So I have no idea how I stumbled across this a couple months ago, maybe it was on a hymn page I was Googling for this blog or a synod page I was Googling for something else. But it turns out that the composer of this hymn (and a few other hymns in this volume) is a repeated sexual harasser. D:

Lots of churches and church bodies are making the choice to not sing his compositions, going forward. I think this is a great decision! If he were thrown in jail without a trial or prevented from publishing lyrics on his own blog, sure, that might be a violation of freedom of speech, but the opportunity to have your works performed in a public setting is a privilege, not a right. There are plenty of good hymns out there. And given the choice between performing a song by "this guy who is a known repeated sexual harasser" or "how about someone else," I think "someone else" wins every day of the week and twice on Sunday. (Which is when you're usually performing hymns anyway.)

However, I also think this might be a case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Because in several of those posts/announcements, the context has been along the lines of "we don't want to perform his songs because they may be triggering to people who he abused." I certainly hope no one would be deliberately attempting to trigger survivors of abuse! But the thing about triggers is, in many cases they don't behave "rationally" or along predictable lines. A song by an innocuous person could be triggering to someone if it was associated with a traumatic event, just like any other kind of sensory stimuli linked with that traumatic event could be triggering. Should we refuse to sing (insert whatever song here) because it might be someone's trigger? This may be slippery-slopey, but I feel like emotional versions of the heckler's veto are increasingly common in the circles I run in and I don't want that trend to continue. (And again, nobody should feel like they ought to perform this guy's songs just 'cause, just like nobody should feel like they need to screen a movie by a known harasser at a film festival just 'cause! It's just this reasoning that seems specious.)

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On "hymns in the wild," we did in fact sing "Lift Every Voice And Sing" today, and the pastor even suggested we stand for it (on zoom), which is obviously the first time we've been like "stand for the hymn!" in months and months. :D

The chorus is a paraphrase of Isaiah, which talks about the mountains singing and the trees clapping their hands, which is a great mental image. The last verse ties into that with "when creatures, once forlorn, find wilderness reborn" and "the promised green of Eden." That's a good message for the world in terms of our commitment to justice needing to be justice for the planet as well as equality among people and an end to hunger. In Biblical terms, though, we begin with creation in a garden and end with a new heavenly city. It's a very wordy urbanization narrative. ;)

So there are a couple hymn tune names that are the name of a city, maybe where a song originated, or maybe it was written for an assembly there or something. This is one of them.

The first verse is an incomplete sentence leading into the second, it just generalizes the "all." So it seems like "your" might be referencing God? Everyone is serving God's city in some way. But no, second verse is a direction towards those people: "seek the Lord, who is your life."

Now, this section is about justice/peace, and a lot of them are about economic justice--God lifting up the lowly, working for peace among nations. So you might be worried it's getting a little hippie. But then we quote Jesus "You must work while it is day." No free riders here! Unless...maybe it's telling the rich elites to get working and make a difference? Hmm.

And then the last verse asks "shall yet the city be the city of despair?" Which is a little reminiscent of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem before his crucifixion. Anyway. The city this tune was named after? New Orleans. I feel like someone might be going "no, Jesus, that was a rhetorical question."

As promised, here's the one about "heart compassionate." Actually these two are even more similar than that suggests; the last verse of that one starts "O God, whose heart compassionate bears every human pain;" this one in its first line is "O Christ, your heart, compassionate, bore every human pain." This one was written four years later, I wonder if someone dared him to use this as a jumping-off point and he ran with it?!

"O Love that made the distant stars, yet marks the sparrow's fall" is great (and probably qualifies this one for Jesus=Proper Nouns). But the "heart" metaphors zigzag between "join our hearts with those who weep" to then "create new hearts in us that beat in time with yours." Depending on how screwed up I'm feeling, there can be quite a difference between those! Like, getting a new heart that's more aligned with Jesus' would be great. But lacking that, having my heart linked with someone else who's hurting doesn't feel like it's very useful, just spreading the misery.

I've found this to be fairly popular in congregations I've worshipped in, and...I don't know, I just don't think it's that good? There's nothing offensive or hypocritical about it, and the refrain is a loose paraphrase of the popular Micah verse: "[the Lord asks you to] do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God." I don't know, I think this arrangement is maybe too...peppy for me. (I wouldn't necessarily even classify it as a praise song, although it was written in the eighties and has a little bit of that style musically. The "extra five measures of rest for instrumentals" at the end of the verses seems redundant, too.)

This is a translation from Japanese, and features the word "publicans," which apparently is the term for the tax collectors in the Roman Empire so it's actually relevant (Zacchaeus! etc.) but not used very often. I also found it interesting that it namedrops both Joseph and Mary, but in different contexts--the end describes Jesus as both human and divine, "son of Mary, son of God." But the beginning part mentions Jesus growing up "under Joseph's watchful eye," emphasizing that he was a humble laborer from a working-class family. Neat.

The composer has a pretty great name, Olive Wise Spannaus. (I guess Wise was her maiden name, so less cool than a middle name, but still cool.) She was born in 1916 and still alive when the book was printed in 2007, it looks like she made it to 2018, pretty great.

The music source is an equally catchy (non-person) name, the "Šamotulský Kancionál," a 1500s Czech-language hymnal.

The name of the tune is "Just As I Am," so I assume it was originally written for this text, but that obviously didn't stick. They actually have different meters--the last line here is only six syllables, whereas the song with lyrics "Just As I Am" pads it out to eight by repeating the last "I come" in "Oh Lamb of God, I come, (I come)."

light/infinite/sight is the "notable" triple rhyme here.

This is another one of those "pentatonic scale, but only in the melody line" arrangements. Lines 1 and 2 are the same; the bass line is slowly descending (sometimes it repeats the same note a few times, but always the same or lower than the one before). The altos do something similar in the last line, but rise from a G to A at the end. (G is relatively low for altos, at least in this hymnal, so maybe it's for the best we don't have to hold it.)

Interesting turn of phrase: "in [your light's] height and depth and greatness." Greatness as a measure of dimensionality? Martin Gardner has riffed on some of Paul's allusions to "height and depth etc" in his "Church of the Fourth Dimension" article, which apparently went over so well people didn't know it was satire.

Don't I know this melody?

Yes, it's "Jupiter" by Gustav Holst, or at least "the slow part."

Isn't it awesome?

Yes! One of my friends keeps posting Facebook statuses about "Jupiter is the best planet, especially when it's slow," and eventually I realized that wasn't a commentary on the orbits around the sun but rather this section of the piece.

Is the text as awesome as the melody?

In fact yes! It looks like it was written at the end of the Cold War, so we get progressive language like "healing of the nations" and "strike down the iron pow'r," and an extended metaphor about weaving (it's better than it sounds). Then we get "your city's built to music," and he interweaves the triads of "faith, hope, love" and "the way, the truth, the life," across several lines so it's not anvil-y but very tied together.

Sounds like the names of some fantasy series.

Yeah, in one of my fictional settings I cribbed a bunch from here (and other hymns) as the in-universe titles of an epic science fiction saga that was the fictional world's version of "Wheel of Time"-esque doorstoppers. So my characters can allude to something epic, without me actually having to write it down.

Does everyone agree about the grandeur of this melody fitting this text?

Some of the members of my old choir do not, but they are haters and losers.