Songs Sung Blue (and Red and White)

I’ve been reading song lyrics. Nothing like song lyrics to get people worked up.

 OK, I have been efforting creatively to avoid thinking about the pudgy guy who is threatening to impose cruel and unusual taxes on a motorcycle company for disobedience and who hogged the spotlight at a Medal of Honor ceremony to proclaim that the widow voted for him. I’ve been reading Pray Tell, the liturgists’ Web site. Deacon Jim turned up there today, by the way.

 What I’ve been looking at are a claim of inappropriateness for Marty Haugen’s "Gather Us In," and what today escalated into a charge of heresy against Lee Greenwood’s "God Bless the U.S.A." In both cases, the liturgical use of the songs was the starting point of the discussion, and in both cases the offense was given by the lyrics.

 Heresy first. The blogger recalled marching from her school to the church in 1991 for a lecture about the Gulf War. The ceremony started with the playing of a recording of “God Bless the U.S.A.” The author was proud to sing it then, in the aftermath of 9/11, but it sticks in her throat now in the presence of the policy/non-policy/Democrat law at the southern border.

 

 I have real problems with flags, including the yellow-and-white Vatican flag, in churches. We are not there to wave flags, nor to sing national anthems, official or unofficial. Everybody’s national anthem smacks of uberallishness, although you can’t really condemn the Germans’ anthem when it praises  “German song and German wine” in the second verse. “More song and wine and less marching on and standing on guard for thee,” says I.

 Anyhow, when one of the respondents accused the Greenwood song of being heretical, I looked up the lyrics. They are no worse than the usual run of patriotic songs. You can sing them and think of blood, race and killing foreign enemies, if you insist on being a moron. But you don’t have to. At least it thanks God for something. Not all do.  The song is a bit derivative of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which has managed never to offend me. Greenwood’s fans would not sing Guthrie’s fourth verse if they knew it, and the People In Charge have all but suppressed it although it has a nice Franciscan thought to it. At least it’s not heretical.

 The club used on Haugen’s “Gather Us In” has more facets. The blogger suggests that the “here,” in the song’s repeated phrase “here in this place,” is anachronistic because of both what we know about the universe and of the multiplicity of “here’s” involved when we text or Skype or use What’s App. (When you are talking hands-free to someone in a different city while you drive down the highway, where’s the “here” you could talk about?)

 The second point is where Jim Pauwels contributed a thought that seems to be pro-virtual reality and pro more of it in church. If he wants to further explain himself, I hope he does. He can start with the datum that emojis had to be invented because of what’s lost in virtual reality. And if emojis are a huge step forward for humankind, it will take some explaining to convince me.

 In addition, the blogger had recently been to the Basilica of the Holy Cross at the Valle de los Caídos in Spain and did not feel -- in that combination of church, necropolis and monument to Franco’s ego – the feelings Haugen would have her singing about.

 A commentator mentioned that Haugen’s fourth verse is not sung in his church and is omitted in  the newer Catholic hymnals. Fourth verses are as rare as maniples where I come from, so I had to look it up. The offending lines seem to be:

Not in the dark of buildings confining,
not in some heaven, light years away,
but here in this place, the new light is shining;

Those words might ring hollow in one of the dark, old churches of previous centuries, like the Spanish basilica in the Valley of the Fallen, and it may strike some as being too smug about our bright modern church architecture. And the “some heaven, light years away” may remind some of Joe Hill’s “pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye,” but one commentator noted that Jesus Himself said the kingdom is within. Here, in other words, in this place.

 All in all, it’s nice to have music to think about. Where I come down is, Haugen is OK for liturgical purposes, and Greenwood is acceptable if you keep him away from the altar. But others may disagree. And have already done so.