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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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Bring many names, beautiful and good;
celebrate in parable and story,
holiness in glory, living, loving God:
hail and hosanna, bring many names.

Strong mother God, working night and day,
planning all the wonders of creation,
setting each equation, genius at play:
hail and hosanna, strong mother God!

Warm father God, hugging ev’ry child,
feeling all the strains of human living,
caring and forgiving till we’re reconciled:
hail and hosanna, warm father God!

Old, aching God, grey with endless care,
calmly piercing evil’s new disguises,
glad of new surprises, wiser than despair:
hail and hosanna, old, aching God!

Young, growing God, eager still to know,
willing to be changed by what you’ve started,
quick to be delighted, singing as you go:
hail and hosanna, young, growing God!

Great, living God, never fully known,
joyful darkness far beyond our seeing,
closer yet than breathing, everlasting home:
hail and hosanna, great, living God!

In my opinion, this hymn needs to be retired.

To be honest, I groaned when I turned to the page and saw which hymn it was.

First, it is a fairly annoying tune to repeat seven times – and it’s hard to omit a verse because then you’re omitting an aspect of god. But ugh – it’s such an annoying tune I stopped after three and then just sang the last line to end on a resolved chord.

Second, it’s got some troubling stereotypes: “Strong mother God, working night and day.” Really? The father God is warm, “hugging ev’ry child” – Dad’s being loving and kissing the hurts away while Mom is toiling away at creation? Are you kidding me? No. Just no.

I’m not that thrilled with how the lyrics paint young and old, either, as though only the old ache and only the young learn?

There are admittedly a few lovely moments – the last verse is terrific – “joyful darkness far beyond our seeing” is a nice turn of phrase. But I am not going to praise an entire hymn because it stumbles into poetic once or twice.

And yes… I get why this might be important for some people coming in to this faith from others who painted a vengeful, controlling image of a strong male God. But there are so many other hymns that explore the ways Unitarian Universalists understand the Divine, without using stereotypes and an annoying, kill-me-now tune.

I don’t want to talk about aching Gods and overworked housewife Gods, I want to talk about a God that can’t be described in trite stereotypes but needs expansive and gorgeous language to give a hint of what God might be.

I want to talk about all that might be God even if we can’t or won’t name it as God because of all the damage that word has done.

I want to talk about what God means to how we live with and among one another.

I want to talk about how we live on this amazing planet in this amazing time of the creative humans and see what we can do together to be together, work together, love together because that is God.

I want to take hikes in the woods and sit on beaches and picnic by streams and gaze out at changing leaves and talk about the emanating from the rocks and lakes and trees and birds God.

I want to talk about inspiring, creative, love beyond all measure, bigger than us but seen constantly in us and among us, present whether we notice or not God.

I want to talk about God without needing to believe in God.

I want to see God in you, and I want to see God in me.

I don’t want to categorize God. I want to experience God.

 

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Songs of spirit, like a prayer breathing in the ambient air;
singing in the morning light, in the radiance of the day,
in the twilight shadows gray, in the brooding hush of night;
dark or light, or storm, or fair — singing, singing everywhere.

In the burgeoning of spring, in the summer’s scented bloom,
in the autumn’s mellow glow, in the winter’s ice and snow;
shade, or shine, or joy, or gloom, as the seasons come and go,
break and bare, or blossoming — still the songs that sing and sing!

Singing, singing everywhere, at the heart of everything,
in my soul I hear them sing, mystic music of the spheres;
songs that, with my utmost art, I can only catch in part;
broken echoes, cold and bare, of the songs my spirit hears.

Remember yesterday, when I talked about the easy-to-sing, familiar tune? What I deleted from that discussion was a rant about musical showboating. In this rant, which apparently I can’t keep quiet, I talked about how it is helpful to remember what the tune is for – in this case, getting non-singers to sing together in public. Thus, a tune should be fairly easy to sing, predictable, but not dull. A congregant should have a sense of where a hymn is going next, and those foundational phrases should, in and of themselves, be both interesting and comfortable. I think of Jason Shelton’s hymn Fire of Commitment (which we’ll get to sometime in mid 2018) – the pattern of the phrases is similar and familiar, dancing along the chord progression, even as the music itself is interesting; once you get the rhythmic sense, it rolls and calls back and keeps us going. This is a tune that does what it’s supposed to do.

Sadly, there are other tunes that try to be interesting, to toss in a surprisingly different phrase, or add an awkwardly inserted chord progression to add what the composer probably thinks is interest but is actually just something different to make it different – showboating. It’s “look at me, I write interesting music’ and not remembering that this is something non-singers have to sing together in public. I think it’s one of the struggles we have with hymn-ifying some popular and folk music, too – the music is interesting and should be, but it’s not really for non-singers, because what works for a performed song doesn’t always work for a hymn; they have different purposes and thus different constructions. You wouldn’t haul logs in a Mustang convertible, and you wouldn’t take a vacation along the Maine coast in a logging truck… it’s the same thing. They’re both vehicles, good and right, meant for different purpose.

And so we turn back to this tune. I plunked it out, I plunked it out again, trying to add the treble harmony, I tried to sing and then plunked it out again.

This, to me, is a terrible tune. And just because it is named Servetus doesn’t make it any less terrible.

Adding fluffy lyrics doesn’t help it any. Whereas the lyrics of the last couple of hymns had depth and purpose, the lyrics here are fluffy. I am not changed, I am not moved. I don’t need a recitation of nature, a recitation that goes by nearly unnoticed because we’re too busy trying to figure out this terrible tune.

And maybe I’m missing something, in my cynical mood, surrounded by cynicism and heartbreak and struggle. Maybe this is just the wrong hymn for the moment. Maybe this is me trying to go sightseeing in a logging truck. But right now, I need something to take my out of myself, to feed my soul, to inspire me.

This is just not it.