Thrice Happy Shall His Welcome Be

Happy New Year to the church!

We celebrate the First Sunday in Advent today, the beginning of the Christian church's liturgical year.  Though Christmas preparations have been going on in the secular world for weeks now, we are called to a different kind of preparation.

The readings for this day usually point us to the second coming of Christ, rather than the birth of the baby Jesus in the manger.  This second coming, or second Advent, will bring the reign of God to earth, where justice and equity will prevail.

Today's hymn is from a new discovery of mine, a collection of hymns called Advent Songs (1916) by Dr. Simon Nelson Patten.  Subtitled A Revision of Old Hymns to Meet Modern Needs, you can probably understand why it interests me.   Dr. Patten believed that the standard hymns of the church were too focused on the past, with language from European sources, talking about kings and lords and subjects and war, and did not represent the ideals of modern (early 20th century) Christianity.  He goes on in the introduction:

My main endeavor has been to avoid the expressions of war, depravity, and woe upon which the emotional value of earlier hymns depends. (...) At a recent baccalaureate service, the large audience, after listening to a convincing peace sermon, sang energetically, without a qualm of conscience, The Son of God goes forth to war. Our national and religious life must be reinterpreted...

Advent Songs includes several familiar hymns, such as A mighty fortress is our God and Love divine, all loves excelling, with Patten's reinterpretations, altering words and lines much as the hymns I have presented here for the last several years. He has also written  a number of original texts on subjects he considers important, such as womens' suffrage. His third category is somewhere in between: hymns with original texts but that are suggestive of other, familiar hymns.

Today's hymn is from that category.  Appropriate to the Advent season, it expresses our hopes for God's coming reign. I believe that it was also intended to remind its singers of an earlier hymn: O for a faith that will not shrink by William Hiley Bathurst (though in a different meter altogether).

O for a faith in boundless love
To open wide the realm above,
Where life is God and God is life,
Reviving souls cast down by strife.

O for a faith that growing youth
Shall keep the path of living truth,
Ours is the night, to them the day,
If now we show the onward way.

O for a faith that men are good
And, given strength, do what they should,
A growing faith that womankind
May equal man in skill and mind.

O for a faith that greed shall cease
And commerce follow ways of peace,
When neighbors fair with neighbors deal
And each regards the other's weal.

O for a faith in brotherhood
To batter down the walls that stood
Between the races of the past
Behind the feuds of clan and caste.

O for a faith that Christ may come
To end the work he has begun,
Thrice happy shall his welcome be
And great the joy of victory.

O God, give us a faith like this,
And help us feel the perfect bliss
That noble effort always brings
To those who hope for better things.

Simon N. Patten, 1916; alt.
Tune: CANONBURY (L.M.)
Robert Schumann, 1839; adapt.

Patten was clearly influenced by the theology of the Social Gospel movement that was active in his times. His hymnwriting efforts may not have been as accomplished as those of Frank Mason North or Walter Russell Bowie, whose equivalent texts are still widely sung today, but this work was clearly important to him. 

In some ways he was probably ahead of his time. Today, his ideas about the language of hymns seem less radical, and revisions are more numerous.  In the 1970s, the Ecumenical Womens' Center took on the same concerns (with the addition of inclusive/expansive language), revising familiar hymns, writing new ones, and also writing texts that suggested or could be substituted for earlier ones, such as Ruth Duck's Lead on, O Cloud of Presence (for Lead on, O King eternal and Arise, your light is come (for Rise up, O men of God).  Television evangelist Robert Schuller and his wife Arvella Schuller rewrote many hymns that were sung at Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, incorporating some of the same concerns as Dr. Patten. And, of course, as explained here before, there were the efforts of the committee that produced worship resources for the Metropolitan Community Church, from which many of the hymns on this blog are taken.

So, another Advent.  As before, we will avoid the carols of the Christmas season until we actually get there (maybe it's time for another CWS Twelve Days of Christmas - go back and check out the entries here from December 25, 2009 - January 6, 2010).  There's an Advent introductory video on YouTube that says if you're too stressed about Christmas to appreciate it when it gets here, you probably didn't do Advent correctly.  We'll try to do it the right way here.



Seven (Liturgical) Years Ago: Lo! Christ comes with clouds descending

Six (Liturgical) Years Ago: Jesus came, adored by angels

Five (Liturgical) Years Ago: Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates

Four (Liturgical) Years Ago: The King shall come when morning dawns

Three (Liturgical) Years Ago: Once he came in blessing 

Two (Liturgical) Year Ago: In the Advent light, O Savior

One (Liturgical) Year Ago: Hosanna! now through Advent

Brian Wren

Happy Birthday to hymnwriter Brian Wren, who is seventy-four years old today. He is certainly one on the best known contemporary writers of hymn texts; several appear in many modern hymnals. He was ordained in 1965 in the United Reformed Church in England but has now lived for many years in the US, currently in Georgia with "his partner in marriage and ministry," the Reverend Susan Heafield, a United Methodist minister. Their joint website, Praise Partners, contains much more information on their lives and works.

I would guess that Wren probably has written a greater number of texts that have never appeared in a denominational hymnal than those that have. It's true that hymnwriters generally write more texts than are ever accepted for publication, but it's also true that many of Brian Wren's texts are considered too radical by many. His commitment to writing in inclusive language has only strengthened over time (he first believed it to be an American fad when encountering the idea nearly forty years ago). He also believes that modern hymns should avoid much of the language of the past about militarism and even the kingship of God.

One of his hymns that some may know is Bring many names (which you can see and hear at the Cyber Hymnal). Written more than twenty years ago, it exemplifies everything that some people like about his texts as well as everything that other people don't. The text was considered for inclusion in the Methodist Hymnal of 1989, but lost the committee's recommendation by only one vote. Presumably the Methodists were not ready for a "strong Mother God" (among other things).

Anyway, the hymn did go on to be published in the Unitarians' Singing the Living Tradition (1993), the United Church of Christ's New Century Hymnal (1995), the Anglican Church of Canada's Common Praise (1998), and perhaps a few others I don't know about. It also appears in some supplemental collections that don't have the same wide usage as an official denominational hymnal, such as the Episcopalians' Voices Found (2003). And the Methodists finally included it in their supplement The Faith We Sing (2000).

Others of his texts seem unlikely to be widely used, such as All-Perceiving Lover or Against the clock (you can see these and several others by searching at the links in the first paragraph above). But it's always useful to remember that some of the most well-known hymns sung today were not immediately loved or widely sung at the time of their creation, or even in the lifetime of their writers.

I encourage you to read these two interviews with Wren, one from the Christian Century and one from Reformed Worship. Though they are not as current as I'd like, they do give a better understanding of the themes and ideas that he brings to modern hymnwriting-- he explains them so much better than I ever have.

New Treasures Still

(slight exaggeration perhaps - but where's the quote from? - without using Google!)

I've added a few new links over on the right which you may or may not have noticed. The Sibley Music Library, located at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY bills itself as "the largest academic music library in North America." But the most interesting thing about them is that they are making vast amounts of their public domain (pre-1922 for the most part) music available online. I've been prowling around the choral music, but there's lots of instrumental pieces, songs, organ pieces, etc. From the main page, follow the links from "Music Resources" to " Sibley Resources" and then to "Sibley Digitized Material." where you can search by composer.

You will also see a link to "Request Public Domain Scores" where you can request particular PD items from their library to be put online. There's a limit to how many you can ask for at once, so if you don't know what to request I have A LOT of suggestions (just kidding).

Farther down on the right I have added two links to "Inclusive & Expansive Language Resources." The first one, Ohio Conference Guidelines (UCC) I've discussed here before (see February 8 for that background if you haven't been reading here that long). The second link is actually to a book review written fifteen years ago by Ruth Duck, but I think there's plenty of food for thought even without the context of the book being discussed. Ruth Duck, now professor of worship at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, IL is one of the pioneers of inclusive language beginning more than thirty years ago as part of the Ecumenical Women's Center of Chicago, a group that published the inclusive language resource Because We Are One People in 1974. Duck's website, linked above, may also give you a lot to explore and think about.

One of her earliest hymns, Lead on, O cloud of Presence, while under copyright, can be found in a book titled Bearing Fruit in Due Season by Elizabeth J. Smith, (thanks fo Google Books -- if the link doesn't take you directly there, go to midway down page 196). The book quotes the first line as Lead on, O cloud of Yahweh, an earlier version that has since been revised by Duck - no text is set in stone. Tying in with our earlier discussion of Onward, Christian soldiers, this text was written to take the place of the older Lead on, O King eternal. It's no mere revision, but a new text altogether (though generally sung to the same tune, LANCASHIRE) -- and one of my favorite twentieth century hymns.

You May Have Noticed...

I believe that every full hymn text I have posted thus far (not so many, but it's early days) has been capped with the mysterious "alt.". So what's up with that?

As you probably know, "alt." is a long-standing convention in the world of hymnody, meaning that something in the text has been altered from the original. Could be one word, could be several. Could be for any number of reasons. Sometimes the revision is so extensive that "alt." is insufficient and it becomes "adapt. by ___." But let's not go there just yet.

Sometimes an "alt." is from so long ago, or is so universally accepted that modern hymnal editors don't even acknowledge it anymore. Charles Wesley wrote a hymn called Hark, how all the welkin rings back in 1739, but everyone knows it today as Hark, the herald angels sing. Would we still be singing it today if the first line had not been changed? (We also generally only sing three of the original five verses, but that's another blog entry for another day.)

There are many reasons why hymn texts have come to be changed over the years. Sometimes theological differences between denominations forced rewrites. Sometimes archaic words have been updated. In some modern hymnals, words like "thee" and "thou" have been modernized to "you," forcing further changes in declension, syntax, rhyme, and meter.

For myself, many of the changes in the texts I'm posting are made for reasons of inclusive language, or perhaps, better called expansive language. Nearly twenty years ago I was involved with a project to develop a hymnal for use in the Metropolitan Community Churches. We developed a set of guidelines around inclusivity and expansiveness which are close to those found here (developed by the Ohio Conference of the United Church of Christ). The guidelines on that page are not dated, but I suspect ours were developed earlier. In some instances we went even beyond those guidelines, and a few (not all) of those instances, twenty more years of perspective have led me to believe that we occasionally went a bit too far, but not often. If you make your way through the UCC guidelines, they lay out most of the precepts I'm going by with hymn texts.

Here in the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of "inclusive language" dates back more than thirty years, yet it sometimes seems that it is just as controversial in some circles as it was back then. Many denominational hymnals have made modest attempts at changing the predominantly male-focused language of hymnody, at least with regard to humankind and the people of God, but few are willing to go further. On this blog, I'm going to go further, as we did nearly twenty years ago.

Most blogs that I have found on the topic of hymns are pretty conservative, even downright reactionary (and not always in a particularly informed way). They have lots of rules: "a hymn must do THIS" and "a hymn cannot be THAT," and "a hymn can never never say THAT OTHER THING." Most of them are also bitterly opposed to inclusive language in even its most mild form. On the other hand, I have a reeeeeally broad definition of what a hymn is. Since I couldn't find a blog with a similar viewpoint, I had to make my own. In the earlier MCC project, we drew from a very wide range of material across many denominations (and theologies) and vastly differing musical styles. I may not go quite so far musically, due in part to my own musical tastes and in part due to the issue of copyright (modern stuff simply can't be posted online, even though "everybody does it") but you'll see a broad theological spectrum.

So, I'm proceeding with "alts" that you may not have seen before. You may not like 'em. That's fine, but I'm not going to argue about it. I already know your arguments and it's very unlikely that you can convince me that you're right. I also know that I probably can't convince you, if your mind is made up (and it usually seems to be, online), and it doesn't bother me. As Biblical scholarship has progressed, so too should our hymnody. The world is moving on, but I'm not forcing anyone to keep up. The fourth verse of Washington Gladden's hymn Behold, a Sower from afar begins

Light up thy Word; the fettered page
From killing bondage free;
Light up our way; lead forth this age
In love’s large liberty.

That's what I think "alt." can do, with our hymns as well as our Scripture. Expansive language makes everything fit better in "love's large liberty."

P.S. As you can see, I have no problem with "thee" or "thou." I'm not pleased that The New Century Hymnal took them all out (even though they did a lot of things right). Bad poetry! Probably more to say about that at another time.