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