So the first verse is a paraphrase of Romans 14:8, which they cite in the credits: "whether we live or we die, we are the Lord's." Verse 3, however, alludes to the Gospels: "there will always be people who cry without consolation." Which is a pretty bleak message from Jesus, although maybe he's encouraging us not to expect the impossible?

The translation is pretty literal, and in fact, the Spanish original illustrates a feature that Spanish has but English doesn't really, which makes it conceptually a little tricky to learn. The normal, standard translations of "we live" and "we die" are "vivimos" and "morimos" respectively; they come from the root words "vivir" and "morir." In Spanish, verbs (infinitive--the version you'd find in the dictionary) always end with "ar," "er," or "ir," and when you put them in "we" form, those consistently become "amos," "emos," "imos." So far so good.

But even when you're not changing tense or person, you can go to the subjunctive mood, which expresses things like "I am happy that we are living" or "I hope that we live another day" or "He wants us to die in a fire." When the secondary verb is described in some emotional/possible/change of subject context, you put a different ending on the verb, and we get things like "vivamos" or "muramos." (The last one is actually irregular, you would expect "moramos" there, but there are different kinds of "shoe verbs" that conjugate weirdly.) So anyway, in this version, the first two lines are "If we live, we live for him; and if we die, we die for him." (declarative) "Whether we live or we die, we are the Lord's, we are the Lord's." (subjunctive)

That's enough linguistics nerdery. Here is a non-religious song that we learned to practice the subjunctive. ("I dream that this love never dies.")

This is (very coincidentally) 100 off from 737, but it reminds me of that one in terms of its structure and vibrant images. 737 starts each verse with "He comes..." and uses creative metaphors to describe God, starting with "one unknown" but ending with "yet unseen, but not unknown." This one starts each verse with "Holy God, holy and..." and describes God's attributes (glory, power, etc.) and how they're revealed in sometimes paradoxical weakness--God's weakness is more powerful than human strength, etc. Another awesome text.

And yet another bragging rights connection; when I was in undergrad, one of the young adults at the student group was the lyricist's daughter! (It looks like that's one of those double-pastor families.)

The tune is by the prolific Marty Haugen, with a random 2/4 measure thrown in in the midst of 3/4 just to mess with us, I guess. The tune name is Shanti, which is the Sanskrit word for "peace" and probably a reference to Jesus' greeting of peace in the first verse. It's better known in English for being quoted in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which I haven't even read and am still aware of it as a pretentious multilingual allusion, so...bizarre highbrow choice there I guess. The text is better than I'm making this sound and alludes to Jesus' appearance to Thomas in the Easter stories; although Thomas gets an iffy reputation for doubting the resurrection at first, he's also one of the first people to identify Jesus as God.

So, we've recently seen a hymn where the verses could be sung by a leader, call-and-response style, or alternatively, by everyone. Well, this hymn doesn't want to give you the option, because the printed music is just the refrain. Then at the bottom of the page, text-only (the way they sometimes print overflow verses if there are too many to fit otherwise), are verses for the leader. Except, those don't really seem to fit the same rhyme or meter scheme, so they're probably not to the same melody. So the leader has to sing them alone, because the rest of the congregation doesn't know the melody! (In which case, why even print the lyrics in this edition, since we're not going to sing them? Compare "Veni Sancte Spiritus.")

...This probably needs its own tag.

The first verse has the slightly weird phrasing "all thy faithful mercies crown," "crown" being used as a verb (request). Are we asking Jesus to increase our own mercy, or finish off his many instances of being merciful to us by appearing incarnate? This caught my eye because we get a more familiar phrasing at the end: "till we cast our crowns before thee." The image of throwing down our own crowns in the presence of God shows up elsewhere, and is probably a motif from Revelation or something, because it's also the etymology of the Christian rock band Casting Crowns!

This song is noteworthy for two reasons. One, it has a lot of beautiful texts about asking God to be with us in both life and death. Only God is unchanging, unlike the inconstant Earth, but because God is with us, we can ask "Where is death's sting?" (from 1 Corinthians, which it looks like is actually a callback to Hosea, but Paul's rhetorical questioning is much better-known). Because of this, the hymn lends itself well to obituaries, my grandmother's family used it for hers.

The other reason this song is famous is because ninety-three years ago, British soccer fans thought it would be a great choice to sing at their soccer cup/bracket final and they liked it so much they've done so ever since.

British soccer fans are weird.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate! (In the Western calendar anyway, Orthodox Easter is next week.)

The opening melody is a C major chord which is probably the first chord you learn in piano lessons so that's kind of neat.

This song is interesting in that it comes with two sets of lyrics for verses 2-4, and they're fairly different from each other in translation. The main set is about great days in the church year (Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost); the alternate set is sort of about Christmas and then nature metaphors (trees, birds, etc).

It's heavy on the feminine rhymes, mostly of the -ing form, but some other original ones (horizon/season/emblazon is pretty bold, I like it). The alternate set has more original ones (cherish/perish! ...nourish).

I want to say that this song is associated with one of the Lutheran school (college?) choirs my relatives went to, but that's a lot of schools, so I'm not really sure which.

I like the lyrics in general, especially the last verse--describing the journey to heaven as "we'll gather in song."

The text here is an interesting collaboration between 16-1700s era Isaac Watts (British, super prolific, we'll run into him again) and Robert Lowry (US, 1800s, we'll run into him too.) Shannon density is somewhat low in that lines three and four are the same every verse, ditto five and six, and of course the refrain is a refrain. This isn't unheard of for Watts--think of "and heaven and nature sing" repeating in "Joy to the World." But it comes off as less impressive here, where the overall vibe tends towards the cheesy old-fashionedish.

"The hill of Zion yields a thousand sacred sweets before we reach the heavenly fields" is an interesting mental image. Usually we don't think of heaven as having tiers or levels of awesomeness, or indeed tasty foodstuffs, but then there are lots of descriptions of "Pilgrim's Progress" (or maybe Dante's journey applies here as well?) that introduce a lot of complicated metaphors into how different writers have seen God's kingdom. So maybe this is just following in that tradition.

Does the composer have a cool name?

I'm going to guess that Augustus Toplady was not, in fact, a top lady.

Riven?

Having a rift in it, ie, wounded (Jesus was pierced in the side with a spear.)

It's also the sequel to Myst, but that's not relevant here.

Cleft?

Cut in two, or looking like it was cut in two, like a cleft palate.

Is the "rock of ages" actually a line from the Bible?

Apparently so (it shows up in hymns that were older than this one, so Toplady didn't coin the phrase), but it might not be a very accurate translation.

What's the time signature?

Mostly 4/4, but the first measures of the first two lines are 6/4. I don't think I know this melody at all.

Well? Can the head rise and leave his members dead?

I mean, technically, sure, God can do whatever he/she/it wants.

Shall you fear and/or have courage shaken?

I think this is one of those aspects of faith that aren't under my voluntary control. So sometimes yes, sometimes no.