LTLT # 5: It Is Something to Have Wept

How can you sing an enigma?  How can you give yourself to a hymn, when you have no idea what it means until you get to the last six words?  And even then, you might not understand unless you’ve scoured the internet to figure out what “The Great Minimum” means.

Before I rant too much longer, though, I have to let you know that not everyone feels this way; some people like a little mystery in their lyrics.  My suspicion is that it matters how your brain works.  Whenever I take a Multiple Intelligences assessment, the top three strengths for me are linguistic, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence, in that order.  Musical intelligence is usually pretty far down the list.  Someone for whom music is more important, and words less important, might experience enigmatic lyrics differently than I do.

This tangent helps me understand that, for me, it’s really important to have a simple, easily singable and preferably familiar tune.  I want the tune’s structure to support the hymn’s meaning, and not distract from the hymn’s lyrics.  Given a complicated, unfamiliar tune, and impenetrable lyrics, and I’m unlikely to enjoy the hymn.

I wonder how diverse UU intelligences are.  How many UUs are wordy, introspective types like me?  How many could care less about words, but need interesting and challenging music?  How many are nature folks who would rather be outdoors than sing a hymn?  And how do we create a common experience for a community whose members are, quite literally, wired differently?

On a different note (pun intended), I do like some of the words from “The Great Minimum” that this hymn left out:

In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,
And fattened lives that of their sweetness tire
In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,
It is something to be sure of a desire.

LTLT #4: I Brought My Spirit to the Sea

“I Brought My Spirit to the Sea” is not on the list of hymns with which the Anchorage UU Fellowship is familiar, but it should be.

Our fellowship, like many UU congregations, has a large contingent of nature mystics.  If you ask what is sacred to them, their answer will be some variation on “being outside in nature.”

We are also an activist congregation, and the last verse of the hymn speaks to that sensibility.  It reminds us that we cannot spend all of our days in solitary contemplation.  We also need to rise “from bended knee to meet the asking years.”

I didn’t find an audio versions of the tune (Jacqui CM) online, so I brought my rudimentary keyboard skills to the task.  The tune is pleasant, and not difficult to play.  Its lilting style lends itself well to the hymn text.  My only quibble is that the last notes of the last line rise, making each verse seem to end with a question mark.

Unfamiliarity with the tune need not discourage congregations from singing this hymn.  Its meter is the aptly named “Common Meter” (the CM in the tune name), and better-known hymn tunes can be used instead of Jacqui.  The text, penned by UU minister Max Kapp, was inspired by time spent at Ferry Beach, a UU camp and conference center in Saco, Maine.  According to Between the Lines, Ferry Beach participants sing this hymn to the tune, “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.”

Other Explorations of UU Singing

Here are others writing about the UU hymnal and other aspects of UU music.  I’ll update this post as I meet more explorers.

• Unitarian Hymnal Sing-along is among the first results of a Google search for most UU hymn titles.  Kathryn, the blogger, “attempts to sing a different song everyday from the Unitarian Universalist hymnal.”
• Jon Arterton provides a useful hymnal history and user’s manual in a talk simply called “Singing the Living Tradition,” presented at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown, MA.

LTLT #3: The World Stands Out on Either Side

Some ideas do not come neatly packaged in words, sentences and paragraphs. They arrive in our minds as images, and we struggle to share what we have seen.

Poets frequently encounter this experience. They feel something so big, so deep, that it first forms in their minds as an image, then story, and finally words.

Such an experience must have prompted twenty-year-old Edna St. Vincent Millay to write “Renascence,” the poem that changed her life. Reading its 107 rhyming couplets and trying to glimpse the picture in the poet’s mind, the feeling in her soul, is almost painful.

For someone unfamiliar with Millay’s poem, the third hymn in the UU hymnal, “The World Stands Out on Either Side,” must seem strange indeed, if not incomprehensible.  First included in the 1964 hymnal, “Hymns for the Celebration of Life,” the hymn is made up of eight lines from the end of the poem (but not the final two couplets).

The selection committee for Singing the Living Tradition must have presumed deep familiarity with “Renascence” among Unitarian Universalists, in the same way that Christian churches presume deep familiarity with the biblical narrative.

This hymn is not easy.  Using it in a service would require a great deal of congregational education.  Perhaps a sermon that unpacks “Renascence” could be followed by singing the hymn several weeks in a row, allowing the images and ideas of the poem to sink from the head to the heart.

LTLT #2: Down the Ages We Have Trod

If I have ever been present during a UU service where this hymn was sung, it clearly didn’t make an impression.  I looked online to see if anyone had recorded the tune and shared it with the web, but my search came up empty.  UUs are singing it, but not sharing it.

The hymn title is an occasion to talk about the problem of naming hymns by their first lines.  The word “trod” at the end of the title falls off like a heavy, well, clod of dirt.  It sounds tired, like we’ve been walking, and walking, and walking.  If the hymn had a catchy title, rather than “Down the Ages We Have Trod,” maybe it would be more memorable.  What if it’s title were, “This At Least We Must Believe”?

Between the Lines notes that the text for this hymn “provides an overview of complex theological ideas in clear, accessible language.”  I suspect that this is another difficulty for this hymn.  It’s a thinking hymn, rather than an inspirational hymn.

With no online version of the tune, I went to the keyboard to dust off my sight-reading skills.  The tune is pleasant, though not particularly intuitive, and in a few places the words and music stretch to meet each other. For UUs whose voices are rusty, there are probably some high notes that would be difficult to reach.