Thursday Night Hymn Festival

Last night we all headed over to St. James Episcopal Church in Hendersonville, about 15 miles away.  We trooped over there for the Music Week Hymn Festival.

Why did we need to change location?  In part, because the organ is better.  In part, because more people could come.  In part, because we've always done it this way, at least for the past decade or two or three.

Last night, at times, the organ took center stage.  Even if you think your church has a magnificent organ, it's likely 2-5 times smaller than the organ at St. James.  I know this because my mom is an organist, and at her last church, she was the organist who helped do a capital campaign for a new organ.  I thought it might be the same size as last night's organ, but she said it's about a quarter of the size.

David Cherwien was the organist and director of the Hymn Choir last night.  He showed us all the ways the organ could perform, and I was happy with the way the music illuminated the hymn itself.  At times, I wanted less organ and more singing, but I am aware that my preferences don't reflect the whole of the attendees.

Many of the hymns were familiar, but some were not.  Almost all of them came from the ELCA hymnal, the ELW (which stands for Evangelical Lutheran Worship).  As always, I am struck by what a wonderful resource that hymnal is.  Like my brain, like a computer, I don't use nearly as much as is there.

Last night, with every hymn, the audience had verses to sing; some years, the hymnfest is more like a concert, but not this year.  I thought about how unusual it is for me to sing in a group where I cannot hear myself singing--what a delight!  I took the picture above before the pews filled, and because it's Music Week, everyone was singing.

It's been a week full of delights, and I'm sad to see it come to an end today.  Happily, we are likely to be able to come to Music Week again next year.  I feel very fortunate.

Erasures: Poems, Hymns, and Prayers

Yesterday, I wrote a blog post about my experiments with erasure poems and collaging, and I posted the link to the blog post on Facebook.  One of my FB friends said that she once did the same thing with hymn lyrics to create prayers and that she found my process notes helpful.  So, I thought I'd include the helpful post here:

I have experimented with erasure poetry before, and I'm in awe of poets who can make that work.  In the past, I haven't created an erasure poem that I like, but the process has sometimes sparked a more traditional poem for me.

Until I saw the work of Sarah J. Sloat, I hadn't thought of combining erasure poems and collage.  I loved her book Hotel Almighty, the erasure poems with collage that Sloat created from pages of Stephen King's Misery, and it made me want to do something similar.  But this past summer hasn't been a great time to do that, what with getting ready to move, then moving, then having art supplies in various places.

And there's the issue of intentionally destroying a book.  I don't have that many books I don't care about.  I thought I might use John Naisbitt's Megatrends, once I glanced through it again to see if it had been correct about its predictions.  But when I saw my notes from so many years ago, I just couldn't damage the book.

So, I made a photocopy of a page that had potential.  I blocked out some words that seemed to go together.  And then I clipped some pictures from a December copy of Oprah magazine.  I arranged and glued:

I love that I was able to find an image of a fountain pen for a page that deals with information and how we distribute it.  I love a beautiful pie for a page that talks about economy and how we sell things.  And the watch symbolizes so many things--same for the glasses and the jewel.

The second day, I started the blacking out.  I had thought about using different colors of markers, but in the end, I started with black ink, and I found it very soothing to keep using the marker.  The two lane road around the margins I added last:

I also made a PDF by scanning the image, which I can't figure out how to include here.  I still don't have the right camera for capturing my sketches and collages.  Sigh.

Here are the words:

Megatrends:  The Information Economy Is Real

concrete terms

Without answers, 

Documenting       is difficult.

part of a job

study

skeptics

err

I will return to Megatrends again--I'm interested to see if I keep finding delight in erasing and collaging.  Even if I don't end up with something as satisfying as this first creation from the book, the process is really satisfying.

Stony the Road

Yesterday I listened to this wonderful conversation with Henry Louis Gates on NPR's Fresh Air.  He's just published a book, Stony the Road, which explores the time after Reconstruction and how the newly acquired rights of freed slaves were taken away again--in short, it's about the birth of the white supremacist movement that's with us today.

While the whole interview is wonderful, I bring our collective attention to it because at minute 17:06, Gates sings the 4th verse of "Lift Every Voice and Sing."  It's the verse that gives the title for the book, and Terry Gross asks Gates if he can quote it.  He says, "You want me to sing it?"  It was an unexpected blessing.

I was so moved that I hollered for my spouse so that he could listen too.  I am tempted to listen to it every morning.

It's a moving song, just on its face.  Gates reminded us of how we came to have this song:

"Well, this song was written to inspire young black children at a time when there was nothing on the horizon that was inspirational, nothing that would make black people think that the rights our people had been given by the amended Constitution in the 13th, the 14th, and 15th Amendments would ever come back because starting in 1890, those rights had been chipped away by the Redemption governments in the former Confederacy.

So that - the fact that our people never gave up hope, that we never stopped believing that a better day was coming and that if we worked hard enough and prayed hard enough and believed deeply enough, that one day the glories that we saw in Reconstruction would return. And hope against hope, that's what happened."

What a treasure--both the song itself and the willingness of Gates to sing it for us.

Singing "Jesus Loves Me"

Is it just me, or have you also been singing "Jesus Loves Me" more often lately?

I'm not sure when I first noticed this, but when we sang "Jesus Loves Me" at Synod Assembly last week, I said to a friend, "The last time I sang this song so often was when I was about 8."  I've sung it in many a worship service, from suburbun church to camp.  I've sung it as a way to bring a session to a close.  I've sung it where I'd expect to sing it, in children's Sunday School class.  I've learned how to sign the song, so that I can sign and sing.

Is it a special anniversary this year?  My friend at Synod Assembly said she thought it was because the song is in our latest hymnal, so we have easy access to words and music that we didn't have before.

Can I just admit that I do not like this song?  It gives me the same kind of creeps that the "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayer gives me.  It feels vapid.  I'm a grown up.  I shouldn't have to sing this kind of simple song when we have such rich hymnody available.

But enough of me sounding cranky.  Perhaps I should think about my experience at Lutheridge, where so many people already knew how to sign and sing the song, where the sight of so many of my dear camp friends making the sign for Jesus (touching a finger to each imagined nail hole in the palm) gave me a shiver in a good way.  Maybe I should think about Synod Assembly and all those older folks, still able to sing every verse from memory. 

I shouldn't be so quick to dismiss a comfort, especially the easily attained comfort of a childhood song.