Top 10 Hymns

Phillip Lopez, the Casey Kasem of Christian Colleges, writes to say he's listed the "Top 10 Christian Hymns of All-Time."

It's an interesting list and worth a look, but personally I'm not sure why Φως Ιλαρόν and Apostolorum passio are missing. What else belongs on this list?

Is this the most provocative blog post title of all time?

First Things asks for your opinion on the ten worst hymns of all time.

So the Pope gets on a plane...

Whenever you see a picture of Pope Benedict talking to people, he's got this shy smile thing going on. And yet, he's brilliant, and although welcoming of people, he's ruthless about ideas.

Actually, he's theologically much more welcoming than I am. For example, if I'm not mistaken he recently made a positive reference to Rene Girard, my theological arch-nemesis. Perhaps there is some good there that I just fail to see--but I digress. Regarding liturgy he can see nonsense claims coming from miles away--and then he devastates them.

A lot of electronic ink has been spilled over the Pope's recent plane ride TO Africa, mostly because his remarks had something to do with sex. But his remarks on the way back FROM Africa were much more dramatic. As I read them, I thought I heard the echoes of the old Bat Man comics' fight scenes.

Speaking of the Masses he celebrated in Cameroon and Angola, the Pope said,

"[I was] moved by the spirit of meditative absorption *POW!*
in liturgy, the powerful sense of the sacred *BIFF!*;
in the liturgies there was no self-presentation *BANG!*
of groups, no self-animation, *ZAP!*
but the presence of the sacred, of God Himself; even the movements were always movements of respect and awareness of the divine presence. *KAPOW!*

This multi-whammie, smiling pre-emptive measure undermines all future attempts to point to the African liturgies as a positive example of the multi-cultural fad in liturgy. Yet another ephemeral wave in the endless cycles of fads that have mainstreamed since the last Council, multiculturalism (like all the others) effectively downgrades the liturgy from the most intimate possible sharing of heavenly and earthly realities available to us on earth, to an anthropological celebration.

The most astonishingly candid expressions of the superficiality of multiculturalist liturgy are the various Dancing Puppet Liturgies, in which non-human, non-animate artifacts are dressed up to represent various colors and genders--which then "participate" in the liturgy.



I'm sure that we can all see the difference between Africans dancing at Mass vs. midwesterners, and their puppets, dancing at Mass. Yes? But the Pope wisely made a very public and clear distinction.

It's not wrong to express ourselves in the liturgy. But we must express ourselves liturgically, and in Christ. We are at Mass to open ourselves to God and to come into direct, real contact with the Father through Him--never losing the "sense of the sacred" and the "respect and awareness of the divine presence."

Songs of Thankfulness and Praise--or--An Epiphany Hymn that Isn't We Three Kings

Merry Christmas!

I've been getting some traffic related to an archived post on the hymn Songs of Thankfulness and Praise.

Just thought I'd mentioned that I've programmed this hymn for the next two weeks: both Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord. The first time we will sing it as a choir-led meditation; the second week as the Offertory hymn, which is generally sung by the whole congregation. Since we don't have pre-Mass singing rehearsals at my parish, I've found that to be a helpful way to introduce a hymn.

The tune Salzburg is also the tune used in Worship III for At the Lamb's High Feast, so it is familiar, but we haven't sung it since last Eastertide. So a refresher will likely be helpful.

"Canon: that's Latin for Row, Row, Row Your Boat."

The other day I scheduled Jesus Shall Reign for a Communion hymn. That's not something I ordinarily do, but it was the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross. My choir's greatest strength is SATB harmony: power in every voice, and a certain lovely motion. So at the organist's excellent suggestion, we did this:

1. verse 1: in canon. Men first, women closely following in the second measure. Jesus shall... Jesus shall... It breaks up somewhat in the very last measure, but by then the impact has occurred. It was light and almost fun.
2. organ interlude
3. verse 2: SATB harmony

A nun friend of mine who is by her own admission very tired of this hymn attended the Mass, and she paid us a very high compliment: she said we made it new for her.

With a Little Help from My Friends

Yesterday I was working on the Hymn list for May. Because our diocese transfers the celebration of Ascension Thursday to the following Sunday, every single Sunday in May is a special feast day: Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, and Corpus Christi.

Still, I think we'll manage to bring in some Marian hymns.

Anyway, since we have the custom of singing a Psalm to begin the Communion Procession, I was thinking that Psalm 33 would be a good choice for Trinity Sunday. I have often thought that there was a Trinitarian sense to the couplet: "By his word the heavens were made/ by the breath of his mouth all the stars." This seems to me to be consonant with the idea that the Trinity acts together. In this case, creation was done by the Trinity together: the Father with the Word (Jesus Christ the Son) and with the Breath (the Holy Spirit).

So while I was on the phone with a friend of mine I asked, fully expecting the question to be too obscure and trivial to find a ready answer, whether Psalm 33 was ever interpreted by the Fathers in a Trinitarian sense. Now this is no ordinary friend. She has the Gospel of Luke, in Greek, written out and taped to the wall of her house, with a pencil hanging nearby so that she can make translation notes whenever necessary. Still, it's an obscure question.

She immediately responded, "You must speak to my husband about this." So she hands the phone to him and I repeat the question. He said, "Okay. I just looked into this." And he proceeded to tell me that Irenaeus and [someone obscure] made this interpretation, but then it does not reappear in the literature until the late 4th century.

Again, he's no ordinary husband-of-a-friend.

Continuity

At the National Shrine last Wednesday (was it only 5 days ago?) the Holy Father and all the American bishops sang the Vespers hymn, At the Lamb's High Feast. This is an admirable choice for several reasons, all important. Only a few relatively inconsequential points argue against it.

For:

• It is a translation of Ad regias agni dupes, an Ambrosian Hymn--that is to say it was either written by St. Ambrose himself, or else good enough and venerable enough to be ascribed to him


• For centuries it has been the traditional Vespers hymn for the Easter season before Ascension, that is to say, now


• Considering the congregation it was exceedingly fitting that the hymn would include the lines "Praise we Him whose love divine/ gives His sacred Blood for wine/ gives His Body for the feast/ Christ the Victim; Christ the Priest." Priests are all called to be good shepherds, laying down their lives for their people. So it is fitting that the bishops (who have the fullness of the priestly sacrament of ordination) would recall the tie between the Eucharist and the offering of their lives.


• The hymn is an excellent translation of an ancient text. Providing excellent translations of ancient texts, I believe, is one of several steps which the bishops might well choose to take in their efforts to provide better liturgical music for their people. So it was fitting that they should enjoy singing together this particularly excellent example.


• The translator, Robert Campbell, was a convert to Roman Catholicism from the Episcopal Church of Scotland.


• The hymn itself, just as it comes to us in English from the page, is rich with sacramental and biblical imagery that is at the same time clearly expressed and intensely poetic. It's simply a worthwhile hymn, one of the very best. Having translated a few hymns into English, I admit that sometimes all that I want is to make a translation. Campbell did not stop there; he made a hymn!
  

Against:

• In the current confusion over Eucharistic theology, it generally seems best to me to avoid any hymn that refers to the Eucharist as "bread" and "wine," because these words can give the impression that the real change of consecration has not occurred. It should be a simple rule to follow: Do not use hymns in the Liturgy that weaken faith! In this case the effect of using these words is mitigated by the obvious sense that these gifts derive from the Crucified, and from "above." It's not just bread, it's "Paschal bread," in parallelism with the "Paschal victim." I've used this hymn in my parish, at Communion, several times during this Easter season. I think its goodness outweighs this misgiving. And yet the misgiving remains...


• The tune was written by one Lutheran, arranged by another. Of course, the arranger was Bach, and it is a wonderful composition. I've ordinarily been singing the alto line for this hymn this Easter, and it's a melody in itself. (That is not something that can usually be said about an alto line!)

Both for and against:

• This text was among those altered by the Urbanite reforms of 1632. In fact this text was in fact so changed that even its title, formerly Ad cenam Agni providi, was lost. We live in interesting times, liturgically, in which the Holy Father has taken authoritative steps towards the restoration of the sacred in the liturgy. One of his most important moves, the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, authorized wider use of the Mass of 1962, even without the permission of the local bishop. The motu proprio is opposed by many bishops in the US and elsewhere. So the question arises: given the existence of this tension and the generally paracletic tone of the Apostolic Journey, is it a good idea to use a hymn that reminds bishops of a papal decision (the Urbanite reforms of the hymnary) that seems to many modern scholars to have been ill-advised and capricious? Or is this consideration too trivial--and far too obscure--to enter into the conversation?

In my opinion the bulk of the argument falls in favor of the use of the hymn, because of its excellence in English, its ancient origins, and probably most importantly its use in the immediate centuries of the past as the Vespers hymn for Easter. Singing it is an exercise of--an act of faith in--the diachronic unity of the Church. The Church is one, throughout time, and the bishops of the Churches of the US sang with one voice, with the Pope, a song that has resounded (in some form) through most of the Church's centuries.

A great hymn selection.

The Threefold Manifestation

Traditionally the Epiphany and Baptism of the Lord have been linked with His first miracle: the changing of water into wine for the Wedding Feast at Cana.

The primary link is the idea of "manifestation." But I also think of these all as feasts of special gladness.

Maybe that's the same thing!

Manifest at Jordan's stream,
Prophet, Priest and King supreme;
and at Cana, wedding guest,
in thy Godhead manifest;
manifest in power divine,
changing water into wine;
anthems be to thee addressed,
God in man made manifest.

more

Using Protestant Hymns at Catholic Mass--One Catholic's Perspective

I think the theological content of non-Catholic Christian hymns should usually be addressed on an individual basis. But there are some big red flags:

1. Hymns written apologetically in protest against the Catholic Church.

2. Similarly, hymns that bring up the old divisive issues, such as faith vs. works. Unfortunately, for example, I believe that it is inadvisable for Catholics to sing the last verse of Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus, because Catholics have a nuanced view of merit, and the expression "all-sufficient merit" has been used apologetically against the Catholic view. So that's one down for Wesley. On the upside, there is nothing more Catholic than:

Finish, then, Thy new creation;
Pure and spotless let us be.
Let us see Thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in Thee;
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before Thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.

3. There are excesses of individualistic piety, full of pathos, in some of the German chorales. I believe these to be out of place in Catholic liturgy. It's one thing to say that Jesus would have died on the cross for just me, and quite another to sing that He did, or that it was only my sins that He bore. We can see this sort of heightened individualism coming in the CCM song "On my cross." But I believe it is just as mistaken in the beautifully set, brilliantly translated (by Robert Bridges, no less), "Ah, Holy Jesus."

Maybe I'll try this next...

British musicians send pope iPod nano packed with modern church music

...The gift is from contemporary Catholic songwriters Jo Boyce and Mike Stanley, and it features a new album of classic hymns reworked in modern forms of music. The duo has used instruments such as pianos, saxophones, guitars, drums and synthesizers to recreate centuries-old works in laid-back gospel, folk, funk, soul and lounge-music styles...

What's German for "Yeah, right."

Two new factors are thus at work in Church music. Artistic freedom increasingly asserts its rights, even in the liturgy. Church music and secular music are now each influenced by the other. This is particularly clear in the case of the so-called "parody Masses", in which the text of the Mass was set to a theme or melody that came from secular music, with the result that anyone hearing it might think he was listening to the latest "hit". It is clear that these opportunities for artistic creativity and the adoption of secular tunes brought danger with them. Music was no longer developing out of prayer, but, with the new demand for artistic autonomy, was now heading away from the liturgy; it was becoming an end in itself, opening the door to new, very different ways of feeling and of experiencing the world.

Music was alienating the liturgy from its true nature.

At this point the Council of Trent intervened in the culture war that had broken out. It was made a norm that liturgical music should be at the service of the Word; the use of instruments was substantially reduced; and the difference between secular and sacred music was clearly affirmed.

Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI)

The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp 145-6

Favorite United Methodist Hymns

Dean McIntyre's Top Twenty (with a few extras because of ties):

"Amazing Grace"
"Here I Am, Lord"
"How Great Thou Art"
"O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing"
"Hymn of Promise"
"In the Garden"
"Great Is Thy Faithfulness"
"Holy, Holy, Holy"
"Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee"
"Spirit Song"; "Blessed Assurance"
"Old Rugged Cross"
"Lord, I Lift Your Name on High"
"Lift High the Cross"
"Sanctuary"; "Be Thou My Vision"
"It Is Well with My Soul"
"Shine, Jesus, Shine"
"Christ, the Lord, Is Risen Today"
"Because He Lives"
"Love Divine, All Loves Excelling"
"On Eagle's Wings"

Every now and then I sing at a Methodist church for a choir director I know. It's a small congregation, but boy do they sing.

O Christ, the Great Foundation

Today I enjoyed singing two great hymns, Crown Him with Many Crowns, and this one, sung to the tune of The Church's One Foundation.

Any good hymns at your parish today?

1. O Christ, the great foundation
On which your people stand
To preach Your true salvation
In every age and land:
Pour out Your Holy Spirit
To make us strong and pure,
To keep the faith unbroken
As long as worlds endure.

2. Baptized in one confession,
One church in all the earth,
We bear our Lord's impression,
The sign of second birth:
One holy people gathered
In love beyond our own,
By grace we were invited,
By grace we make You known.

3. Where tyrants' hold is tightened,
Where strong devour the weak,
Where innocents are frightened,
The righteous fear to speak,
There let Your church awaking
Attack the powers of sin
And, all their ramparts breaking,
With You the victory win.

4. This is the moment glorious
When He who once was dead
Shall lead His church victorious,
Their champion and their head.
The Lord of all creation
His heavenly kingdon brings,
The final consummation,
The glory of all things.

Timothy T'infang Lew

Trans. Mildred A. Wiant

A Call for Artistry

My collaborator Michael Lawrence writes an impassioned plea for artistic excellence on The New Liturgical Movement:

...Many of the Church's better musicians have heroically tried to concoct elixirs for this epidemic mediocrity, only to be brushed back or beaten into submission. It seems that many of them end up going with the flow so as to keep food on the table. One of this writer's colleagues once lamented, "If I hear 'It's good enough' one more time....." Indeed, "excellence" seems to be defined as that which is better than mediocre. It's good enough.

Even if we could have done better...

How Can I Keep From Singing?

Let's face it, you can't keep from singing. In the shower, in the car, while doing the dishes or mowing the lawn--maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but sometime soon you will break into song. It's normal human behavior.

It's also normal but exceedingly rare these days to sing out loud with a group. When do we do this? Two times: at a baseball game and at church. At the ball game we sing the National Anthem (at least a few people do, who aren't afraid of either the low notes or the high notes) and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Maybe some people who have had some beer sing We Will We Will Rock You. But primarily, outside of church, we sing two songs: O Say Can You See and Buy Me Some Peanuts and Crackerjacks.

Oh, and we also sing Happy Birthday.

The point is, we human beings need the outlet of shared song. We like it and we need it. We need to express ourselves together, and we need to share stories; that is is part of being human. But not since Motown was big has the whole American culture sung the same thing (though Dancin' in the Streets has been covered a zillion times) and ever since the Beatles went Krishna our music has been privatized, spiritualized, aestheticized and sanitized, till privatization has now possibly reached its limit extreme, in which subway cars full of pod people listen to personal digital playlists on their white earphones.

We never sing our songs together. Music-as-isolation--what an irony and a loss! So, when we go to church and sing together, we keep trying to sing our songs. OUR songs. Not songs for or about God, but the songs about life and the living of it, about memories and tragedies and heroes. We're starved for our epic poems so we sing them out of place, and they distract us from the reason for our participation in the church service, which is not supposed to be full of ourselves, but of God.

These songs are good, but they are out of place at Mass. They are the songs we should be singing in the carpool. In the pub. At the stadium. At home, after dinner. Together.

The People vs. The Pastors

A recent on-line survey by The National Association of Pastoral Musicians (which unfortunately has a labyrinth on its homepage, but that's another story) shows a serious disconnect between Church musicians and non-musicians. The question was asked, "What helps you to sing the Liturgy?"

The discrepancies between the opinions of music-organizers and the music-participators could be framed in many ways, given these results. Let's look at them up like this:

.............................Rank, Non-Musicians.........Rank, Musicians
Familiar Melody.............1........................................7
Easy to Sing....................2.......................................8
Traditional Song..............3......................................11

The people like to sing the "same ol same ol." Musicians do not. Musicians attend conventions and learn The Latest Thing, which I believe is still "World Music," in which people whose cultural backgrounds are Northern European write pseudo-Swahili and pseudo-Pacific Islander verses and try to force their Latino-Anglo congregations to sing them. Meanwhile the people themselves would far prefer to sing "Holy Holy Holy," "Holy God, We Praise Thy Name," and "Bendito, Bendito."

In the parish where I cantor, which is admittedly in Virginia, the people really came alive last weekend when we sang "Faith Of Our Fathers." And yes, we sang the martyrdom verse. Con mucho gusto.

HT: The New Liturgical Movement

A Few More Principles

I've been putting together a few "principles of discernment" that I think are useful tools for choosing among the many hymn texts that we have at our disposal. I use these myself when choosing songs for the Liturgy, and when I write my own texts. I would imagine that preachers have a similar list of do's and don't's for when they prepare homilies: some things that they would always be sure to say, and some things that they would never ever say in a million years.

Right now I'm working out "the negative judgment"--some of the features of hymn or song texts that I believe make them misleading or harmful for the people to sing. Things I think we should never ever sing in a million years. Two of them follow:

• Hymns that speak of the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, the City of God, or the Heavenly Jerusalem must always be clear that this kingdom "is not of this world," but is fulfilled in heaven.
• No hymn should speak of the Eucharist as "bread" and "wine" without some clear, immediate qualification that indicates that bread and wine have been changed into the Body and Blood of Christ. Examples of acceptable usages include: Bread of angels, living Bread, Bread of life, the One Cup. Examples of unacceptable usages include broken bread, bread broken for us, wine poured out for us, bread (simply), wine (simply).
  
  (This last leaves out one of my favorite hymns, Father We Thank Thee Who Hast Planted, whose expression "broken bread" is (arguably, and imho) not sufficiently clear regarding the Real Presence. It's misleading on this one point alone. I know, I know, it's from the Didache. But, it's from the Eucharistic prayer of the Didache, and in an early point of the Eucharistic prayer at that. First of all, what are we doing singing a Eucharistic prayer as a hymn? Secondly, when would we sing it? It's neither pre-consecrational, nor post-consecrational. It's neither fish nor fowl for us; it doesn't "go" with our current rite. )
  
  To my thinking, a single corrupt or potentially misleading expression makes a corrupt hymn. If it can be fixed or reworked, why not? But then again, with all the music at large, why bother? Rare is the hymn that would be such a great loss to humanity, that we cannot simply let it disappear. And most of those are so consonant with Catholic sensibilities that they contain no errors anyhow.
  
  In some cases, just one verse might be problematic, but perhaps not the entire hymn. For example, another principle might be:
  
• No hymn should use the word "sacrament" for any activity other than the seven sacraments of the Church, unless it refers instead to the Sacrament that is the Church itself.(LG 9, 4)
  
  This leaves out the third verse of Draw Us in the Spirit's Tether--but then it was already pretty well farfetched in its Eucharistic theology in the verse two. Catholics don't "break the bread and bless the cup," exactly. "We" don't do anything, first of all; Christ does, in the action and words of the priest. Secondly, what happens is the bread and wine are offered in sacrifice; they are consecrated. The first verse of this hymn is quite pretty and good, and the tune, with its "alleluias" is so lovely, that its subsequent inadequacy (even poetic inadequacy) is often overlooked, even for its use in Catholic hymnals and churches. But it is because of theological inadequacy that it should not be sung at Mass.

Principles for Discerning Good Liturgical Music

1. The doctrine of the Trinity should never be compromised through the consistent replacement of masculine pronominal references to the three Divine persons
2. Any emphasis on the work of the members of the Church should always be balanced by an appreciation of the doctrine of grace and our complete dependence of the grace of God to accomplish anything
3. Any hymn focused on apostolic activity among the poor should mention at least one of five goals of apostolic activity:

• service to Christ who identified Himself with poor (Mt. 25)
  
• the desire that others may see our good works and glorify the heavenly Father (Mt. 5:16, cf. SC 10)
  
• the imago dei present in every human person,
  
• the desire that God's will be done on earth as in the heavenly kingdom, which is "not of this world"
  
• the imitation of Christ who "came to preach good news to the poor" and "became poor though He was rich, to make you rich out of His poverty" and "took on the form of a slave."

Some similar, explicit reference to a God-centered, theological reason for any apostolic activity must accompany any exhortation to that activity.