#theistically neutral hymns

[profanityandprophecy]

On Rewriting “Were You There?”

While working on content that may turn into a Good Friday service, I’ve been writing a theistically neutral version of Were You There? Instead of merely adapting the song to speak of Jesus’s passion, I’m including many wrongful deaths throughout time, including people who were driven to suicide, with an emphasis on the present day. I’m trying to make sure it highlights a number of causes: poverty, racism, unjust laws, lack of healthcare, transphobia, etc.

It’s been a powerful and moving process, and many tears have been shed along the way. I’ll share it here when it’s done.

I’m still trying to decide if I want to alternate the verses of the original with the new verses, or merely bookend it. (Thoughts?) I’m also trying to decide if I want to include a modern version of the sometimes included final verse of domination over death. Something dealing with amazing goodness happening now. (It feels inappropriate because I do feel we’re not out of the woods yet.)

FWIW, others may feel free to take the idea, add in/substitute other people, esp. meaningful deaths within their community.

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this.

[profanityandprophecy]

Theistically Neutral Hymn - “May We Pursue a Life of Pure Integrity”

I was inspired by the subject heading “The Life of Integrity” from Singing the Living Tradition, the UU Hymnal.

Yes, I know, the meter changes throughout the song. Feel free to play with it to make it work. (The ending seems to fit well with AURELIA, a.k.a. “The Church’s One Foundation”. You can kinda make the beginning fit with that. However, a different sound was going through my head for the beginning, so play w/ different songs or even compose your own.) It seems to have that feel of hymns from the 18th & 19th centuries, often from the Protestant tradition: Bach & Wesley, etc.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Lyrics under the cut.

V1:

May we pursue a life of pure integrity

May we be as steadfast as the eldest tree

Our branches reaching out to sufferers who call

Our roots keeping us grounded in values, we stand tall

V2:

Our ethics shining forth like a beacon by the sea

Of love and peace, compassion embraced diversity

Of justice and of freedom equal opportunity

Acted out in homes & in global community

V3:

And if you’ve walked away you’ve strayed far from the path

All of life’s another chance to repent & turn back

We welcome you with open arms back on the road to right

We pledge to walk beside you help make your burden light

V4:

As we pursue a life of pure integrity

We recognize our task is hard but know that it must be

We covenant together to stay accountable

To not just live for one’s own self but for the greater whole

[profanityandprophecy]

We do not know the answers to the most important questions But we go forward believing that loving is the way Loving is the answer Compassion is our call To spread peace and justice over all Over all

Because @revkryssie mentioned they were interested in seeing my work on the service(s) I’ve been writing, I thought I’d share this with everyone. Feel free to add your thoughts, but please be kind. Posting this wasn’t easy for me & I’m feeling sensitive about it.

I hope me writing about my process is okay and isn’t too boring. (I wanted to get it down for posterity, because the how feels as important to me as the fact that I did & the things that I wrote. And, yes, I realize I wrote like 10 paragraphs on a 5 line work.)

(The file of me singing it is from the day I wrote it… the lyrics now change WE spread into TO spread. I wanted to reflect our charge, and the “we” thing felt a bit self-righteous/self-congratulatory. We’re not there yet so let’s not sing that.) If someone can transcribe music, I would LOVE to have someone write down the sheet music to it in MuseScore. (I <3 MuseScore. It’s saved my ass.))

About my process below the cut. (Y’all remember LJ cuts? Yeah.)

As I wrote my service, in trying to follow the parts of the Ordo Missae 1970, after the Institutional Narrative, where Christians tell the story of the Last Supper, you have the Mystery of Faith.

(Forgive my lay description of this. If I get it wrong, feel free to kindly correct me.)

For those unfamiliar with it, the Christians who have this in their service sing one of a number of different settings, all speaking to the greatest, well, mystery, of their faith: the death & resurrection of Jesus.

We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection until you come again.

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Dying you destroyed our death, rising you restored our life. Lord Jesus, come in glory.

When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, Lord Jesus, until you come in glory.

Lord, by your cross and resurrection you have set us free. You are the Savior of the world.

You see what it’s getting at.

Now, I could just skip this as I have other parts of the Mass that seemed so focused on things that have no spiritual meaning for our church, that it seemed pointless to try to translate it into theistic neutrality. (Things that are so deeply tied up in theism or specifically Christianity that they can’t be extricated from that.) However, there was something about the concept that grabbed me, that made me really want to sit down and see if I could hash this out.

When I originally started envisioning services, I had no desire to create my own religion. In fact, I really wanted to be UU. But as my relationship with UUism soured, I realized that I either needed to reform UUism (still not fully off the table), or go under some other church, or start my own thing. I’m an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church, so I’m doing this under the ULC tent, but because they’re such a broad ministry, they have no service of their own (that they’ve publicly published. I know the church in Modesto has services, and I’d be curious what format they use. From what I can gather, the minister has a sermon, and then opens up the floor to anyone else who would like to speak.)

Anyway, I realized that trying to puzzle out if our faith has a mystery, and if so, what, would be a valuable thing, due to the fact that it’s kinda sorta growing into its own faith thing, possibly its own religion, and it would probably be valuable to figure out what we believe (or even simply espouse), so that we can tell people who we are.

So I sat down and really tried to figure out the answer to the question of “if our church had a mystery, what would it be?”

At some point I had an inspiration: we don’t fully know the answers to the big questions in life, but we act anyway, and we act from the idea that love is important. Those answers are a mystery to us, but our faith says good is important. It is (somewhat) a mystery as to why, esp. when you realize how meaningless everything is on a grand scale of the universe… what we do matters to people in the here and now and in the future, but we’re not able to effect the grand scale of time. (Most likely?) And yet, life is still important, and doing good is still important, and loving is still important. That is what we all hold dear, what some would probably call their faith. So I think we have a mystery of our faith. (I’m open to writing different ones as well, as there are alternates.)

(Note: while most of the other non-theistic prayers and service parts I’ve written attempt to be suitable for all people, I recognize that a mystery of faith is, in some ways, an intimate thing, and it might be a thing that divides. I tried to make it as open as possible, but I also wrote it in what I want from my congregation/church in mind. So this one might not be as suitable for all as others.)

I started playing around with words and melodies. Here’s the thing. I’m a HORRIBLE composer. Truly. I failed Music Theory II in HS. And yet, I kept playing around with a melody, and eventually, through a lot of singing it out in my bedroom, nailed it down. (Frankly, I’m impressed with what I came up with. Inspired by something greater than me or beyond me? Possibly. More likely it’s like something I already heard, forgot about, and accidentally plagarized. That’s what happened the only other time I composed something I liked.)

I’m happy it’s upbeat, and it has a bit of the feel and influence of the contemporary/”folk” Catholic/mass music, that of Haugen, Haas, Schutte, etc.

It’s at a point I feel comfortable sharing it with folks, but it still doesn’t feel completely done. I’d like a coda that talks about that maybe when life’s done, we’ll get the answers to the questions, but until then we go forward with loving as our answer.

(I’ll formally CreativeCommons this later, once I decide what name I want it attributed to. General ideas are: feel free to share this, edit this, use it for your own uses, esp. services. I’d prefer if you shared alike w/ your edits. Commercial uses are only allowed if you’ve edited it in a way that added to it or made it your original work: i.e. mashed it up, added more to it, etc. All of this is allowed assuming you’re acting in good faith towards the work. Critical reviews are allowed, however.)

[profanityandprophecy]

Theistically Neutral/Nontheistic/God Optional Hymns (Or How I’m Accidentally, Inadvertenly Compiling a Hymnal)

As a minister for a theistically neutral congregation, and one small enough that we don’t have a separate music minister, it’s up to me to provide appropriate music. Seeing that the music was and is a huge part of what I love about services (and about religion in general), plus having been a music minister & cantor for many years as a child and teen, I’m not just gonna skip it. (It’s half the reason I GO to services!) So obviously I went looking for resources, and writing some myself. And what happened?

I think I’m accidentally compiling a theistically neutral/non-theistic hymnal.

<Insert Withnail & I, “We’ve Gone On Holiday By Mistake!” jokes here>

(Because I’m the “anything worth doing is worth overdoing, obsessing about, and doing to exhaustion” type.)

Because there are resources out there, they’re just very scattered, don’t show up easily on a Google search. In fact, there’s been resources since at least the year 1900. (Yes, I totally accidentally came across, on the Internet Archive, the song book that the New York Ethical Society put out in the year 1900.)

There’s a number in the various UU hymn books. (Singing the Living Tradition, Singing the Journey, and I’m assuming in La Voces del Camino, but also Hymns for the Celebration of Life (the first UU hymnal from 1964), and We Sing of Life (a joint project between the Unitarians and the Ethical Culture folks in 1950!), and probably in Hymns for Living (the hymnal for Britsh Unitarians and Free Christians)) (Edit: the Earth & Spirit Songbook was supported by a grant from the UU church, as part of their Green Sanctuary program, and has non-theistic songs.)

There’s a book called The Secular Hymnal.

There’s the various song books that various Ethical Culture and Humanist Societies use. Noted above was one, and I’m hearing tell of a Humanist Hymnal by Jerry Phillips (part of it is anti-Christian, part of it is Tongue-in-cheek, but some songs apparently have values.) and of a volume called Heritage Songs by the St. Louis Ethical Society, although I’m having problems finding info on both of them other than mere mentions. (The HH has some Geocities archive pages, and leads to a dead URL when you click humanisthymnal.com)

There’s songs where you least expect them. Surprisingly enough, there’s songs in the LDS (that’s right, the Mormons!) Hymnal that have extremely few to references to God or the supernatural that talk about doing good & duty and stuff. (”Have I Done Any Good” comes immediately to mind.) (Also, other denominations? This is how to do your hymnal right. (Damn near) every song online, every lyric, every piece of sheet music, every MP3, and even some ASL translation videos. The whole thing is almost COMPLETELY accessible to all.)

And then there’s various works by various people.

Greta Vosper, leader of the Toronto suburb United Church of Canada that went non-theist/theistically neutral years ago when she came out as an atheist, has a whole category on her site for new words for old songs. (Note: She’s the only one I’ve seen other than myself who has taken a contemporary/folk hymn, often popular with Catholics, and give it theistically neutral/non-theistic lyrics.)

Her music director wrote a bunch of new songs and made a hymnal called Wonder of Life. Also her and him adapted a bunch of old songs and made a hymnal called Sing it Forward: Traditional Hymns Recast and Rewritten for Religious and Humanist Communities.

Dr. Matt has written what he calls 3 Humanist Hymns. (I’m saying “what he calls” because I haven’t listened to them yet.) He also mentions The Humanist Hymnal Project, of which I can find no other reference online (not saying it doesn’t exist... I’m hoping someone else can find info on it!)

Jesse David Sykes did what he called a Secular Series, which includes polyphony w/values (and some Godless language) & new lyrics in Latin, as well as Christmas carols.

And there’s other songs that aren’t “hymnal worthy” but still fun and relevant, like You Are Theist, I Am Humanist, to the tune of “16 Going On 17″ from The Sound of Music.

And then there’s the stuff that I’ve done, that has an emphasis on the contemporary/folk music popular in the Roman Catholic church, because it’s a large part of my spiritual music tradition, and one that simply isn’t reflected in places like the UU hymnals: Haugen, Haas, Schutte, and more. (Imagine my delight when I found that Greta Vosper redid “Here I Am, Lord” by Schutte! Her stuff is complete rewrites, while mine is often adaptations trying to keep as much meaning, or at least feel, as possible. What she does is WAY harder! I’m not NEARLY that good!) (And I really should put more of my works out there. I’m just worried about copyright issues.)

And I’m sure there’s more I haven’t found yet, but will find in the days to come.

And they’ll be rounded up by me, and maybe they’ll end up in an informal “hymnal”. But someone else needs to get permission from all the publishers.

P.S. For more on Liberal Christian/Unitarian/Universalist/Unitarian Universalist hymnody, Jason Shelton did a paper on the history of U/U/UU Hymnody. (BTW, the “new hymnal” he refers to, not only was it published, but he’s the biggest contributor to it, having more original hymns in it than anyone else.)