“Every person who has attended a church and
sung hymns with a proper sense of their importance has assented to a magical
act...” Robin Skelton
I come from a clerical family. My mother’s grandfather was a Methodist
minister, and my grandfather went to a Methodist school, then to a Cambridge
college to train as a Methodist minister.
While he was there, he went back to the Anglicanism which Methodism had
broken from, and spent the rest of his life as an Anglican priest (being a
scholar, he actually called himself “a clerk in holy orders”). My father was an Anglican priest, too. To my
relief, if I ever had a vocation to follow their footsteps, I was too busy to
hear it.
Still, I suppose it is hardly surprising I
know by heart the words of many of the hymns I’ve sung a good many Sundays
throughout my life (given a few years of non-attendance because of rebellious
agnosticism). Sometimes, I find myself hardly bothering to open the
hymnal. The words are there, in my head,
in my heart, in my imagination, so much a part of me that, at times, I could
almost think I wrote them myself.
It helps that, for seven years, I was a treble
in the choir of the Cathedral of St Michael & St George in Grahamstown,
South Africa, and learned not just to read music but to allow, almost
instinctively, my brain to direct my voice to the right notes. I still remember the surprise I felt when,
one Sunday after I had for some reason missed the Wednesday practice, I could
nonetheless lead the choir through the treble part of the anthem I didn’t know
just by doing what the notes said I had to.
I am not of course the only person to whom
this applies. This is the sociologist, David Martin, in his memoir, The Education of David Martin: “My
saturation in hymns gave me access to tonal and literary worlds that informed
how I thought, felt and expressed myself... The tunes and words of hymns...
were my earliest real education. They
ensured I would always respond most intensely to a combination of words and
music”. In my case, this was an additional blessing, because the headmaster of
the prep. school I went to (an admirable man in many ways) did also think that
nothing had ever been said in verse which couldn’t just as well be said in
prose; so we studied hardly a single
poem all my early schooldays (though we were allowed to sing folk-songs as well
as hymns). It wasn’t until I came into the purview of a genius of an English
teacher - when I was about fifteen - that I had confirmed what my maternal
grandfather had told me: the glory of
England is its literature, and the most glorious part of that literature is
poetry. One of my reasons for exulting in The
English Hymnal (almost every version of it, anyway) is how many great poems
there are in that book: poems by George Herbert, Samuel Johnson, Milton,
Cowper, Christina Rossetti, Henry Vaughan, John Clare...
Some favourites, then: Samuel Crossman, “My song is love unknown”;
John Henry Newman, “Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom” (what a pity
some churches think it should be sung only at evening services; these are metaphors as much as descriptions,
and it is perfectly all right to mourn the loss of angel voices at Matins);
Bunyan, 218, provided we use his words, including the lion, hobgoblin and foul
fiend, not the ghastly bowdlerised version; Cowper, 231, “O for a closer walk
with God”; George Herbert, 240, “The Elixir”; Christina Rossetti, 42, “In the
bleak mid-winter”.
There are lots more, of course; and some of my favourite hymns aren’t
actually notable poems per se, but
may be sung very well. I love G. Duffield’s words, “Stand up, stand up for
Jesus”, because it is the battle hymn of the Salvation Army - and can anyone
not be moved to tears of admiration by those brave folk in their uniforms,
playing away in crowds of shoppers or outside pubs? And doing their good,
unfashionable work for those who otherwise have no hope at all? (I did once
know a school chaplain, a devout pacifist, who refused point blank to let the
school sing “Onward Christian Soldiers”, since he thought it an incitement to
war, or at any rate to warlike behaviour.
I never thought to ask him what he made of the Sally Army: were they an incitement to war? I think it
must be very difficult to be a Christian without imagination.)
Of course, there are hymns I loathe - and I
confess that, when one of them is announced, I make my own private protest by
standing silent, not singing at all, much to my wife’s annoyance: why aren’t
you singing, she demands in a whisper? It’s hard to explain to her why I simply
won’t sing a hymn which rhymes “magnificat” with “council flat” , or has a
meaningless rhyme linking “faction” and “action”. And consider those lines, “Was not the Church
we love / commissioned from above?” Did
F. Pratt Green ever try to sing “commissioned”? I am sometimes nonplussed, too,
when a familiar tune is attached to unfamiliar words (oddly enough, the reverse
of that I often like, because it helps me look again at what the words actually
mean. “Firmly I believe, and truly”, says John Henry Newman; you need “truly” as well as “firmly”, because
that’s doctrine, you see...)
However, despite my occasional grumpy dislike
of this hymn or that (“Life is great and life is given; /life is lovely, free
and good”... No 482, and no it bloody well isn’t, not if you live in Rwanda or
in Syria or in Palestine...), the hymnal is a delight and a joy, as are deeply
musical priests who seems to share some at least of my verbal tastes, thank
God.
C.J.Driver
P.S.
I suppose we’d better face the fact that quite
a few of the hymns are written to sound as if women either don’t exist or don’t
matter: “In Jesus all shall find their rest,/ In him the sons of earth be
blest...”
The preface of the hymnal we use at St James’s
in Ewhurst Green says this: “Unlike many other languages, English has only the
one word ‘man’ to carry three distinct meanings: (a) the human race as a whole, (b) an
individual human being, (c) an adult
male as opposed to a woman or a boy.
Some voices of feminine emancipation have come to object to the first
two meanings, not to the third. But we
have not thought it right to alter the words of hymns to meet this
objection.” To which I would quietly say
Hooray: but then I have no objection to
images like God the Father, or God the Son. Christianity exists in history, not
outside it.
