One of the most bizarre conversations I had during my time as a parish ministry took place the evening of a royal wedding in the 1970s. I called on an old, housebound lady who came of north east Scotland 's brethren stock. An edited version of the wedding service was being shown on television, and from time to time our conversation stopped to allow us to take in what was happening. Half-way through the singing of ‘The Lord's my Shepherd' to the tune Crimond, the old lady suddenly burst out “God will punish them for that!”. I asked her what she had heard or seen that would evoke divine wrath. She told me that they were singing “one of yon descants' to Crimond. Apparently she believed Jessie Irvine's tune to have been as divinely inspired in four part harmony as she was convinced the words had been written by King David himself, perhaps even in English!
I have often heard complaints during broadcasts of the BBC programme Songs of Praise that a particular hymn was being sung “to the wrong tune”, very often because the combination of particular words with a specific tune has often meant something to them at a crucial moment in their lives.
Songs of Praise originally linked a hymn to the reason for an interviewee's choice, and in so doing touched deeper chords in the audience's experience than it perhaps does now, and one of the programme's most popular presenters, Sally Magnusson, has just published a book of her own favourite hymns, significantly linked to the moments in her life when they spoke to her: the baptisms of her five children, the funeral of her brother at the age of eleven, in the town of Dunblane the Sunday after the massacre there.
It is the context in which gives her choice of hymns their significance which makes Sally Magnusson's Gorious Things: my hymns for life* much more fascinating than the dull volumes on hymnology which inform you how many Charles Wesley wrote while riding on horseback, or repeat the story of Augustus Toplady penning “Rock of Ages” on the back of a playing card.
Sally Magnusson quotes the experience of D.H. Lawrence who wrote “that he had long loved ‘O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness' because the first line had been painted in big letters over the organ-loft in the chapel he attended as a child; seeing it there invested the hymn with a kind of magic. He acknowledged that ‘gold of obedience and incense of lowliness' in the third line did not mean very much and that even the phrase ‘the beauty of holiness' was suspect; but the verse still produced in him a sense of splendour.” Sally Magnusson adds caustically “I, on the other hand, have no pale-green organ-loft to help me overcome the conviction that ‘gold of obedience and incense of lowliness' is just plain bad.”
The important thing, however, is that these words are not specific, and so allow an individual to invest them with whatever meaning he or she chooses. When a hymn or song becomes too specific it often fails to connect.Paul Oestreicher records that as a young BBC producer in the 1960s he used Sydney Carter's sing Lord of the Dance, with its like “It's God they ought to crucify, instead of you and me, I said to the carpenter a-hanging on the tree”, there was considerable opposition inside the BBC and considerable controversy after it was broadcast.
I was once contacted by a prominent Scottish layman who complained about the use of one of Fred Kaan's hymns which rejects “pride of status, race or schooling” because he was very proud of the school he attended in Glasgow . He was quite content, I was sure, to sing about casting down golden crowns around the glass sea!
Hymns probably play a bigger part in forming many people's religious convictions than most preachers would like to think, which is presumably why the fourth century Arians wrote more hymns than they did sermons on second person of the Trinity. The often quoted words of the Scottish patriot, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun that he cared not who wrote a nation's laws if he could write its song could equally be applied to the church's statements of faith and its hymns.
However the last, and sometimes stultifying word sometimes lies not with the hymnwriter but with the hymnary committees. In the original version of “O love that wilt not let me go” the blind minister George Matheson wrote “I climb the rainbow through the rain”. The Church of Scotland's hymnary revision committee made him change the word “climb” to “trace” because rainbows can't be climbed. But being blind, Matheson knew better.