmmm.

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The lone, wild bird in lofty flight
is still with thee, nor leaves thy sight.
And I am thine! I rest in thee.
Great spirit come and rest in me.

The ends of earth are in thy hand,
the sea’s dark deep and far-off land.
And I am thine! I rest in thee.
Great spirit come and rest in me.

I’m not sure I have much to say – I love the tune (Prospect) and have sung it in numerous settings, most beautifully in a choral setting of Michael Dennis Browne’s “The Road Home” arranged by Stephen Paulus.

The lyrics are much more theistic than its title would suggest. This stealth theism delights me a bit today…especially as I begin planning November’s services and programs, which are all about humanism.

That’s it really. A short, delightful little hymn with more than meets the eye and a lush memory.

 

(PS: The image above is of a tundra swan. Cool, eh?)

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The sun at high noon, the stars in dark space,
the light of the moon on each upturned face,
the high clouds, the rain clouds, the lark-song on high:
we gaze up in wonder above to the sky.

The green grassy blade, the grasshopper’s sound,
the creatures of shade that live in the ground,
the dark soil, the moist soil, where plants spring to birth:
we look down at wonder below in the earth.

The glad joys that heal the tears in our eyes,
the longings we feel, the light of surprise,
our night dreams, our day dreams, our thoughts ranging wide:
we live with a whole world of wonder inside.

Let’s get the melody stuff right out of the way – Tom Benjamin, whom I have had the pleasure of making music with, is a terrific hymn writer, and this tune is great. It’s got all of the qualities you want in a tune, including a well-matched lyric.

I suspect if I were in a different mindset, I’d be singing this hymn’s praises. We really actually don’t have too many hymns that praise nature and its meaning/effect on us. But right now – just weeks before the votes are cast in the most contentious American election possibly ever – singing praises to nature doesn’t cut it for me. I need something right now to help me make sense of deep questions of worth. I need something to get in deep and make it all okay.

Of course, I realize that this is why we have hundreds of hymns and are free to choose those we need to work with a particular setting. And my doing this rather artificially structured tour means I will sing hymns that are not connected to what is actually called for.

And yet… as I typed those words, I wonder. Is it so random, really, that I am singing hymns about nature and the celebration of our interdependent web, that when people are behaving at their worst I am singing praises to the earth and all its inhabitants at their best? I don’t disagree with my earlier feeling that some of these hymns are a little fluffy and light on the theology… and maybe that is exactly the point. Maybe the point is that we have to remember there is more to life than the conflict that is arising or the particular events of a moment. There is more to life – and it is there for us to see, all around us, beyond us, within us.

There it is, then.

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O Life that maketh all things new,
the blooming earth, our thoughts within,
our pilgrim feet, wet with thy dew,
in gladness hither turn again.

From hand to hand the greeting flows,
from eye to eye the signals run,
from heart to heart the bright hope glows,
the seekers of the light are one:

One in the freedom of the truth,
one in the joy of paths untrod,
one in the soul’s perennial youth,
one in the larger thought of God;

The freer step, the fuller breath,
the wide horizon’s grander view,
the sense of life that knows no death,
the Life that maketh all things new.

This hymn feels extraordinarily aspirational to me today. It’s been a hard, heavy, trauma-laden week, thanks to our national flirtation with the collective Id. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of truth, or freedom, or joy, or any space at all to have larger, wider, fuller thoughts about anything, let alone the Divine.

Yet here it is, this project’s gift to me today, lyrics by 19th century poet Samuel Longfellow, set to a familiar hymn tune many might know as “I Know My Redeemer Lives” – which in itself is similarly aspirational and hopeful. Easy and comfortable to sing, cheerful but not sentimental, strong but not defiant.

O Life that maketh all things new … not worn, not reused, not tired. New.

the blooming earth, our thoughts within … even as the seasons cycle through, so will – or should – our thoughts.

our pilgrim feet, wet with thy dew … we are always searching, seeking, mo

in gladness hither turn again … and thank god Life DOES make all things new, because we need it to be that way, for our sanity. We need to be refreshed, renewed, revived, and clearly – at least today – reminded that this does happen. It does get better. It does get easier. Today’s heaviness and worry will morph and change and sometimes become harder and sometimes turn into joy, but Life is here to remind us that it all happens to all of us and there is newness always because that is the very nature of Life.

And here’s the truth: I felt a little better after I sang this. Not because I sang (although singing does feel good physically and emotionally), but because I sang this song despite feeling rather worn and emotionally exhausted. I feel a little better because I caught a glimpse of the aspirational. Sometimes the aspirational feels too precious. And sometimes – like today – the aspirational is a balm.