Your hymns and mine

We were talking about singing in church on Sunday.

OK, the pastor was talking about singing, and the rest of us were listening. It was a sermon on the importance of singing as part of worship. The point was made that very few other regular meetings start with singing; you don't go to a Rotary and someone leads the group in a few Broadway show tunes before the main speaker; neither does the local PTA begin with some favorite school songs.

Of course, any college football game does include playing (and often singing) various fight songs, which I guess adds to the commonly held belief that college football is religion!

There is no denying that music affects us. It's why we have soundtracks to movies and TV shows; it's the commercial jingle we can't get out of our head. How often does a song come on and you think "Ah, I remember that playing when I was ...." at a particular place in a particular time with a particular person or group of people.

And when it comes to church - there have been times I have been "surprised by joy" (in the sense that C.S. Lewis defines that phrase) during a song. There are verses of Scripture that I can't read without hearing in my head the tune that was written for them that enabled me to memorize that verse when I was a kid. Singing "A Mighty Fortress" makes me want to go start a reformation; hearing "Holy, Holy, Holy" can make me feel connected, somehow, with the vision of Heaven in Revelation; singing "Just As I Am" makes me hungry - it seemed to always have been the hymn sung during the invitation, which was the last thing keeping us from getting to Sunday dinner in the church where I grew up.

It is often surprising how my own thoughts and musings tend to show up in my pastors' sermons (without him knowing it). I had just been thinking about hymns recently, about growing up singing from the Baptist Hymnal and how now that I'm "older" (to put it nicely) I wonder if my children haven't missed out by not knowing the old songs like Blessed Assurance and Rock of Ages and I've Got A Mansion (Just Over The Hilltop) and When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder (I'll Be There).

My buddy Mitchell and I worked in a fabric warehouse one summer when we were in high school. One of the guys who worked with us was not a Christian, and he would poke fun at us (but in a good-natured sort of way), and then one day he started throwing lines from hymns at us (evidence that he had grown up in the church) to see if we knew the hymn they came from. He stumped us on "Gathered by the Crystal Sea." I remember that, because it frustrated me that I knew the line but couldn't think of the song it came from (which turned out to be "I Will Sing The Wondrous Story" for you hymnal junkies, if there are such).

I learned to sing harmony in church. Somewhere along the way, I'd taken just enough piano to read music (not play it, unfortunately, but read it), and I could pick out the four-part harmony of the hymns. I always sang the bass line(it wasn't usually very complex) because I've always had a deep voice (even in the children's choir, I remember the nice lady leading the choir didn't know what to do with me because everyone else was singing like, well, children, and I was a full octave lower).

And of course there were all kind of games we used to play when we got bored in church - deciding on a phrase like "On a first date" and then turning randomly through the hymnal, finding a hymn title and adding the catch phrase to the end of it to see if it worked. (OK, those of you who know this game know the most popular phrase was not "on a first date" but I try to keep this a family-friendly blog).

Of course, as a kid, we didn't like church music so much, and couldn't wait to get back out to our cars and listen to The Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Chicago or Rare Earth or Jimi Hendrix or any number of other bands that made up the soundtrack of riding in Keevil's Volkswagon or Mitch's New Yorker or Clay's 442 or Jimmy's Bonneville or my Mustang (I think I have all those right).

I kind of grew up with what I guess would now be called "Contemporary Christian Music" (or CCM), only we didn't call it that. The godfather was, I think, Andre Crouch. I can remember listening to his music in high school and singing some of his choruses; I even went to see him live one time, a really cool experience. If you don't know Andre Crouch, Google "Through It All'' and "Soon and Very Soon" and "I Don't Know Why Jesus Loved Me."

There was this whole "Jesus Movement" in the early '70s, part of what theologians sometimes refer to as the "Third Great Awakening." They had this Christian Woodstock music festival called "Explo 72" held in Dallas that featured a bunch of what was called "Jesus Music" back then. Larry Norman was one that I remember, and a group called "Second Chapter of Acts." But it was also a time when regular artists got in on the Jesus Movement, and AM radio had Jesus Music on the regular playlist - songs like "Day By Day" from the musical "Godspell," and because I was (and still am) a Kris Kristofferson fan, he had a couple songs like "Why Me" and "Jesus Was A Capricorn" (which, come to think of it, may not have really been a Christian song). The Doobie Brothers sang "Jesus is Just Alright" and George Harrison eventually added "My Sweet Lord" (although he was more into the Eastern mysticism and added the Hare Krishna line, so his "Lord" was probably not the Lord we took it to be). The Edwin Hawkins Singers had "Oh Happy Day" on regular radio rotation, as did a song called "Put Your Hand in the Hand" by a group by Ocean (I remembered the song, but had to look up the band).

Neil Diamond's "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" was not really a Christian song, but dang if it didn't capture the essence of a tent revival perfectly.

Wow, did I ever get side tracked there.

Years ago, we moved from a church that was slowing dying to another church. When that church finally did close up and sell the building to another church, they had a reunion service of sorts and invited people to come back. One of the things they allowed us to do was take a Hymnal with us if we wanted, and I did. I have that Baptist Hymnal in my library, and occasionally I like to get it out, leaf through the songs, and find myself reading lyrics that suddenly mean so much more to me than they ever did when I was a kid.

But rather than lament my children missing out on the old hymns (although I do think they missed out), I started thinking about the songs that they grew up singing. I could argue they miss some of the theological depth, but what would be the point? My guess is, one day they'll hear songs by people like Michael W. Smith with the same sense of loss as I do when I hear the songs of Fanny Crosby or Isaac Watts or the Wesleys or William Cowper or Big Daddy Weave (I threw that in there to see if you were paying attention).

I was never a fan of Michael W. Smith as a solo artist (I remember when they tried to make him out to be like a Christian George Michael, and he seemed very uncomfortable with the idea of it and I could see why). However, you look at the chorus work he produced: Awesome God, Mighty To Save, You Are Holy, Here I Am To Worship ... those are songs (among many others by other "contemporary" Christian artists) that my kids will probably look back on as adults and wish their kids had grown up singing. I bought a CD called "Michael W. Smith, Decades of Worship" just because as I thought about those songs, it hit me that those are the hymns of my kids' youthful worship. (Yes, I still buy music CDs; what can I say? I'm a walking anachronism).

Not that my kids didn't grow up hearing the "old" hymns. We still laugh about a rather morbid scene from my daughter's childhood. She grew up watching something called "the Donut Man,'' a Christian TV/video show for children, and the kids on that show used to sit together on the edge of the stage and rock back and forth while singing "Oh the Blood of Jesus," and my little girl would sit and sway and sing "Oh, the blood of Jesus" over and over and over, too. Only she'd do it after the TV was turned off, when she was just off by herself. I don't mean the song is morbid; just the idea of this little girl solemnly singing this line over and over and over about "Oh the blood of Jesus ... Oh the blood of Jesus ... Oh the blood of Jesus ... "

Anyway, the preacher was going through all these verses on singing in the Bible, particularly in Psalms.

But as he went through verse after verse at various places in the Bible, one song popped in my head and I couldn't shake it.

The lyrics go:

"Sing with me, sing for the years
Sing for the laughter, sing for the tears
Sing with me, just for today
Maybe tomorrow, the good Lord will take you away"

If you're not old enough to remember, it's by that great hymnist Steven Tyler.

Of Aerosmith.

From 1973.

Or just about the time I'd have been sitting in church, listening to the 14th verse of "Just As I Am,'' dreaming of getting back into the car and popping in an 8-track tape of ...

Well, Dream On.