In Praise of Hymns

Guest blogger Jenny N. Sullivan is a novelist, author of English literature text books, developer of a Catholic catechism alphabet for children, and an essayist.

In Praise of Hymns

            A happy Catholic now, I grew up a happy Methodist, sometimes singing in the children’s choir. I can still feel that anticipation, standing in line behind the altar, waiting for the processional hymn to begin. We processed through a back panel of the altar, a hidden door, and filled the rows of the choir loft. The adult choir in burgundy robes lined up on the left hand side behind the pulpit. They faced the children’s choir in our waist-length half-robes of white on the right hand side where Mrs. Glover, seated behind the organ, played “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty./ Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.” About half way through the service, if it were the Sunday out of the month that the children got to sing the “anthem,” we stood on cue and waited for the musical introduction. Mrs. Glover had to leave the organ and go over to the piano, which always accompanied our choral offerings.  Glancing alternately from our sheet music to Mrs. Glover every few seconds, we sang:

This is my Father’s world,

And to my list’ning ears

All nature sings and round me rings

The music of the spheres.

That hymn went on to assure me that all was well:

This is my Father’s world.

I rest me in the thought

Of rocks and tree of skies and seas,

His hands the wonders wrought.

           The Methodist hymns of my childhood catechized me.  They taught me to rest in Him, the only thing, as St. Augustine tells us, we can do to cure our restlessness since we were made for God. Singing those hymns at church, even when I wasn’t in the choir, made me know that I was a part of something big with scores of other people around me holding forth in song while simultaneously I was nurtured in a private, interior, personal moment with God, with Christ. My little voice was joyfully acknowledging to Him that I understood what the church music was telling me. I understood “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Such a huge blessing for me in my childhood were these hymns. Every child should be so fortunate.

            Out of bashfulness, I did not go to church regularly until I was seven or eight, maybe nine. My mother did not force me to accompany her and my older brother and sister, four and six years older. I don’t know what went into that decision, but we have Sunday photos of me in my shorts standing between my sister in her pretty, filmy Sunday best and my brother in his crisp shirt and trousers.  I stayed home with my father who spent Sunday mornings with Bishop Fulton Sheen and Lawrence E. Spivak, Life is Worth Living followed by Meet the Press.

My first memory of regular church attendance accompanied my preparation for baptism. My sister took me to my lessons, on Saturdays I think. She was the good big sister, indeed the self-sacrificing big sister. Once I made that transition to church, wearing a pink dress with a white pinafore for my Sunday baptism, I was all in. And whether it was church service or Sunday school, singing was major.

           

Everything seemed good while hymns were being sung. Jasper, a girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen at the time, could, amazingly, rock that piano in Sunday school assembly with any hymn that any kid requested, which we were encouraged to do. Certain winning hymns were requested nearly every Sunday. As I recall, “Blessed Assurance” was the first request every Sunday for a long stretch of Sundays. The tune is rousing, and the message obviously appealed to the junior high crowd: “Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine. / O what a foretaste of glory divine.” Sort of sums up what life is all about. The lyrics keep that whole personal thing going too. Jesus is “mine,” not only “ours” (although that is true too), but “mine.” Since He is “mine,” I get a “foretaste of glory divine.” That reality is of course why the line has to begin with “O.”

So many lines demand an “O.” “O for a thousand tongues to sing/ My great redeemer’s praise” or “O God our help in ages past,/  Our hope for years to come” or “O holy night” or “O come let us adore him.” Never is the “O” more called for than in the wailing of “O, o, o, o, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. / Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” I sure hope you are hearing these melodies in your head. If you are Protestant, I suspect you are. If you are Catholic, you have seen some of these wonderful songs creep into our hymnal as well. They are just too good not to hear and too catechetical not to use.

            Any seeker of  faith, of truth cannot help but love the simple way the old Baltimore Catechism began, how it summed up for children the meaning of life with a simple question and answer. “Why do I exist? To know, love, and serve God in this life and enjoy Him in the next.” As a little Methodist girl, I did not know the Baltimore Catechism, of course. But I got the same message from the hymns. One such hymn certainly helped me to know who God is.  He is “Jesus, lover of my soul.” What an exquisite definition of God. The God of the universe is the one who loves my soul. That was an important piece of information for me to have as a child. It is important for any child, for any person. That hymn did more. It modelled for me how to behave with the one who is the lover of my soul: “Let me to thy bosom fly,” the lyric prayerfully continues.  This hymn was teaching me how to know God, to do what the Catechism says I was born to do.

            At home, whenever a Billy Graham revival was on TV, we had to watch, at least long enough for Mama to hear George Beverly Shea sing “How Great Thou Art.” We even bought the sheet music so that Mama or my brother or my sister could play that one on the piano. (It wasn’t in the hymnal.) Lyrics stay with a person just as prayers and poems do, and that is good. Catholics learn the “Hail Mary,” the “Our Father,” and the “Angelus,” and that is good. Methodists, this little Methodist girl anyway, learned the lyrics of many hymns and has found them on the tip of her tongue whenever the moment has called for them.

            The Baltimore Catechism says that in addition to knowing God, we are to love God. One hymn that rings in my head, even breaking through the tinnitus, served as a practical manual for loving God and told us, as we sang, that we should

Take time to be holy.

Speak oft with the Lord.

Abide in him always

And feed on his word.

Make friends of God’s children.

Help those who are weak.

Forgetting in nothing,

His blessing to seek.

If you are not a Protestant of a certain age, you may be unaware of what a common denominator hymns were at one time in American culture. I remember sitting on the glider on the porch of one of my little Baptist girlfriends and singing hymns to while away a summer afternoon. I remember teaching hymns to a little girl down the street too young to read the lyrics. On a few occasions my mother, siblings and I even sang hymns around the piano. Why, I can even remember once, early in my career in a new city, having a colleague from another part of the country stop by the house to bring me something and ask what I was doing. I admitted, “Actually, I had the Methodist Hymnal out, and I was singing!” He laughed and said, “Don’t tell me,” and began to sing, “There is a fountain filled with blood/ Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins” as dramatically as the words demand. Although he was having a good time teasing me about singing alone in my living room, we finished the hymn together.

The Baltimore Catechism also tells children, in its simple answer to the question of why we exist, that we are to serve God. So many hymns taught me that to serve God was to tell the good news of the gospel. One man in our adult choir, Dickie Zimmerman, had a voice that boomed over all the others. He tried to blend in, but his voice wouldn’t allow it, and nobody minded. He was lovely to listen to. After he died, the absence of his voice was shocking to the ear. Everyone noticed. How could we not? A part of his service to God and to us was that voice, so convicting, especially in masculine hymns like “Rise up o men of God. / Have done with lesser things. / Give heart and mind and soul and strength/To serve the king of kings.” He served the King. A gentler hymn, from my Catholic experience, written in 1981 by Daniel O’Donnell, says the same thing in a quieter way.

Here I am, Lord.
Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night.
I will go, Lord
If you lead me.
I will hold your people in my heart.

And so my catechesis continues. But as everyone knows, Catholics don’t sing as enthusiastically at Mass as Protestants did when I was a child and do now in their services, I suppose. Despite the beautiful ancient music of the Catholic Church, despite the explosion of engaging contemporary liturgical music after Vatican II, and despite the incorporation of many of my beloved Protestant hymns and spirituals into the new Catholic hymnals, we don’t sing out. Yet, I have observed that there is one time when the singing is stronger than usual, in my parish anyway. That time is when the liturgical calendar calls for Marian songs. The veneration of Mary is something many Protestants do not seem to understand easily, and so it causes many of them concern.  Put simply, she is a special way to Jesus. God gave Mary the same free will that He gave to Eve, but Mary said “yes” to the will of God, and so salvation came into the world.  At the wedding at Cana, she told the attendants, “Do whatever He tells you.” Pretty good advice. Mary’s obedience to God, her strength, and her beauty touch the Catholic heart in a deep way. We Protestant converts may sing all the hymns, but when Marian hymns are called for, even the cradle Catholics join in: “Gentle woman, quiet light,/ Morning star so strong and bright,/ Gentle Mother, peaceful dove, / Teach us wisdom, teach us love.”

The Methodist church taught me to know, love, and serve God and now so does the Catechism.  The little Baltimore Catechism goes on to explain that while we exist “to know love, and serve God in this life,” we exist also to “enjoy Him in the next.” Enjoy him in the next. The evening before my mother died, I was saying goodbye to her in the nursing home. I kissed her, I prayed with her, and I sang to her. Bedridden with a stroke for five and a half years, she was silent and her body was wasting, but her gaze was strong and inviting, her smile sweet and gentle. I sang for her a hymn we had both become acquainted with only recently through a woman who conducted worship services at the nursing home for her own mother and for the other residents. The song was written by Gloria and Bill Gaither of the singing TV Gaither family. Because it is the last hymn that she heard, I think of it as her capstone hymn, one that says it all, an anthem to the power and beauty of the God she knew and loved and served in this life and who, please God, she is enjoying in the next. If you do not know it, listen to it on YouTube, but have a tissue at the ready.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,

There’s just something about that name.

Master, Savior, Jesus,

Like the fragrance after the rain.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,

Let all heaven and earth proclaim.

Kings and kingdoms shall all pass away,

But there’s something about that name.

                                                                                           Jenny N. Sullivan

My Father, the Vegetable Farmer

My Father, the Vegetable Farmer

            Come April my dad was out in the back yard turning over his vegetable plot, a perfect rectangle positioned between the patio and the garage. The hose to the well he had drilled was conveniently hanging just outside the garage, and he was religious about proper watering.  His lawn chairs were positioned just inside the open garage door where he sat to rest, to smoke, to savor a bit of Four Roses, and to “receive.” Once that garage door went up in the early morning, everyone in the neighborhood knew that Doc “was receiving.”

            Geezers, young fellows, and little children came and went all day long. They got cokes and watermelon and cheese if they liked but mainly talk. I believe they came for the talk. Once Dad was rested enough to get back to his garden, often his visitors did not leave. They did not even get up from their lawn chairs. They watched Doc till or weed or water. The little kids, of course, wanted to help, to dig with the shovel or set the seedlings in. The men wanted to advise or compliment as appropriate.

Sometimes Dad and another fellow would disappear for an hour or so and come back with fertilizer. When the circus was in town, they would go and ask for elephant manure and bring home buckets-full. Dad would find someone in the family, usually me it seemed, and thrust the bucket in my face. “Smell that. We’ll have some good tomatoes this year.” He loved to watch me cringe and turn my head. What would he do now that Ringling Brother got rid of their elephants and then even had to close down.

            Dad loved dirt and talked about his dirt all season long. He was so proud of the soil he gave to his vegetables to grow in. It was black and loamy and luscious. All summer long it fed his tomatoes and peppers, summer squash and zucchini, cucumbers and occasional radishes. And all summer long they fed us.

What he did not grow, he bought from the farmers’ market. Our farmers’ market back then was not the sophisticated affair that many farmers’ markets are today. A permanent semi-circle of shelters, a roof and a table, gave the sellers some shade through their hot day. All of the sellers were very small farmers, some even backyard farmers, who came to town each Saturday.

            Dad was a frequent enough customer that folks knew him, and he knew which growers had the best value for the price in his opinion. They did not know each other’s names, but they spoke with the familiarity of people who get together once a week. At the farmer’s market, Dad wanted corn, kale, collards, or mustard greens, and watermelon or peaches.

            Summer was tomato sandwiches on lightly toasted white bread with salt, pepper and mayonnaise for lunch, cucumbers every night for supper, summer squash fried down with heaps of onions and lots of black pepper every Sunday dinner along with some of those greens from the market and maybe a peach cobbler for dessert. We enjoyed zucchini bread when Mama felt like baking, which was often. And there was watermelon in the backyard, cold from the refrigerator Dad kept in the garage for entertaining when he was receiving.

            We did eat protein. But in the summer meat seemed merely a compliment to the vegetables, except for pork. Dad would drive into North Carolina with a friend for pork that the farmer made available from the poor pig on that very day. And Dad fished for spot and croaker or bought them from the men who brought their boats in at Harrison’s Pier. Summer pork and fish out of the bay have almost nothing in common with a pot roast in winter. They are more like ripe tomatoes fresh off the vine.

            Mama took care of the flowers and of food in the winter. But food in the summer was my Dad’s. It was not his responsibility but his great enthusiasm. When spring arrived, he donned his warm-weather uniform, a horizontal striped tank top, plaid Bermuda shorts, and bare feet. He died on April 23, 1991. It was sudden and merciful. His heart played out as he tried to rise from his bed, and he was gone. He had already turned over his vegetable garden. I flew down to Norfolk that morning when I got the call, cried with and tried to console my mother, took care of some of the funeral business, what Emily Dickenson calls “the solemnest of industries enacted upon earth,” and then went out back for a quiet moment alone. There in the soft dirt of Dad’s vegetable garden, in his beloved dirt, were his footprints, probably from the day before. Mama set in the plants he had bought and bravely harvested his vegetables that year.

Jenny Sullivan

Father's Day 2017

Beachhead Established in Europe by Orthodox Anglicans

BEACHHEAD ESTABLISHED IN EUROPE BY ORTHODOX ANGLICANS

Author: Woody Norman

EDINBURGH, Scotland, U.K., June, 2017 – Within sight of the mouth of the Firth of Forth, an archbishop of the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon) introduced the conference's to-be-consecrated missionary bishop to Europe.

The Most Reverend Doctor Foley Beach, Archbishop and Primate of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) made the announcement on June 8, 2017 following a vote by the Scottish Episcopal Church changing its canons allowing for same-sex “marriage.”

Canon Andy Lines will be Gafcon’s missionary bishop to Europe. The office - a new "North See" - provides Scottish Episcopalians who faithfully uphold traditional and biblical marriage episcopal oversight.  

Just days earlier the globe-trotting archbishop attended the convocation of the FreeChurch of England (FCE), an ecclesial body associated neither with the Church of England nor with the Anglican Communion. Beach's close proximity to Scotland at that time was not coincidental.

THE ARCHBISHOP

The young North American archbishop has been, since his election by fellow ACNA bishops, working diligently to shore-up orthodoxy around the world and not just within Anglicanism.

Foley Beach has developed a relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church, especially a good relationship with the Metropolitan Hilarion of the Department of External Church Relations. Beach has also entered into talks with American ecclesiastical organizations such as the LutheranChurch-Missouri Synod. ACNA is in communion with the North American LutheranChurch (NALC).

Since its founding in 2008 by Gafcon, the Anglican Church in North America has been planting churches across the United States and Canada. Indeed, there are many “store-front” churches within ACNA. One can argue that ACNA exercises The Benedict Option.

CANONICAL RESIDENCE

What might have gone unnoticed in the announcement by Archbishop Beach of bishop-elect Andy Lines is that Lines’s canonical residence has already been moved from a diocese in a South American Anglican province to ACNA’s Anglican Diocese of the South, Foley Beach’s diocese.

To be sure Archbishop Foley Beach does not act independently of his Gafcon brother Primates, however, he appears to have been charged by them with pulling together any and all remnants of orthodox Christianity throughout the world. Beach is a person with strong, biblical convictions and has continually demonstrated his highly developed organizational skill as "captain of the ship."

Placing Canon Lines within Beach’s own Anglican Diocese of the South promises, to a degree, an implementation of orthodox Anglicanism - under Beach's oversight - throughout a dying Europe.

Canon Andy Lines will be consecrated a bishop on June 30, 2017 at the ACNA’s triennial assembly at Wheaton College in Illinois.

Worth Earlwood "Woody" Norman, Jr. is a biographer , historian, poet, and publisher. A community chaplain, Norman is a deacon in ACNA's Special Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy and is an assisting clergy at the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd in Pelham, Alabama.

Separation

Separation

Forty years my acquisition

Of books have numbered

In the hundreds. A new condition

Now tasks me; I’m encumbered.

All or some?

Which shall I pack?

This or that one?

It’s a huge stack!

It’s not the amount

Of books to flee

Into boxes that’s tantamount.

It’s their departure from me.

But, no. The change in my reality

Is actually my own departure, my leaving.

Not to depart is my plea.

Packing, the gateway, began my grieving.

I must now stop

And catch my breath.

On the holy hill atop

I should not fear death.

Endings, for sure,

Come closer every hour.

Many deaths I endure

Like the life cycle of a flower.

Where went time,

The gift coupled with space?

They, our temporal clime,

I live within that divine grace.

Time and space,

Chronological.

Life lifted from that place,

Eschatological.

Dare I say

“Woe is me.”

No pity in play.

Grace is free.

Two Prescient Books by French Writers

Considering both immigration and toleration by the secular left, these two books have much to behold for unchecked challenges to Western civilization.

The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail projects what types of immigration are possible, including unexpected and rapid confrontation by the unprepared and unsuspecting.

The Camp of the Saints

The book Submission by Michel Houellebecq, is a more recent publication. This novel expresses the transformation of a nation (in this case, France) by ideological/political Islam.

Submission

Submission

Submission

The secular has no clue.

Nominal Christians are nice.

Both see what Submission will do,

But are scared to fight.

Read the Prophet’s book

Just once,

And you will forever not look

And talk like a dunce.

It’s not a fight

With Submission’s so-called “Radical.”

That “Radical” is actually its pure light,

The Prophet’s binding manacle.

The real radicals of the “pure light”

Are misnamed as moderates.

If they speak up they might

Have their heads removed in their habitats.

Vast numbers of followers

Of the Prophet are not fanatics,

Neither total swallowers

Of sura dogmatics.

However, those followers are weak

And frightened by their throat-slicing minority.

Hideouts are what they seek,

They have ceded their authority.

The West then must assume this fight

And call a spade a spade.

It must recover its true grounding,

Or submit to the blade.

Coming to Terms

Coming to Terms

What’s so radical

About misuse of a term?

Words classical,

Once healthy, now deadly germ.

Radical Islam is a misnomer.

Its practice, Koran pure.

So-called moderates, the sarcoma,

The real radical offers no cure.

Radical is not

Pure Islam.

Its principles, its thought,

No peace, no balm.

Pure Islam is

Commitment, conviction.

On infidels quiz

Belief, impose affliction.

+++

The secular west

Did its best

To rid its root

Of Christian fruit.

First in Europe

Began to stir up

Old convictions

Creating frictions.

No need for tradition

With the Enlightenment mission

Of thinking the rational,

Being one, killing the national.

Fluid thinking,

No principles linking

To past truths.

 The secular requires no proof.

+++

Pure Islam and the secular

In strange alliance

Make spectacular

A frightful compliance.

The secular so blind

With no principles at all

Must resign

With submission, withal.

+++

"Radical," you see

Really are the "Moderate."

The rational and secular plea

Have succumbed to the pure threat.

Is it too late

To come to terms?

How long will the secular wait

Before western culture burns?