Remnants. . .

Hymns are not what they once were.  They have succumbed to the modern day penchant to shorten and make bland what was once long and rich in language and poetry.  Take a look at just about any modern hymnal and you will find the longer hymns of yesteryear edited down to a few stanzas and the symbolism stripped away in favor of non-specific language designed not to offend.  It is sad but it is more than simple tragedy.  We have forgotten a tradition and we have proven ourselves too weak to preserve what was passed down to us.  The reality is that most of our hymns are really mere fragments of what were originally very long and often complex compositions.  It was a different time, to be sure, but we forget that even these long and complicated hymns were put to memory and sung in the home and throughout the day as worked.  In our effort to reduce these to 3-5 stanzas, we also have lost the desire and, perhaps, the ability to sing even one stanza of our favorite hymns.

The fact is that many excellent hymns are only fragments from lengthy compositions which have taken on a life apart from the context in which they were created.  The enormous length of a great many hymns is beyond our comprehension today and certainly outside the realm of our desire either to learn or to sing.  I am not at all suggesting that we must treat every hymn text as if it were Scripture and take it as is.  What I am asking, however, is that we learn which stanzas were kept and which disregarded and which were combined into what is an effectively new composition.  It is my conviction that some of the best has been lost and some of the most profound hymnody rendered inaccessible to us today.  Can you imagine doing the same kind of thing to the Psalms?  What would the great Psalms sound like if we had edited them for length and for content?  I dare say that they would no longer be called the prayerbook or hymnbook of the Bible.

As a Lutheran, I mean to say that some of the most sacramental imagery has been lost to us as we parsed the words we received to fit the modern ear and as we translated hymns from one language and era to another.  In particular, baptismal imagery and the symbolic language that would refer to the Sacrament of the Altar have been eroded by well-meaning but destructive translations and summaries.  While I am grateful to Catherine Winkworth for her monumental work of rendering Lutheran chorales into English and thus preserving them for my use today, her own theological presuppositions have surely worked out of many of her translations some of the richest sacramental and symbolic language inherent in the original.  We must do better.  I am in awe of the work of Matthew Carver in translating with a good sense of poetry and a command of the languages.  He reminds us that we are not and should not be beholden to the well-meaning efforts of those in the past whose work may have intentionally or accidentally overlooked such sacramental nuances in the original text.  This also would enhance the riches of those great hymnwriters of the past who have bequeathed to us many more texts and compositions than are now contained in any one hymnal.

Finally, there is a good cause for resurrecting the idea of memorizing hymn texts both for children and adults.  I well recall visiting an elderly blind woman in what was then called Lutheran Home in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  I was a seminary student attached as an ordained deacon to Redeemer Lutheran in that city.  Truth to be told, I had no real idea what I could do for her but she told me simply to read to her the hymns from The Lutheran Hymnal (the only hymnal in our church at the time).  What I noticed is that this woman in her late 80s was mouthing in silence all the words to the many stanzas of the hymns I was reading to her.  She did not want simply to hear them but wanted to hear a voice speak them with her as she moved her lips and thus formed a small congregation of two.  Sadly, most of us today cannot even get through one stanza much less the 20 or more stanzas to some of the best of the hymns passed down to us.  Where would we be today if the same circumstance applied to us?  I fear we would be hearing the words as if for the first time and thus be deprived of this witness living in our hearts and minds.