Hymnody

Back in my teens and early twenties, I think that I must have been able to sing between fifty and one hundred hymns from the Episcopal 1940 Hymnal by heart. And I mean, all the verses. This was especially true of the magnificent Easter hymns, like "Jesus Christ is Risen Today," "The Strife is O'er," and "He is Risen." I never needed the hymnal. Many of them I can still play by heart on the organ as well. When I left church and church music in my late twenties, those words apparently never left me because 28 years later, when I sang about a dozen Holy Week and Easter services in the choir at St. John the Divine in New York, I still didn't need the hymnal. (From time to time that got me into trouble. There are a few minor, but noticeable word changes in the "new" 1980 hymnal!)

The intervening years had taken me on a spiritual journey that was, like me, independent and very internal. My Aquarian side wanted something substantial enough for my intellect to grab onto, but I never took an interest in other major religious traditions. Law of attraction certainly makes the most sense intellectually, but there's not a lot there for the heart to gravitate to. And on the rare occasions when I have connected to the stream of love that conforms most to my sense of "Source," I don't "hear" hymns, only what Simon and Garfunkel called "the sound of silence." I have felt quite "out there," beyond spiritual form or ritual or hymnody.

I believe in my heart of hearts that there is a place where hymns and no-hymns, music and no-music, religion and no-religion overlap; trying to articulate this has been crucial to my (so far unsuccessful) effort to write a new mission statement and move forward bringing my original passion for church music with me. Yet this was the first year in the last seven that I did not attend even one Holy Week or Easter service. I just couldn't do it. It was too painful, given what is happening in the world, to relive the ancient Maundy Thursday betrayal or the Good Friday violence. And while I craved something to reinforce Easter's metaphor of rebirth, I woke up Sunday knowing that I'm just simply done singing those hymns. Isn't that strange? I couldn't do it again. I need new songs, somehow; to bring forward the musical and spiritual passion but few of the old forms. Even though I think of life as more of a spiral than a straight line, it's getting rather freaky how many "doors" seem to be closing behind me in this seventh decade. New ones must be opening, but I just don't see them yet. Maybe I need to sing a new song, to sing them into view.