The Hymnal of our Soul Part 4

 

Engaging with art means we have to slow down to allow a new experience to enter which perhaps cannot be accessed in another way. It can be an expansive experience.  Lourdes Bernard

 

So far this week you have been making a list and checking it twice or more for hymns that are a soundtrack to your soul.  Yesterday, I asked you to do the difficult, demanding, work of looking at hymns that irk or irate you, that you want to scratch like a rash that won’t go away!  Today, I am going to ask you to scan, survey your list to find five hymns (or ten if you want), Google the lyrics, and read them.  Or come to church, find a hymnal, settle into the pew to read.

 

What are your favorite hymns preaching and proclaiming?   What are your favorite hymns saying about the sacred?  What do the lyrics illuminate about the human condition?  Like scripture, hymns sometimes point out a problem.  For example, here is the second verse of “God, Who Stretched the Spangled Heavens”

 

We (meaning humans) have ventured worlds undreamed of since the childhood of our race.

Known the ecstasy of winging through untraveled realms of space;

Probed the secrets of the atom, yielding unimagined power,

Facing us with life’s destruction or our most triumphant hour.

 

In that verse we hear a celebration of ways human scientific achievements from things like space travel, personal computers, smart phones, and renewable energy sources.  We share inventive powers with God.  But the second part of the verse reminds us, in the immortal words of Spiderman’s uncle, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Humans haven’t always been as ethical as we could be with our responsibility – true then and now.  We have valued profit over people, bottom lines, and bank accounts to define worth rather than the truth that we are each in God’s image.  I hope you start to sense that when you slowly read the words of the hymn, you are entering a world.  Often, because of the way music functions in our worship, we don’t allow space to pause, letting the melody and music and meaning of the hymn fall afresh on us.  Find a few hymns or one hymn or however many you’d like to savor each syllable as though this was food for our souls ~ what lingers on the tip of your tongue as you taste what we sing?  May this question be held in each of our hearts now and in the days to come.  Amen.